The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish Read online

  Nothing is known of Miss Dido Butterworth, curator of worms (retired). Museum records contain no employee of that name, though there is speculation that the name is a pseudonym for Hans Schmetterling, curator of worms (1936–55).

  Tim Flannery, discoverer of the manuscript of The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish, is the author of several works of non-fiction and was curator of mammals at the Sydney Museum 1984–99.

  The Text Publishing Company

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  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  textpublishing.com.au

  Copyright © Tim Flannery 2014

  The moral right of Tim Flannery to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published in Australia by The Text Publishing Company, 2014

  Design by W. H. Chong

  Typeset by J&M Typesetters

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Author: Butterworth, Dido, author.

  Title: The mystery of the Venus Island fetish / by Dido Butterworth; edited and introduced by Tim Flannery.

  ISBN: 9781922079305 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781921961625 (ebook)

  Subjects: Adventure stories.

  Other Authors/Contributors: Flannery, Tim F.

  (Tim Fridtjof), 1956– , editor, writer of introduction.

  Dewey Number: A823.4

  This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

  To my father

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  END NOTE

  INTRODUCTION

  by Tim Flannery

  The Butterworth manuscript was discovered in rather unusual circumstances. The initial finding was made by Margot 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 Margot heard 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, Margot contacted me. When I arrived to investigate I found that the hide of the creature had shrunk, and it had become almost bald. A scroll of paper, its tip yellowed with age, could be seen protruding from its posterior.

  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. Animal skins 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 George Bowridge extracted one hundred and thirty-five sheets of government-issue, wartime 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 in his experience museum staff are notoriously averse to discarding anything. Some curators he knew had accumulated great balls of string originally used to tie packages sent to them, while others hoarded boxes full of worn-out shoes. He’d been told that in times past requests had been made of taxidermists to secrete objects, which might better have been destroyed, into animal mounts. Who, I wondered, would have selected the anus of an ape to secrete a manuscript? And why?

  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 that name 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, detailed and often lyrical references to worms in the work that whoever wrote it must have had an intimate knowledge of the annelida.

  I have no idea whether The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish presents 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

  Chapter 1

  Archibald Meek watched from the canoe as the muscular form of his adopted brother Cletus dived through the water, coming to rest atop a submerged coral bommie. Cletus stilled momentarily, then thrust his arm into a hidden cavity. A black cloud erupted, leaving only the man’s legs visible. Agame. The giant Pacific octopus. Archie’s eyes followed Cletus as he swam to the surface, the beast’s tentacles waving wildly.

  Cletus bit into the animal’s head as he broke the surface, then flipped the lifeless mass into the canoe and catapulted himself aboard. Then he froze. For a moment Archie thought he’d glimpsed the great hammerhead shark that had been hunting the lagoon of late. It was longer than Cletus’ canoe and it moved hypnotically, as if to the throb of an invisible kundu drum—seeing all, sensing all. But it was not that. Cletus pointed with his lips. On the western horizon was the faintest of black streaks.

  How long since a steamer last anchored in the lagoon? Long eno
ugh that Archie had begun to feel that steamers were things you saw only in dreams.

  He had been living outside time, at least as it is measured by clocks and calendars, for almost five years. But that smudge of smoke announced that a ship was coming to restore him to a land where time is doled out in precise units.

  The canoe ground into the sand and Archie leapt ashore. He ran to the beach-side hut that he called home. Crates filled with pickled fish, birds and lizards occupied one wall, while from the thatched roof hung all sorts of artefacts, from grass skirts to spears and knobkerries. He sat on his ribbed, wooden sea-trunk, its rusty lock long untouched, and remembered the day he’d arrived.

  Then, as today, Archie sat on the trunk. It was midday, and the sun beat down on the deserted beach like a hammer. The sailors remained silent as they offloaded his cargo of preserving jars, reference books and butterfly nets. He had told them what he had half-convinced himself was true: that museum anthropologists had studied and collected on most of the islands of the Pacific, and that very few had come to harm. But the sailors’ eyes said it all: they were sure they were leaving the young scientist to be killed, and most likely eaten, by savages.

  As he watched the crew row back to the schooner he erected an umbrella, and waited. Soon, the sounds of the wind in the palms and the chirruping of insects filled his consciousness. As the sun was sinking into the lagoon a man strode out of the shadows, took his hand, and led him to the hut he sat in. Months later Archie learned how lucky he’d been. By sitting and waiting on the beach until being welcomed by the village chief, a man called Sangoma, he’d unwittingly followed protocol, and had been accepted into the clan.

  But God, how difficult those first months had been! Archie was as useless as an infant. No, worse. He had the mind of an infant, but the body of a man. He could not light a fire or prepare food. In fact he could hardly tell what was edible and what was not. He unwittingly stole fruit from people’s trees because he did not know that the forest was owned. He transgressed into the women’s menstrual huts and stomped through sacred sites, simply because he did not recognise the many warning signs placed around them. He killed tabooed creatures, defecated in taro gardens (which he took to be the bush), and generally made a nuisance of himself. All the while, Sangoma had made excuses for him, paid compensation to those wronged, and explained that Archie knew as little about life as a child, or a savage.

  At first his only use was as a beast of burden—to carry firewood and suchlike. But he was soon participating in communal activities. One morning the men of the village set out to clear the bush for a new garden. Archie swung his axe until he was in a lather of sweat. When the tree he was hacking at finally fell, a great rat slithered out of a knothole in its trunk, and Cletus expertly flung a stick after it, striking it on the head. Archie scrambled to collect the animal, thinking that it might interest his friend and curator of mammals at the museum, Courtenay Dithers. Cletus’ younger brother Polycarp had mimed that the creature was unclean, but Archie persisted in carrying it back to his hut and pickling it. For weeks afterwards, whenever they met, Polycarp would repeat the mime and walk off laughing.

