By the reckonings of history, Harris was not a winner in life. In 1808— the same year that his descriptions of the Tasmanian tiger and devil were published in the Transactions of the Linnean Society of London—he protested the flogging of a convict woman on the public parade in Hobart. We could see the site of the old parade from where we were sitting atop Mount Wellington, just behind Sullivan's Cove near what is now Ho-bart's Town Hall. Harris, who had never seen or heard of a woman being subjected to flogging, ran to see what the commotion was and found the woman in a fainting fit. Outraged, he asked Edward Lord—a lieutenant of the Royal Marines who was acting as the head of the settlement in the temporary absence of David Collins—under what authority he had ordered the punishment. Lord told Harris to shut his mouth, and when Harris persisted, Lord had Harris arrested at gunpoint by the marines. Harris was subsequently placed under house arrest and accused of insubordinate conduct. He remained under house arrest for about six months. Although the charges were finally dropped and the matter resolved, the stress and long confinement took a severe physical and psychological toll. In 1810, in failing health, Harris died after a short illness at the age of thirty-six.
Harris never had a chance to finish his work on the zoology of Van Diemen's Land, and the scientific name he ascribed to the tiger didn't stick for long. The year he died, it was decided by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the famous French biologist, that Didelphis didn't really describe the genus properly, and the name Dasyurus cynocephalus was applied, Dasyurus being the new descriptor for carnivorous marsupials. In 1824, the Dutch naturalist Conrad Jacob Temminck proposed a new scientific name for the tiger that would have honored Harris: Thylacinus harrisii. But while Thylacinus stuck, the harrisii part was rejected. (The scientific name of the devil was altered, too. But in this case, Harris's contributions to natural history weren't forgotten. In 1837, the Tasmanian devil's scientific name was changed to Sarcophilis harrisii, Harris's Lover of Dead Flesh.)
Edward Lord, incidentally, went on to live a long and prosperous life. He became one of, if not the, largest stockholders in Van Diemen's Land. In 1817, a Tasmanian tiger measuring six feet four inches was killed on Lord's property, purportedly after killing some of his sheep. This incident was the first published report of a tiger attacking livestock—and it was the beginning of the end for Harris's tiger.
At the top of Mount Wellington, there was an informational sign. It stated that great tracts of the original eucalyptus forest on the lower slopes had been cut down by 1870. The “immense” trees, the “stately” trees, the trees “of incredible size” that Harris had written about were long gone.
We wondered if Harris had more paper, would he have finished his work on Tasmanian zoology? Would he have become a famous man? There was something ironic about the fact that the eucalyptus trees he loved so much were now being clear-cut for manufacturing paper.
Alexis glowered down the mountainside toward Hobart. “If that fucker Edward Lord was still alive, I'd hurl his ass off this mountain.” Then he said, “I can't wait to get back and do some work.”
How were we going to get back? We briefly considered walking down the Zig Zag Track. Then we looked at one another and stuck out our thumbs. A winding road snaked all the way down the mountain, and we hitched a ride in the back of a van. It dropped us off in Battery Point, and from there we walked back to our motel. We had found what was literally the last room in the entire city, everything being booked up due to a popular annual boat festival. It was conveniently located above Hobart's only twenty-four-hour liquor store.
Back in our room, Alexis took out his case of art supplies. Clearly the urge to create had possessed him. He removed the paint cup containing the leech that had sucked his blood on the Weldborough Pass. “Well, well … what do we have here?” he said. It was payback time.
“So I want to turn this leech into pigment,” he told us.
We agreed to help mash it up. Using the butt of a Bic pen as a pestle, we began grinding the nasty little animal to bits.
“Die, you…”
“I think it's already dead,” Alexis informed us.
He looked down at the little black flecks of leech muck at the bottom of the paint cup. There didn't seem to be any blood in there. The leech must have digested it. “I don't think that's enough material to make pigment with,” he said. “Maybe I should add some more of my own blood. Do we have anything sharp?”
