The Sea Inside

by Philip Hoare

  Truganini’s peers may have elected to die as passive victims, but she did not. She had tried to be part of the white world, or at least to work with it. In the aftermath of the Black War, during which the government had offered a bounty of £5 for each Aboriginal adult captured alive (and £2 for each child), Truganini moved to the mainland and joined a band of rebels, former whalers living on the outskirts of Melbourne, then a virtual war zone between the settlers and the settled. Resistance had become active. In one notorious raid, two white whalers were murdered and other settlers shot. In the ensuing pursuit, Truganini was shot in the head. She survived, but was tried in court and narrowly avoided being the first Aboriginal woman to be hanged in Australia. Sent back to Flinders Island, she and the last of her people were then removed to Oyster Cove, south of Hobart. New images showed them bowed down by oceans of cheap fabric, engulfed in their captors’ costume.

  Shortly before her death from ‘paralysis’ in Hobart in 1876, Truganini confessed to a Church of England priest that she feared the dishonour of her body. She had good reason to do so, given the fate of William Lanne, her second husband. A well-known whaler, ‘King Billy’ had died in 1869, and his corpse had become the subject of an unseemly dispute between scientists of the Royal College of Surgeons, run by John Hunter’s heirs, and those of the Royal Society of Tasmania, busy building their own collection. It is a remarkable story, as told by the historian Helen MacDonald, who points out that such grave-robbing had its precedent in the Antipodes.

  In 1856 Joseph Barnard Davis, an English surgeon and collector, instructed Alfred Bock, son of the painter Thomas, on how to salvage specimens of Aboriginal people to supply a Western taste for such ethnic curiosities. In order to obscure acts of pillage which were, if not illegal, then certainly unethical, Bock was to find not just one but two corpses: one black, one white, ready for burial. Since his customers generally only wanted the cranium, he was to peel the skin from the black skull and replace it with that of the white person. He would then dress the replacement so that the skin would assume its shape. This ghoulish deception was, perhaps, the ultimate insult for a dreaming people: to go to one’s grave with white bones beneath black skin.

  Eight years later another Englishman sent a request for more bones. William Flower, who had succeeded Richard Owen as conservator at the Hunterian, was eager to acquire a sperm whale for the collection. He wrote to William Lodewyk Crowther, a Tasmanian surgeon and owner of a fleet of five whaleships, and was duly sent the skeleton of a fifty-one-foot male sperm whale caught off the south coast of the island in 1864, along with the lower jaw of the largest sperm whale ever taken in Tasmanian waters, measuring sixteen feet and indicating an animal of more than seventy feet in length.

  But Flower had other acquisitions in mind, too. In a postscript to his letter he added the suggestion, ‘I suppose there is no further chance of obtaining a skeleton of … one of the aboriginal human inhabitants, or a pair, male and female?’ There was a hint of the black market in this whispered request. Crowther replied that there were just five such ‘specimens’ left – that is, Truganini and her friends at Oyster Cove – and promised to do his best. His grotesque efforts echoed John Hunter’s ‘collection’ of the Irish Giant in the previous century.

  On the night of William Lanne’s death, Crowther and his son stole into the morgue in the Colonial Hospital. Employing the techniques outlined by Joseph Davis, they took Lanne’s skull and replaced it with one from a white body. Did Lanne now look like a white black man, or a black white man? It hardly mattered, since he was no longer Lanne at all. Having discovered what had gone on, George Stokell, resident surgeon at the hospital and member of the Royal Society of Tasmania, the rival of its London equivalent, was told to amputate Lanne’s hands and feet and so prevent Crowther from returning to claim the rest of the skeleton.

  King Billy – or what was left of him – was carried to his grave by fellow whalers, among them a Hawaiian, a South Australian Aborigine and an African-American. His coffin was covered with a black opossum-skin rug, ‘and followed by above a hundred citizens’, as The Times noted, adding that Lanne was ‘the last man of a race which only half a century ago numbered 7,000 souls …’ But that night, Lanne’s corpse suffered a third violation. Barely hours after interment, his coffin was dug up and his remains harvested by the Tasmanian scientists. His bones were as dispersed as St Oswald’s, only for reasons of science rather than of faith. When the bizarre conspiracy became public, cartoons appeared in the press depicting Crowther as a grave-robber, surrounded by coffins dangling from ropes and bat-winged devils out of a Victorian pantomime. It was claimed he kept Lanne’s skull as a paperweight on his desk in Hobart; its current whereabouts are unknown.

