In the winter of 2016, mutilated remains
were found in the heart of Melbourne.
The investigation that followed would uncover
a trove of hidden treasures.
The culprit, though, was never publicly held to account.
I was contacted by a young man by the name of Chris,
and he was interested in particular work.
A work published in 1789 written by Guillaume-Antoine Olivier
who was a really significant figure in the history
of French entomology.
The person requesting the book was
interested in seeing one particular beetle.
It was a particular beetle he was
doing as part of his PhD work.
Neither of us had ever seen those particular books before,
so we went up together to have a look.
The first thing I noticed is it had the book plate
from the Comte de Castelnau.
Comte de Castelnau left the most important donation
the library had received.
He'd collected quite a substantial collection
of some of the key works of natural history.
And so there are some really beautifully illustrated works
about different types of insects and about fish
from around the world.
They're very valuable in the market these books,
and there are books that we couldn't procure or purchase
today.
But they're also special because they show us
the working library of a gentleman
scholar in the 19th century.
From our point of view, they are irreplaceable.
I started to turn the pages, and it was truly magnificent.
I suddenly came across a page that just had a hole.
That was when, to our horror, we discovered these books were--
Mutilated this book has been mutilated.
You know, it's distressing.
I was mortified because it felt like under our watch--
The role of being a rebel curator
is to be just one link in the chain,
passing it on to the next generation.
Now, I went back to the shelf and as I
worked my way through all of the volumes had beetles cut out.
Who would do this?
You know, who would do this to such a beautiful and rare book?
Who, indeed, and why?
Why target these books?
The answers to these questions lay in the 1860s when these
books lived in a terrace house which once stood right here
in East Melbourne and belonged to the French Consul General,
a gentleman scholar who is said to be the illegitimate son
of a French King or an English King depending on the source
of the rumour.
He was a man who went by many names,
but was known to his few associates
in Melbourne as Le Comte de Castelnau, or simply the Count.
Here's a man who belongs to a great and ancient noble family,
is able initially to indulge his passions of scientific inquiry
and travel with family money.
Castelnau had led an expedition of four
through the jungles and mountains
of South America in which one man was murdered,
another died, and he himself left riddled with disease.
He painstakingly acquired one of the largest
entomology collections in Europe.
And then, of course, after the 1848 revolution,
this family money seems to have been cut off
and he starts looking for jobs.
Well, he went into the consular service.
He had various diplomatic postings around the world.
Everywhere from Brazil, to Cape Town, Bangkok,
and then in Melbourne.
At one point while Castelnau was here,
it was the second largest city in the world behind London.
Castelnau died in 1880, the very peak of Melbourne's growth.
More than a decade before he died,
Castelnau sold his beetle collection to the museum
after arriving in Melbourne.
Beetles are the most common life force in the world.
One in every five named animals is a beetle,
and that's what Castelnau decided
to make a collection of.
So he travelled, but he also swapped, and traded,
and bought specimens of beetles from around the world.
Really interesting, the Castelnau collection.
When you pull a drawer out, and there's about 40 drawers of it.
And you scan your eye across the drawer
and it looks as though there are beetles
throughout the whole drawer.
It's only when you begin to look closer that you realise that,
in fact, some of the specimens are quite flat.
Castelnau, being a naturalist, he
was looking for news species.
So when Castelnau knew about a certain species of beetle
but he didn't have a specimen, he'd cut it out of books.
And then he would paste it onto a piece of cardboard,
and then put it in the collection.
And that looks just like the other specimen
sitting beside them in there.
And if anyone knew of this link between books and beetles
at the time, that knowledge was lost.
That was until a recent chance conversation between librarians
and curators about the curiosities
of their respective Castelnau collections.
It was suddenly mentioned that it was quite odd
because his beetle collection, some of the beetles
were just made a paper pinned in.
And it was like a kind of light bulb moment.
Suddenly our kind of mystery was resolved.
And in fact, the books interestingly
went from being kind of mutilated damage
to suddenly being extraordinarily
interesting things and a part of the wider story.
Castelnau now left us more than just a story about the past.
Within our lifetimes, there's lots
of species becoming extinct.
And so the new fossils really are museum collections.
And the Castelnau collection allows us to look back--
directly back--
to see how we came to where we are now,
and then to be able to predict and hopefully manage
the future.