We didn't question whether adding human blood to the pigment was really necessary. In fact, we had read that ancient aboriginal artists had used blood as a binder for making their rock art pigments. And we had read that Michael Howe, a Van Diemen's Land convict-turned-bush-ranger who headed up a band of outlaws that raided farms and rustled sheep from 1814 to 1818, had been so desperate to record his nightmares that he made parchment out of kangaroo skin and wrote his dreams down in blood. That was keeping it real. We began searching the room and found a set of needles in our first-aid kit.
“How about this?” We showed him a big needle and then sterilized it with his mini-blowtorch.
Alexis jabbed his index finger with the tip of the needle. “Ow! This is duller than a two-by-four.”
“We'll do it. Just turn your head away.”
“No! Please, I need my hands. Haven't we got anything sharper?”
We pulled out a thinner, sharper needle from the first-aid kit.
“Why didn't you use that one in the first place?” he complained.
“Hold it, we've got to sterilize this—and your hand, too.” We flamed the needle with the blowtorch and wiped his fingers with an alcohol swab.
Alexis took the needle and slowly pierced the tip of his finger about a quarter-inch deep. “Fuck,” he muttered.
He turned his hand upside down over the container that held the mashed-up leech and began milking his injured finger like a cow's udder. Nothing came out.
“Am I dead? Where's all my blood?”
“Maybe you're a vampire.”
“All right …let me do this again.” He shoved the needle into his fingertip and emitted a kamikaze scream. A drop of bright red liquid emerged and he quickly squeezed it into the paint cup. Altogether he squeezed out three or four small drops.
“That's going to have to be enough,” he said. He stirred the mixture, creating a brownish paste, and then added a splash of acrylic medium from a small bottle. “If I need more, I'll just add some instant coffee.”
Then he took out brushes and paper and swirled the invertebrate slime, blood, and coffee into a twisting, gaping-mouthed leech—about one hundred times its actual size.
27. SENATOR THYLACINE
The next morning, we were still a bit groggy from the one-two punch of climbing Mount Wellington and bloodletting Alexis. And we were late for an appointment, one that had been difficult to arrange. We struggled to find something decent to wear in our packs, and managed to dig out a few unrumpled clothes. To our chagrin, we discovered we only had hiking boots with us—not that the lack of formal wear should have come as any surprise. We smoothed down our hair as best we could, then raced down to Hobart's waterfront and a cluster of small office buildings.
Of all the tiger hunters in Tasmania, only one had gone on to become a high government official. Bob Brown, James Malley's partner in crime from the Thylacine Expedition Research Team of 1972, was now serving his second term in the Australian Senate. We had arranged with the sena-tor's press aide to interview him at his office on Franklin Wharf. And as we dashed down Hobart's steep streets, we wondered if, after all these years, he would still be interested in talking about the tiger.
Half a block from the senator's office, Alexis stopped short.
“What is it?” we asked.
He pulled his pot pipe from his pocket. It was fully loaded for his next hit. “I should leave this someplace,” he said, looking around on the street.
We started to get nervous. There would probably be a security check outside the senator's office—a metal detector at the
very least. But where could Alexis hide his stash? We were on a public street. Suddenly, Alexis— who had been scanning the surroundings—executed a startling layup. He loped toward a small street tree, jumped in the air, and deposited the pipe in a crook between two branches with a graceful finger roll. “Let's hope the magpies don't snatch it,” he said as he came down.
As it turned out, there were no bag checks or security guards inside the building—just cheerful, helpful people eager to direct us to the senator's office. When we got off the elevator on the senator's floor, we saw a woman with a furry animal in her coat pocket. It was a brushtail possum joey. Just as this was starting to remind us of a scene from Dr. Dolittle, a harried aide informed us, “We can't let him give you more than half an hour,” and we were whisked into the senator's private office.