  Given these gruesome events, Truganini’s fears were entirely understandable. Shortly before she died, she asked that her body be cremated and her ashes scattered in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel that separates Bruny Island from Tasmania; like Charles Byrne, the Irish Giant, she sought the oblivion of the sea. Instead, she was buried in Hobart’s suburbs, following a strange lying-in-state, wrapped in a rough red blanket and placed in a pauper’s shoe-blacked coffin. Her friend, the barrister John Woodcock Graves, said he’d never seen a corpse so ‘placid and beautifully quiet’. He suggested that a plaster cast be made of her face, and asked why the government had made no provision for the burial of such a notable person. Accordingly, the public were invited to ‘Queen Truganini’s’ funeral – but only after the Royal Society in London had removed samples of her skin and hair.

  Two years later, the Royal Society of Tasmania, which claimed, erroneously, that it did not have a female Aborigine specimen, was allowed to exhume Truganini’s remains on condition that the skeleton was not put on display. Her bones were stored in a box until 1904, when they were articulated and put on show in a glass case in Hobart’s museum as ‘The Last of Her Race’. In 1947, a belated decency overcame the curators and Truganini was removed from the public gaze, but it was not until 1976, one hundred years after her death, that Truganini’s final wishes were honoured: her remains were cremated and the ashes scattered off Bruny Island. As quickly as the events of her life had played out, so slowly history repaired the insult to her memory. In 2002 it was discovered that the samples of her hair and skin which had been taken were still held by the Royal College of Surgeons in Oxford. They were returned to Tasmania. Truganini had finally transcended her story. Her skeleton is gone from its glass cabinet, and does not even exist in the photograph that I have of it, which I cannot reproduce here.

  On 21 April 1805 a letter from William Paterson, Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, was published in the Sydney Gazette. It described an animal ‘of a truly singular and nouvel description’, which had been killed by dogs at Port Dalrymple, and which, so the excited editor informed his readers, ‘must be considered of a species perfectly distinct from any of the animal creation hitherto known, and certainly the only powerful and terrific member of the carniverous [sic] and voracious tribe yet discovered on any part of New Holland or its adjacent Islands’.

  Paterson’s interests were scientific as well as military. He was another protégé of Joseph Banks, to whom he had dedicated his Narrative of Four Journeys into the Country of the Hottentots and Caffraia, written after his sojourn in South Africa in 1780. His report from Van Diemen’s Land, which had the air of an academic paper, sealed the fate of the Tasmanian tiger. Like the island’s peoples, its seals and its whales, such exposure would prove to be the tiger’s undoing – and in the same short span. It all happened with extraordinary speed.

  For thousands of years the thylacine, as it was more properly known, had survived in Tasmania long after its mainland population had been forced out, a result of an ever drier habitat and competition from dingoes. On this temperate, predator-free island – a residue of what Australia once was – it was preserved in its insular splendour, protected by the surrounding sea. Until now.

  ‘It is very evident th
is species is destructive,’ Paterson announced; and he had the evidence to prove it. ‘On dissection his stomach was filled with a quantity of kangaroo, weighing 5lbs. the weight of the whole animal 45 lbs. From its interior structure it must be a brute particularly quick of digestion.’ Guilty from the inside out, the creature’s every part was measured and itemised: from its eye, ‘remarkably large and black, 1¼ inches’, to its tail, ‘1 foot 8 inches’. Paterson was nothing if not precise. He counted nineteen bristles on either side of the animal’s face, and found its body to be covered with short smooth hair, ‘of a greyish colour, the stripes black; the hair on the neck rather longer … the hair on the ears of a light brown colour, on the inside rather long.’ Despite these anchoring details, one might have forgiven the reader of the Sydney Gazette, secure in his convict-built house in Port Jackson or Hobart, if he had assumed that this was a fabulous portmanteau of a beast, barely more credible than any of the other extraordinary fauna that leapt or crept or flew or swam around these islands. ‘The form of the animal is that of a hyæna, at the same time strongly reminding the observer of the appearance of a low wolf dog. The lips do not appear to conceal the tusks.’

