Review by Peter PierceSome of the wittiest recent mining of Australian history in the cause of crime fiction has concentrated on the 1930s. Sulari Gentill has just published A Murder Unmentioned, the sixth book in her Rowland Sinclair series, while Kerry Greenwood's detective Phryne Fisher has had 20 outings, not counting television. Both authors prefer the social milieu of the bourgeoisie and the nouveau riche. Not for them the grim realism that might have been thought more consonant with the decade of the Great Depression. Emboldened by their examples, but hardly without confidence of his own, Tim Flannery has written his first novel, The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish (although it purports to be his editing of a manuscript by the curator of worms at the Sydney museum, Dido Butterworth).

"The most famous Pacific artefact in the world", the fetish is a dinner-table-sized face surrounded by the 32 skulls of a shipwrecked crew.

Flannery - or Butterworth - gives us two hostages to fortune. Readers are promised "a gripping tale and something of a window onto a lost world".

For young museum curator Archie Meek, back after a five-year scientific sojourn on Venus Island which has left him deeply sympathetic towards so-called primitive ways, Sydney is now an unfamiliar, if not a lost world. The talk is of Don Bradman and of the Crash (particularly vexing for the budget of the museum's English director, Vere Griffon); motor cars are replacing hansom cabs; Phar Lap's heart is on display in the museum and prostitution is rife ("and they call the Venus Islanders savages," Archie muses). The museum is in disarray. Curators are dying and disappearing, perhaps so their skulls can replace those on the fetish, while his beloved has been discombobulated by Archie's betrothal token (following Venus Island custom) of his foreskin.

Flannery, who was curator of mammals at the Australian Museum from 1984-99, has an intense regard for such institutions. This informs his knowledge not only of the strange objects that museums house, but of the even stranger people who curate them. The fictional director, disappointed in his hopes for the British Museum, dwells on his long-ago triumph, the discovery of "the rat-eating centipede of the Arabian Sea". Then there are taxidermist Henry Bumstock,  curator of mammals and Great War veteran Courtenay Dithers, Eric Sopwith, who was suspiciously killed by fugu (fish) poisoning, and Elizabeth Doughty, who goes to the Dutch East Indies to secure specimens of rare minerals, loses a leg and marries the doctor who amputated it. Flannery writes astutely of the always diplomatically and financially difficult relations between those who run museums, their board, and the state government. All of this is related with acumen and brio.

The satire is punctuated by murders that serve notice that there is still a mystery to be solved. Or several mysteries: what is behind the thefts from the Vatican Museum? Is visiting Japanese admiral  Yamamoto's request for "a complete set of the jellyfish species of Sydney Harbour, along with a detailed map of the waterway" innocent? 

A dance troupe from Venus Island turns up and causes cross-cultural mayhem. At the same time, several of the surviving creators become morally anguished by the destruction of Aboriginal peoples, some of whose skulls are used for inter-museum barter.The first phrase of the novel's title is settled with satisfying complications. Flannery has had ample fun writing  The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish and readers can share that with him. Those better acquainted with modern museums may wonder who among the not so innocent can be detected in the novel's cast of 70 years ago.