Walter Marsh – författare

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 insects included many priceless holotypes the first specimen of a given species to be identified, against which all others are compared.On the other side of the world, New Scotland Yard descended on a country house in Surrey, where they found a trove of over 40,000 butterfly specimens. The culprit was Colin Wyatt, a Cambridge-educated ski champion, mountaineer, wartime camouflager, artist, and amateur naturalist whose high-flying exploits cut a path from the Alps of Europe to a London court room to a final expedition to the jungles of Guatemala.Drawing on unpublished case files, dossiers, and private archives, The Butterfly Thief pieces together Wyatt s enigmatic life story and his decades-long impact on the world of natural history. Along the way, award-winning journalist Walter Marsh reveals a deeper history of gentleman explorers, scoundrels, and grave-robbers that begs an uncomfortable but vital question: What if Western museums were crime scenes all along?

For half a century, the Murdoch media empire and its polarising patriarch have swept across the globe, shaking up markets and democracies in their wake. But how did it all start?In September 1953, 22-year-old Rupert Murdoch landed in Adelaide, South Australia. Fresh from Oxford with a radical reputation, the young and brash son of Sir Keith Murdoch had arrived to fulfill his father’s dying wish: for Rupert to live a ‘useful, altruistic, and full life’ in the media.For decades, Sir Keith had been a giant of the Australian press, but his final years were spent bitterly fending off rivals and would-be successors. When the dust settled on his father’s estate, Rupert was left with the Adelaide-based News Ltd and its afternoon paper The News — a minor player in a small, parochial city. But even this inheritance was soon under siege, as the left-wing ‘Boy Publisher’ stared down his father’s old colleagues at the city’s paper of record, The Advertiser, and a conservative establishment kept in power by a decades-old gerrymander. Led by Rupert’s friend, ally, and editor-in-chief Rohan Rivett, the fledgling Murdoch press began a seven-year campaign of circulation wars, expansion, and courtroom battles that divided the city and would lay the foundations for a global empire — if Rupert and Rohan didn’t end up in custody first. Drawing on unpublished archival material and new reportage, Young Rupert pieces together a paper trail of succession, sedition, and power — and a fascinating time capsule of Australian media on the cusp of an extraordinary ascension.