The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish

Foreword by Tim Flannery

The Butterworth manuscript was discovered in rather unusual circumstances. The initial finding was made by Mrs Fitzgerald, an education officer at the museum. Her classroom is a last stop for stuffed animals no longer needed by the scientists. The exhibits end their days there petted by small hands until baldness, burst seams or an increasingly whimsical appearance consign them to the incinerator.

On the day of the discovery, Mrs Fitzgerald noticed a group of boys sniggering as they clustered around a taxidermised baboon which I had recently brought her.

'That monkey's got a cigar sticking out of its bum,' she heard a boy say. Since I had recently transferred the mount to her care, Mrs Fitzgerald contacted me. When I arrived to investigate I found that the hide of the creature had shrunk and it had become almost bald, revealing a scroll of paper, its tip yellowed with age.

I could just about make out a few typed words on the outermost sheet, one of which appeared to be the name of a retired staff member. Animals are normally stuffed with kapok or cotton wool.

Could this be a lost manuscript? My heart skipped a beat. I took the decrepit mount to the taxidermy workshop, where Mr Bowridge extracted one hundred and thirty-five sheets of government-issue, war-time foolscap paper, tightly rolled and covered on both sides with single-spaced type. In Bowridge's opinion they had been inserted at the time of stuffing, some fifty years ago.

He said that museum folk are notoriously averse to discarding anything. Some curators he knew had accumulated great balls of string, while others hoarded boxes of worn-out shoes. He'd been told that in times past requests had been made to secrete objects, which might better have been destroyed, into animal mounts. Might, I wondered, a curator have selected the anus of an ape to dispose of a 'sensitive' manuscript?

Authorship of the pages is attributed to a Miss Dido Butterworth, curator of worms (retired), but a search of the museum archives revealed no employee by that name. I can only guess that Dido Butterworth is a pseudonym. But for whom? I suspect Hans Schmetterling, curator of worms between 1936 and 1955. Strangely, a character by the name of Schmetterling features in the manuscript.

I could learn little of the real Hans Schmetterling. Evidence of his activities as curator are sketchy to say the least, and the museum archivist noted that, despite the excellent standards maintained by her department, several key papers relating to his employment could not be found. A search of births, deaths and marriages also came up blank.

Others may disagree with my supposition that Schmetterling is the author. I'm convinced by the numerous, knowledgeable and often lyrical references to worms that whoever the author was must have had an intimate knowledge of the annelids.

I have no idea whether The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish is fact or fiction, but it is a gripping tale and something of a window onto a lost world.

In that spirit I offer it to the reader. My duties as editor have been light. Some of the dates and events referred to are clearly erroneous, but I felt it best to leave things largely as they are, for fear of sowing further confusion. The only substantial alteration I've made is to delete the numerous (and often tediously lengthy) descriptions of worms.

Melbourne, 2014