Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves
‘Show us a live, uninjured thylacine that, according to our strict terms and conditions on page 20, is the genuine article, and you will share in the $1.25m reward. No fuzzy photographs, please.’
The Bulletin, March 29, 2005.
EVERY THIRD TASMANIAN HAS A STORY THAT CONFIRMS THE continued existence of the Tasmanian tiger or thylacine: an Alsatian-sized marsupial with chocolate stripes across its back, the stiff tail of a kangaroo and jaws that open wider than a snake’s.
Ivy was no exception. On Gunn’s Plains Road five years before, her nephew came within yards of a Tasmanian tiger. ‘He’d never seen anything like it, what he saw. “I thought I was seeing things,” he said. Reckoned it was a young one. He took his dog next morning to see if he could track it.’ But her nephew’s thylacine had melted away, like each and every one recorded as sighted since 1936.
In Burnie, Laurelle Shakespeare told me that she saw a thinnish-looking thylacine near a shack in the Great Lakes in January 1980. She was with her mother and the owner of the shack when the animal appeared in the middle of the day on a big ridge behind them. ‘It just stood there and we stood there and then it flipped around and walked off, quickly disappearing into bush. I can remember feeling scared, a kid seeing something that was not supposed to exist. I turned to Mum. “That’s a Tasmanian tiger.” She said: “Yes, and we’re not telling anyone.” Can you imagine? Three of us, seeing the same thing. There’d be people all over the place.’
A neighbour of ours on Dolphin Sands was married to the keeper of the Eddystone Lighthouse and saw a Tasmanian tiger – twice – on the north-east coast, where a third of all sightings have taken place. In 1974, she was approaching the village of Gladstone when a large striped animal crossed the road not ten yards from her car.
‘Do you think it was a tiger?’ I ask.
She says: ‘I know.’
A few months later, she saw another one – or the same animal – beside the road. She waited for an hour, but it did not reappear. This time she reported it to the local Parks and Wildlife officer, for his ears only. She told him that she would deny it if everyone descended on Eddystone. She did not want people to think her mad.
Nothing is more emblematic of Tasmania than its vanished marsupial. In the most recent study of the animal, David Owen writes: ‘The thylacine has about it a sufficiently powerful and ambiguous mystique that it is able comfortably to represent and embrace much that is Tasmanian.’ From the label on bottles of Cascade beer to the logos of Launceston city council and Tasmania’s local television channel, its distinct outline tracks you at every turn. ‘It isn’t just a symbol of Tasmania,’ explains the designer who adopted the image for the masthead of Tourism Tasmania. ‘It’s a symbol of the Tasmanian Experience.’ Counterparts to unicorns on the royal arms, a pair of heraldic thylacines stand rampant in the state’s coat of arms. The creature has even lent its name to the island’s first eleven, the Tasmanian Tigers. ‘It is/was a sleek, cunning and aggressive carnivore – a killer,’ according to the former batsman David Boon, himself a local legend also known as the Keg on Legs. ‘If it still exists, it is … surrounded by mystery and extremely hard to track down. It certainly projects an appropriate image for our cricket team.’
This was not, however, the first example of a team named after the thylacine. The convict workers at Mount Vernon played against workers on neighbouring estates under the name of Kemp’s Tigers.
The Tasmanian Aborigines knew the thylacine as Corinna, the Brave One. The only legend about the animal to filter down from their culture is contained in a collection of stories retold by Jackson Cotton and gathered from Timler, an Aboriginal elder, near the Cotton property at Kelvedon. Palana, the little star, son of Moinee, ruler of Trowenna, mixed ashes and blood into a thick brown paste and sketched a number of parallel stripes across a hyena pup’s back, ‘from the top of his shoulders to the butt of his rigid tail’.
Abel Tasman was the first European to allude to the thylacine. On the beach at Marion Bay, his Dutch sailors came across Tasmania-shaped pug-marks in the sand – ‘the footing of wild beasts having claws like a tyger …’ Most probably they were a wombat’s footprints, but the name stuck.
Among the first to hear the animal’s eerie nocturnal yelp, described as a hissing cough or terrier-like ‘yip-yip’, was Midshipman François Desiré Breton of the Naturaliste who listened to a noise that came from the vicinity of Maria Island and in February 1802 wrote this deadpan entry in his diary: ‘A dog was heard barking on shore.’