  Such sins! The animal was betrayed by its features as much as any Victorian criminal by his photograph. The physiognomy was exact: unconcealing lips and low wolfishness, indicating cunning. Such strangeness added up to a sentence of death, and the thylacine, suspected of manifold offences, could hope for little mercy.

  In 1808, George Prideaux Harris, Deputy Surveyor-General of Van Diemen’s Land, sent Joseph Banks a sketch of another animal, which had been caught in a trap baited with kangaroo meat. He noted the tiger’s ‘near resemblance to the wolf or hyæna’, and that its eyes were ‘large and full, black, with a nictitant membrane, which gives the animal a savage and malicious appearance’. As newly discovered as it was, the thylacine was being coopted for the roles it had been assigned, according to the level of threat or scientific interest it evoked. Illustrating what he called the ‘Zebra or Dog-faced Dasyurus’ in an 1827 edition of his encyclopedic The Animal Kingdom, Georges Cuvier concluded, ‘Its compressed tail seems to indicate that it is a swimmer, and it is known to be an inhabitant of the rocks on the seashore of Van Diemen’s Land, and to feed on flesh … fish and insects.’ In Cuvier’s text, the thylacine resembles one of the early evolutionary mammals that took to the water to become entirely marine, the ancient ancestors of the whales, on whose descendants it now fed: ‘They also seek, with avidity, the half-corrupted bodies of seals and cetaceous animals on the sea-shore.’ Joseph Milligan, writing in 1853, agreed with this Darwinian demeanour: ‘The Aborigines report that this animal is a most powerful swimmer; that in swimming he carries his tail extended, moving it as the dog often does.’

  Gradually, more certain details began to accrue, bringing into focus a composite creation. Classified as Thylacinus cynocephalus, dog-headed pouched animal, the thylacine was one of only two marsupials – the other being the water opossum – in which both sexes had pouches, the male’s covering its genitals to protect them as it ran in the bush (a refinement which is surely the envy of other males). It could raise itself on its back legs like a kangaroo, and ran at speed when hunting. Its elliptical pupils were perfected for night viewing, and its one-hundred-and-twenty-degree gape geared for scavenging. However, it would later be proved that the animal’s jaw had little strength, and that its yawning gesture – often accompanied by the straightening of its tail and a peculiar strong scent – was not a sign of boredom, but a warning that it felt threatened and could be about to attack.

  This fearsome reputation convinced settlers that the Tasmanian tiger was a danger to their stock. As early as 1850, the indefatigable John West was protesting its innocence, allowing that the thylacine did kill sheep, but only one at a time, unlike a wild dog or dingo, ‘which both commit havoc in a single night’. Yet the Reverend had to accept that his defence was futile. Rewards offered by sheep-owners meant it was probable ‘that in a very few years this animal, so highly interesting to the zoologist, will become extinct; it is now extremely rare, even in the wildest and least frequented parts of the island’. A male and a female were sent to the Zoological Society of London during the present year [1850], and were the first that ever reached Europe alive.’ To many Tasmanians, it might as well have been an invention. Given its rarity, it is unlikely that my transported cousin James ever saw one, at least not in the wild.

  While their peers were caged in foreign prisons, wild thylacines had bounties placed on their heads and hides. Five shillings was offered for a male, seven shillings for a female, with or without pups, and from 1878 to 1909 more than four thousand thylacines were culled. Some became waistcoats and rugs, allowing men to both wear and walk on their trophies. The animal’s steep decline was only accelerated by the reduction of its habitat, a distemperlike disease, and predation by domestic dogs. By 1910 the population was scarce; the last confirmed thylacine to be killed in the wild was shot in 1930 by a farmer, Wilfred Batty. A photograph of the carcase propped up against a fence displays the power of this creature even in death. The farmer’s sheepdog backs away in fear, flecks of spittle around its mouth. The last capture of a thylacine took place in the Florentine Valley in 1933. Thereafter all is supposition, although in 1946 Dr David Fleay came close to trapping a thylacine on his expedition into the Tasmanian interior. And that was the final encounter – as far as science is concerned.

