In Portland - a small town in the Central Tablelands of New South Wales - a new museum is under construction. The Museum of Comparative Zoology Australia (MOCZA) aims to bring natural history to life far away from an urban cultural centre. But it has been a fantastic and strange journey to get it off the ground.
In December 1996, Hendrikus van Leeuwen was employed by the Australian Museum as a pest controller.
It was a dream job for van Leeuwen, whose fascination with natural history started in childhood and developed throughout his life. His own children grew up surrounded by what he calls “dead pets”; the stuffed incarnations of deceased animals he negotiated from zoos, or ‘revived’ from roadkill.
“Before I was 20 I had already collected chimpanzee skeletons, leopard skeletons [and] monkeys,” he said.
But when he started working at the Australian Museum, his passion for collecting took a turn for…the illegal.
Stuffed lion from The Museum of Comparative Zoology Australia (MOCZA). Source: The Feed
Van Leeuwen claims he started taking items from the museum after seeing how they were disregarded in the Australian Museum’s storage facilities.
“There were things lying around the place,” he said. “You can’t store stuffed animals in a building that’s full of pigeons. It’s like there was no interest.”
In 1997, museum staff started to notice that things were missing, but it was a while before anyone clued into the scale of the thefts. And even longer before they caught the pest controller in the act.
Stuffed goat at MOCZA. Source: The Feed
Pat Filmer-Sankey was the Deputy Director of the Australian Museum from early 2000. She says the Australian Museum is the country’s oldest natural history museum with extensive collections from the Sahara to Antarctica.
“Taking stuff from that is pulling holes in the tapestry. It’s vandalism of the worst sort,” Filmer-Sankey said.
“Within my first week as Deputy Director, a whole bunch of people came to me [and] expressed their concern about stolen material. And they couldn’t find a way of stopping it,” she said.
It wasn’t until 2002, when the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) became involved in the case, that the full scale of the thefts became known.
“He would take an Australian Museum four-wheel-drive vehicle out there, a big Toyota Land Cruiser, and stuff the back with material full-size lions”, Filmer-Sankey said.
Excerpt from the ICAC Report on the investigation into the theft of zoological specimens from the Australian Museum between 1997 and 2002 and related matters) Source: ICAC
Source: ICAC
The ICAC investigation resulted in criminal charges and van Leeuwen was sentenced to a maximum jail term of 7 years for 15 counts of stealing, and ended up serving 5.
In a statement to The Feed, the Australian Museum Director and CEO, Kim McKay AO, said many stolen specimens were never recovered.
“While some of the items were returned, many suffered irreparable damage and degradation while in van Leeuwen’s possession,” she said.
Looking back on his time at the museum, van Leeuwen said he made some “dumb decisions”.
“I should have let the animals rot. But I couldn’t do that,” he said.
Hendrikus van Leeuwen Source: The Feed
But Filmer-Sankey rejects the former pest controller’s claims that he’d attempted to ‘save’ the artefacts. “As the commission found, he did this for his own profit and benefit,” she said.
The final ICAC report concluded that van Leeuwen also had plans to start his own museum.
And now, decades later, this time with his own collection, van Leeuwen will realise that dream with MOCZA, which he and others are opening in Portland, New South Wales.
When asked by The Feed if items from the Australian Museum will end up in MOCZA, van Leeuwen said there’s not a chance.
“No way,” he said. “They got it all back. It’s all our stuff. They’re all zoo animals.”
Rich Evans is the site manager at the Foundations of Portland, where MOCZA has found its home. He said van Leeuwen has been honest from the beginning about his past.
“Clearly he did something, [but] he did his time,” he said.
“If we can make sure that the rest of his collection sees the light of day… Perhaps it’s that journey of crossing the finish line finally for him.”