  Ever so slowly, Archie had grown proficient at things. He loved fishing best of all because the hooks and line he had brought, along with the experience of a childhood spent fishing around Sydney Harbour, made him moderately competent. But he could not manage a canoe, so needed someone to come with him. It was during his hours fishing, most often with Cletus, that he made most progress with the language.

  As Archie realised how ignorant he’d been, he suffered agonies of embarrassment. When he felt competent enough to speak, he decided to broach a subject that he felt might gain him some kudos: the Great Venus Island Fetish, as the mask was known among anthropologists, was the work of a stone-age genius and quite the most famous Pacific Islands artefact in the world. The size of a dinner table, it took the form of a monstrous and stylised heart-shaped face, around the margin of which were attached thirty-two human skulls. It had been taken from the Venus Islands in 1893 by the crew of HMAS Adelaide, during a punitive raid in reprisal for the massacre of the passengers and crew of the Venus. Its loss had been more devastating to the islanders than the shelling of their village, or the destruction of their gardens. Archie was familiar with the fetish because it was a prized exhibit at the museum where he was employed.

  Before its removal to Sydney, the fetish had resided on a deserted sandy islet—one of the five islands that made up the Venus Group. Only under the most exceptional of circumstances would the most senior men dare to visit it. To them, the mask was the embodiment of pure evil. Remove just one skull from the cordon of thirty-two sacrificial heads that surrounded the ghastly face, it was said, and the door to an age of depravity, madness and murder would open.

  ‘Do you remember the great mask?’ Archie asked Sangoma one day as the chief worked carving out a canoe.

  Sangoma put down his adze, fixed Archie with a fierce gaze, and said, ‘Such things must never be spoken of while we work. Wait for the story time.’

  That night, as the coals died down and the young men drifted off to sleep, Sangoma and a few of the village elders refilled the yangona bowl, and began to whisper about the great mask. They told of its creation by a mad genius who was eaten by an enormous shark on the very day he completed his work. Only the spirits of warriors, which resided in their skulls, would be strong enough to contain its malignant power. But how difficult it was to get those skulls! The Venusians were few, and their enemies too fierce and numerous to make easy victims. So the islanders had lived for years in terror while the protective skull fence was in the making. Then, one day, a godsend came to them. A floating island, full of white-skinned warriors, had run aground during a storm and the survivors had straggled ashore. Exhausted, they seemed to give themselves willingly to the bamboo knife and man-catcher. In a single day the skull fence was completed, and the villagers slept soundly for the first time in years.

  ‘I know the fetish. I look after it now.’ Archie had boasted in the silence that followed. Eyes flashed in the darkness. Then all the elders started whispering at once.

  ‘It survives!’ Archie heard. ‘But where? Where is it?’

  ‘In my village. Sydney.’

  From that day on Archie was treated with new respect. Old men took him under their tutelage. Things were shown to him that were revealed only to youths of great promise. One morning, an elder asked what his tattoo should be. Archie was not sure he wanted a tattoo, but sensed that his choice would be significant. Just then a platoon of frigate birds cruised past. Black and red, bent of wing and forked of tail, the enormous creatures flew in a strict V-formation, like some piratical, futuristic flying machines. ‘Alaba. The frigate bird.’ Archie replied. Only later did he consider the possibility that the old man had waited until he saw the birds approaching before asking his question. The tattooing had been painful, but afterwards Archie looked with pride at the image of the bird decorating his forearm, knowing that it was Sangoma’s clan symbol.

  At some moment he found hard to identify, Archie stopped collecting things, and practically stopped making field notes. He had slipped from being the observing outsider to one of the clan. It was only as the final stage of his initiation approached that he took up his journal again. He had both personal and professional reasons to record the event. Circumcision had seemed a
high price to pay to hear the sacred stories that were essential to his full comprehension of the culture. But after a few swigs of yangona the cut of the bamboo knife hadn’t been as painful as he’d anticipated. As Archie watched his blood drip onto the sand, Uncle Sangoma told him that he was now a man, and a true Venus Islander.

  After the ceremony, Archie, Cletus and the other lads had stretched their foreskins into discs, which dried to a parchment. As was the custom, they then tattooed them with their totems. Archie’s frigate bird was beautifully executed. No proposal of marriage would be taken seriously in the Venus Islands unless a man presented his girl with a tattooed, parchment-like disc made from his foreskin. The youths whispered that the objects were infallible love charms. If a girl received one, she would be powerless to refuse the giver anything. She would signal her acceptance of the marriage by softening the parchment in coconut oil, rolling it into a ring, and wearing it on her finger.

  The Venus Islands had made Archie a man in more ways than one. He had learned how to carve a canoe and make a bow and arrow. He could catch a tuna or a wallaby as adeptly as anyone. And he had seen five yam festivals, with their moonlit nights of lovemaking and fertility rituals. He was now a man of consequence among the islands. A man in his prime.

  Archie’s meditations were broken by a bugling sound. Sangoma was blowing his shell trumpet, his muscular chest rising and falling with the effort. He was magnificent, with his prominent nose, dark eyes and full, greying beard exuding authority.

  ‘Launch the great war canoe! Launch the war canoe,’ he shouted between notes. ‘Load it as well. Load it with Aciballie’s cargo. All the cargo!’

  Cletus, Polycarp and the other lads were already at the door, ready to carry Archie’s crates to the beach. Outside, Archie could see that preparations were being made to launch the canoe he had purchased. As the boys puffed past with boxes and chests, Cletus mimed that he was carrying an extraordinarily heavy crate, and quipped, ‘I don’t know why you bothered collecting all those poisonous and useless creatures, Aciballe. They’ll break my back!’