  In Hobart’s museum, next to a gallery lined with Duterreau’s paintings of Tasmanian Aborigines, a video plays on a constant loop. It shows a female thylacine that was bought by London Zoo in January 1926, and which would die on 9 August 1931, shortly after the film was made. It also displays footage from Hobart’s zoo, where the Florentine thylacine had been brought. This hapless beast was a victim of human circumstance twice over, since at that time Tasmania was subject, like much of the Western world, to economic depression. In the mid-1930s, Beaumaris Zoo (‘beautiful marsh’) had become run-down, and its inhabitants – among them polar bears and elephants – neglected in their concrete compounds.

  Like the stranded sperm whales of the Mediterranean, every factor seemed to conspire to precipitate this last captive’s demise, as Robert Paddle, a doctor of psychology at the Australian Catholic University, writes. The deciduous tree which had covered the thylacine’s cage had shed its leaves. ‘Without access to her den, the thylacine was unshaded from the extreme, unseasonal heat by day, and shelterless from the extreme cold by night. Thus, unprotected and exposed, the last known thylacine whimpered away during the night of 7 September 1936.’ It is a mournful scene, worthy of a Victorian oil painting: the bare tree, the freezing night, the crossed paws as the forgotten tiger lays down her head. Like the Aboriginal people, she too had pined away, homesick in her own homeland: collected, and abandoned. A year later, the zoo closed, and the site became a fuel store for the Australian navy.

  But in the technology of the twenty-first century, the thylacine lives on. The Hobart and London films are remarkable for the tantalising glimpses they allow us of an animal so recently made extinct. Their subjects resemble flickering ghosts, pacing up and down, caught in a loop, yet their physicality is certainly not spectral. In bright sunlight, the Hobart specimen is seen in precise detail. It is a living chimera. The mountain-lion head. The narrow, almost cetacean jaw, yawning as if to display distress at its observation. The lemur-like stripes on its hindquarters and the kangarooish tail, thick at the base and tapering to a whip-like point and which, I guess, must have felt as heavy as the wallaby’s tail I once weighed in my hands while its owner foraged on the ground.

  In other photographs of a thylacine family group at Beaumaris in 1909, taken only a century after Paterson first described the animals, they appear intimidated by the photographer’s lens. The vividness of these images renders their subjects almost domestic; I imagine finding one curled at my feet – not such a far-fetched idea, since captive thylacines were often given c
ollars and walked on leads like dogs.

  From the 1880s to the 1920s, a total of nearly two dozen thylacines were sent to London Zoo, a hub for such exotic specimens, an imperial animal clearing house. Many went on to other compounds, in New York and Berlin. In captivity, these unassertively, subtly strange creatures did not speak up for themselves. ‘It is unfortunate that only rarely did anyone take time to observe them,’ writes one modern commentator; ‘their tranquil nature did not arouse much interest in zoo visitors, or zoo directors, either.’ Their calls were said to resemble the slow opening of a door, but their cells would stay shut.

  It was only in 1986, fifty years after the death of the last known specimen, that the thylacine was declared lost to the world. Even now CITES qualifies the tiger’s status as only ‘possibly extinct’. Given such a recent extirpation in an island as untamed as Tasmania, it was inevitable that stories would persist of its survival.

  In 1957, a photograph was taken from a helicopter flying over Birthday, on the west of the island, of a ‘striped beast on the deserted beach’. ‘It was probably a thylacine,’ the Belgian naturalist and cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvlemans claimed, matter-of-factly. ‘An expedition was at once mounted in order to capture a specimen, which would be released again after it had been studied.’

  Heuvlemans’ confidence was misplaced. Despite other reports of tracks and attacks, and the best efforts of a Disney film crew and an expedition led by Sir Edmund Hillary in 1960, no specimen was found. However, in 1961 a pair of fishermen apparently came close to capturing one by accident when it was snared in a trap. The two men, Bill Morrison and Laurie Thompson, risked ridicule to talk to the Hobart Mercury. ‘The tail was rigid,’ said Morrison. ‘The animal’s coat was dark, and I could discern only one stripe behind the shoulders and extending around the chest.’ The beast was understandably maddened, reported the newspaper, although the sound it made was ‘rather peculiar, and different from the barking of a dog’. As the two men attempted to release it, it escaped – although not at any great speed. ‘It seemed to be a slow mover,’ said Morrison.