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.
