The Great Butterfly Heist

Summary

The butterfly was dead when the old man found it, lying in the snow 1,600 metres above sea level. It didn’t have a name then, as he bent down and scooped its body up from the ice – a tiny John Doe, light as a feather, barely visible to an untrained eye. But this encounter in the spring of 1922 wasn’t his first brush with the short life cycle of an insect. It wasn’t his first time on Barrington Tops either, a volcanic plateau perched high in the Great Dividing Range of New South Wales. The man’s name was Johnny Hopson but to many he was known as the “Father of the Tops”.It was no secret that the plateau was good butterfly country; if you picked your moment right, the mountain air would be thick with them, gathering at dusk in cloud-like clusters ripe for someone like Hopson to catch hundreds at a time with a sweep of a net. Or, as in this case, a cold snap or unexpected snowfall might leave the ground littered with delicate corpses, waiting in plain sight for a keen-eyed collector. The butterflies were just the start of its riches and, once word began to spread of this “nature’s wonderland”, collectors swarmed like moths to a flame.Hopson was there to guide the first scientific expedition in 1915 and successive waves of genteel academics, wet-eared university students and avid amateurs who trudged up the misty slopes with their nets and killing jars.Then, in June 1928, Johnny Hopson keeled over dead at the age of 60. The story of his butterfly didn’t end there. Most of the 3,000-odd insects he’d collected were bequeathed to the Australian Museum in Sydney but that little fellow from the snowfield had passed into the hands and collection of Hopson’s friend and Australia’s foremost butterfly collector, Dr Gustavus Athol Waterhouse.Gustavus Athol Waterhouse in 1930. Photograph: Australian MuseumFinishing the work of other collectors, whether they were living or dead, friend or stranger, was nothing new for Waterhouse and he set about identifying the body. As he looked c...