The Butterfly Thief
Adventure, Fraud, Scotland Yard, and Australia’s Greatest Museum Heist
$38.89
- Paperback
368 pages
- Release Date
11 November 2025
Summary
The story of the most audacious serial heist in the history of Australia’s museums — and the British gentleman adventurer who pulled it off and got away with it — in a scientific true-crime caper stretching around the globe.
In January 1947, a chance discovery rocked the world of natural science: over 3,000 rare and precious specimens of butterflies had vanished from Australia’s most prestigious museums in Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide. Alarmingly, the missing insec…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781964992204 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1964992206 |
| Author: | Walter Marsh |
| Publisher: | Scribe Us |
| Imprint: | Scribe Us |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 368 |
| Release Date: | 11 November 2025 |
| Weight: | 376g |
| Dimensions: | 27mm x 135mm x 210mm |
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Critics Review
‘In his intricate new book, The Butterfly Thief, the Australian journalist Walter Marsh offers up a delicious premise: the robbery of 3,000 priceless butterflies from museums in Australia in the 1930s and 1940s.’
– Sam Kean * New York Times *‘The Butterfly Thief is the most delicate of books that, like its insect namesake, unfurls its brilliance slowly and then all at once. Walter Marsh has given us his “lepidopteran Sherlock Holmes” book in all its delightful eccentricity. This is a work filled with artefacts, curios, and the ephemera of human striving, teased out with the sharp eye of a writer, if not a collector. Marsh has a wry attention to detail that thrills, and deploys it to wonderful effect here.’
– Rick Morton, author of Mean Streak and One Hundred Years of Dirt‘In The Butterfly Thief, Walter Marsh follows the trail of Colin Wyatt, a mysterious 20th-century collector who becomes a lightning rod for the tangled legacies of empire, science, and obsession. With wit and wonder, Marsh turns one man’s improbable life story into a fascinating reflection on how history is gathered, shaped, and stolen.’
– Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole‘This fascinating tale of conquest, colonialism, and collecting kept me riveted from the first page to the last. Walter Marsh is a compelling and gifted storyteller, but it is his ability to reveal the intricate connections between a singularly weird and wonderful butterfly heist and the wider crimes of the West that makes The Butterfly Thief truly extraordinary.’
– Hannah Kent, author of Always Home, Always Homesick‘The Butterfly Thief tells a story stranger than fiction … As Marsh describes in this fascinating, impressively researched and at times dismaying book … all the trouble caused by Colin Wyatt’s meddling with Australian butterflies.’
– Simon Caterson * The Australian *‘Walter Marsh’s true crime caper The Butterfly Thief pieces together several mid-century museum thefts that shook Australia’s leading natural history institutions … The book’s scope is broad … [with] vivid details … Compelling.’
* Foreword Reviews *Walter Marsh
Walter Marsh is a journalist and editor based in Tarntanya/Adelaide, and the author of Young Rupert: the making of the Murdoch empire (Scribe 2023). A former staff writer and editor at The Adelaide Review and Rip It Up, his writing has also appeared in The Guardian, The Monthly, The Saturday Paper, Crikey, The Age, and InDaily.
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