The senator met us at the door and greeted us warmly. He was tall and thin, wearing a gray sports jacket and blue button-down shirt. His gaunt handsomeness suggested a fifty-something Jimmy Stewart. His office was decorated with a map of Tasmania, botanical drawings of endemic flowers such as Milligan's mountain heath, and a photograph of him with his partner standing beside a lichen-covered rock. In the window, a triangular yellow sticker read, “NO WAR—THE GREENS.” Bob was one of only three Green Party members in the entire Australian Parliament. He was also the party's unofficial leader. Over the years, he had become an environmental crusader and an outspoken advocate for human rights.
If we had imagined the senator would no longer be interested in the tiger—that he would find the subject trivial or dated—we were widely off the mark. He was still compelled by it, and his memories of his thylacine search, which had taken place more than thirty years before, were crystalclear. Something about that time period, he said, had galvanized him— made him what he is today.
Bob had originally come to Tasmania to see Lake Pedder before it was flooded. (Lake Pedder was the world's largest glacial lake, a two-square-mile shallow body of water in southwestern Tasmania bordered by a pink quartzite beach. When Bob arrived, it was slated to be inundated by a series of dams that would generate hydroelectric power. Intense opposition to the dam had led to the formation of Tasmania's Green Party.)
Trained as a doctor on the mainland, Bob had taken a job practicing medicine in Launceston in 1972, and it wasn't long before he bumped into James Malley and Jeremy Griffith. James and Jeremy were already searching for the tiger and Bob was intrigued.
“Those two guys were bright-eyed. They had talked to a lot of people who had seen it, and they knew the tiger was there. It was just a matter of tracking it down. As a kid I had read about the Tasmanian tiger and I was always fascinated by it and the sightings. And yet, I was the skeptic. When I first came to Tasmania, I thought the animal was most likely extinct. But you couldn't yet make that decision.”
At that point, the tiger had not been officially declared extinct—and the possibility that it survived had not been fully explored. Bob cited the example of the takahe, a flightless bird from New Zealand that had been presumed extinct for fifty years and then was rediscovered in 1949. “The takahe's as big as a turkey,” he said. The rediscovery of such a large creature raised the possibility that the thylacine, despite its large size, might also have survived undetected in a remote area. Considering how significant the tiger was—so much a part of Tasmania's history and sense of place—it was not an animal to be given up on lightly. At least Bob felt it was important to have a systematic look—and that was what he, James, and Jeremy set out to do.
With his own money—what he had left after taking out ads in every newspaper condemning the flooding of Lake Pedder—Bob set up an office and telephone hotline for the thylacine expedition team. When they received a report of a tiger sighting, they would proceed to the area, look for tracks, and interview witnesses.
One of Bob's jobs was to help set the camera traps that Jeremy had designed to capture a photo of the thylacine. This involved placing live chickens in treehouse pens and coming back periodically to feed them. “For the time, it was a sophisticated little system. If an animal tried to get at the chook, a line would be tripped and the camera would go off.” Like other camera traps before and after, these produced snapshots of possums, wombats, and quolls—but no tigers.
Some of their investigations sent them on far-flung, life-threatening journeys into the bush. “Jeremy was totally driven,” said Bob. “But mind you, so was James. I went into the Tarkine with James looking for tigers, and we crossed the Little Rapid River, and when we came back it was in flood. The river was fifty meters wide and flowing very fast. James couldn't swim. I said, ‘We have to camp here for a few days.’ But James was going to cross and that was it. I got a rope to the other side and he walked across. James was a big man. If he had fallen in, he would have drowned.”
