Books

Walter Marsh
The Butterfly Thief

It was inevitable that George Lyell and Gustavus Athol Waterhouse would become friends, despite all appearances. Lyell lived in the Victorian town of Gisborne, had never got beyond high school and was a partner in a dairy machinery factory. Waterhouse had haunted the Australian Museum since attending prestigious Sydney Grammar next door and graduated with first-class honours in geology and palaeontology. There were 11 years between them.

They not only became close friends but ardent correspondents, at times almost daily, as well as professional collaborators. What brought them together? A shared passion for collecting lepidoptera: moths and butterflies.

A museum librarian put the two in touch in 1897 when Waterhouse was only 19. By 1914, the pair were publishing the still definitive catalogue Butterflies of Australia. When they died, more than 50 years after their first exchange and a year apart, they owned two of the greatest collections of lepidoptera in the country: each had amassed and painstakingly classified more than 50,000 specimens.

Details of their lives appear in Walter Marsh’s new book, The Butterfly Thief, two of many colourful characters, from enterprising convicts to professors in the field today. The derring-do of Empire, the exotic habitats and the beauty of the natural world are the backdrops to his narrative.

At its heart, however, is a crime story. The denouement comes two-thirds of the way through: in 1947, while London was still recovering from the Blitz, Scotland Yard was alerted to a spectacular theft. Eight hundred specimens from the Lyell collection had been stolen from Australian museums, not by a vulgar smash-and-grab but by a careful selection over time.

The suspect was a minor English society figure. Colin Wyatt – champion skier, ex-British intelligence, centre of a sensational divorce case and ardent butterfly collector – had recently left Sydney after shipping a consignment of butterflies and other possessions home to England.

It was, Marsh writes, greeted with a “mix of shock, outrage and dread shared by museum workers and etymologists around … the world, as word of the thefts gradually fanned out in hushed phone calls and panicked telegrams.”

It’s quite a yarn, and a surprise that it hasn’t been written about before. Marsh’s telling of it is exhaustive and exhausting; he has apparently never seen a tangent he didn’t want to go off on. But lovers of intrigue told in meticulous detail will be absorbed.

Scribe, 368pp, $36.99

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 4, 2025 as "The Butterfly Thief".

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