They also drove thousands of miles back and forth across the island, interviewing eyewitnesses. This was where the work became discouraging. So many of the reports turned out to be cases of mistaken identity. One of the most promising dispatches came from a remote west coast beach. A young man had reported seeing a tiger while duck hunting. “He said it was getting dark, and suddenly there was a tiger standing on a dune looking at him from just twenty paces away. He had a gun with him and was against shooting it. We got there three days later, and there was great excitement. Men were fishing there for flounder, and James talked to the men. One of them had been to the museum in Hobart and was the most reliable witness among the lot. He said it was a tiger. There was a halfraised print on the dune. Then a couple of hours later, a guy came up the beach on a tractor. Loping up behind him was an Irish wolfhound. Everybody went quiet. I said, ‘Did you have that wolfhound tied up two nights ago?’ With quite a lot of embarrassment, he said, ‘I—I—I, yes, I did.’ I didn't believe him at all.… It was extraordinary. That dog was the last thing you would expect to see on the west coast of Tasmania. But there it was in front of all of us.”
Ultimately, however, it was a sighting Bob made himself that permanently altered his perception—and Jeremy's as well. Bob was driving home one night through a wooded area and saw a startling vision in the headlights. “Here was this animal. I immediately went back to get Jeremy, and I said, ‘You've got to see this.’ We went right to the spot, and the animal was still there. I got it in the headlights, and it was extraordinary. It had pointy ears and a long snout. It had a thick rump and a kangaroo-like tail and four chocolate-colored stripes across its fawncolored back.” Bob paused as we leaned in expectantly.
“And this is the thing. It was a greyhound dog that had the pattern and coloring of a thylacine.”
Eyewitness sightings, it seemed, were not very reliable. “We looked at 250 sightings and at the end of the day only four of those could not be explained by something else: a wombat, a dog, a feral cat.”
Upon investigation, even some historical sightings came under question. The tiger team interviewed veteran tiger hunters, including Arthur Fleming, the retired police inspector who, while working for the Tasmanian Animals and Birds Protection Board, had found tiger tracks in the southwest wilderness during the late 1930s. As a result, he continued to search for the tiger over many years. Bob visited Fleming to ask him about a series of sheep mutilations that were blamed on tigers in a farming community in 1957. Sheep had been found with their throats slashed, their bodies intact but cleaned of blood as if the blood had been slurped up. These vampirelike attacks were believed to be the work of a tiger and were long used as evidence that the tiger survived at least into the 1950s.
“Inspector Fleming gave us the full story,” said Bob. “Yes, there were a number of tiger sightings. So they put out a big steel box cage and baited it with liver. One morning they approached the box and there was a big animal in it. When they got to it, it was an Alsatian dog. They dispatched the Alsatian, and the sheep killing stopped. It was so typical. That component of the story was never conveyed by the media. It's always the excitement of the chase, never the eviden
ce.”
The noose seemed to be closing around the thylacine's neck. At the time of the thylacine expedition search, plenty of trappers and others who had killed tigers for the bounty were still alive. While Bob, Jeremy, James, and others like them were finding it impossible to get even a whiff of a tiger, the older hunters described the tiger as easy to catch.
“I interviewed a lovely old man in Buckland. He had a big tree stump [on his property] and there were iron spikes right around it. Each one of those spikes represented the skull of a tiger that was kept on it. At his back fence were two big holes dug in the ground. They put tabletops over the holes and the tabletops had a steel axis across the middle. A tiger coming down the fence line would tread on one side of the table and it would tip. The tiger would drop into the pit and the table would close over it. In the morning they would take the tigers out. He told me they got forty tigers from a fence line that was half a mile long. That tells you how prevalent tigers were and how rapidly they were destroyed.”
We were surprised that the senator had called the killer of forty thylacines a “lovely old man.” His anger was directed not at individuals, but at the misguided policies behind the state-sponsored persecution of the thylacine.
“Nobody wants to talk about the deliberate extirpation of the tiger,” he said. Had we known, he asked, how close the vote had been that created the government-sponsored thylacine bounty?
Local livestock organizations, such as the Van Diemen's Land Company, had been putting up their own bounties through much of the nineteenth century. But it wasn't until 1886 that the Tasmanian government put up an island-wide bounty—effectively turning the killing of tigers into a business.
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