The first Europeans to set eyes on a thylacine were five escaped English convicts near Hobart. On May 2, 1804, according to Kemp’s friend the Reverend Robert Knopwood, who interviewed them shortly afterwards, they saw ‘a large tiger’ in the bush, ‘and when the tiger see the men, which were about 100 yards away from it, it went away’.
One of the first Europeans to touch a Tasmanian tiger was Kemp himself, who was present when the body of a mauled female thylacine was brought into York Town. On March 30, 1805, ‘an animal of a truly singular and novel description’ was killed by the settlement’s dogs on the hill behind his quarters. The carcass was immediately examined by Colonel Paterson, who sent it in a wooden box to Joseph Banks together with the ‘very perfect native’s head’. The strange animal reminded Paterson of a hyena and also ‘a low wolf dog’. It had a forefoot with blunt claws, large black eyes, canine teeth and 20 blackish stripes along its grey back. ‘It must be a brute peculiarly quick of digestion,’ reckoned Paterson, who found five pounds of kangaroo in its stomach. ‘It is the hope the breed of so destructive a creature is not very numerous as it will be a great scourge to the weaker kind of stock.’
In the letters and diaries of colonists, there are references, too, to a Tasmanian wolf, a Tasmanian hyena, a Tasmanian zebra, a Tasmanian dingo, a Tasmanian panther and a dog-faced dasyure. Not until 1824 did the Tasmanian tiger settle down as Thylacinus cynocephalus, a pouched dog with a dog’s head.
About its habits and ecology, writes Owen, ‘we know pathetically little’. When it was alive concentration was on shooting, clubbing or trapping it, and not on studying it. All accounts agree that it was shy, elusive and – with its fused backbone – not gainly. Unable to pounce, it had to wear down its prey. It stalked wallabies and possums and had a particular liking for Kemp’s merino sheep, which it would bring to the ground with its vice-like jaws and kill by suffocation. ‘The tiger would tear out the jugular vein, suck the blood, then, ripping a piece of flesh from the shoulder, discard the rest,’ said William Cotton, who as a boy in the 1920s took part in a tiger hunt near Swansea. Other accounts describe its taste for vascular tissue: lungs, hearts, livers.
The thylacine’s stiffened tail was adapted for swimming, but when walking through the bush it appeared to one trapper to be ‘turning in a piece like a ship’. If cornered, it would rise on hind legs and hop off like a kangaroo. It ran with a stiff loping movement, although in short bursts it was capable of reaching high speeds. Nocturnal and nomadic, it moved in a circular pattern covering an average daily distance of 35 miles. A female such as the one viewed by Kemp at York Town produced three or four pups in a good year.
In Thylacine, Owen suggests that when Kemp arrived there were 2,000–4,000 thylacines on the island, a figure which is close to some estimates of the Aboriginal population. The ‘perfect native’s head’ and the pickled thylacine that Paterson sent back as curios to England had also this in common: beside competing for the same protein, each species would in a very short time have a bounty placed on it and be hunted near to extinction.
The clip lasts 62 seconds and was taken in the 1930s by a man who was bitten on the buttock while filming. It shows the last known Tasmanian tiger in captivity at Hobart’s Beaumaris Zoo, an animal known to everyone as Benjamin. As if her species had not endured enough misconceptions, the footage shows Benjamin to have been female.
I meet Benjamin on the other side of the
world, in the Natural History Museum in East Berlin. The loop of black and white film ran and ran and was a welcome flicker of life in a procession of cavernous rooms devoted to the skeletons of plesiosaurs.
Benjamin has an elongated muzzle and a striped back and is the size of a large dog with short legs. I do not know how long I stood and gazed at her pacing in her cage. Watched by a man in a floppy hat, she yawns, squats, tears flesh off a bone, looks around with an air of hopelessness and distress, and leaps now and then at the cage wire. The sequence is mute. No recording exists of Benjamin’s bark, but the last curator at Beaumaris Zoo, Alison Reid, wrote that it sounded like ‘ah-ah-ah-ah’.
The scratched fragment of film is the unique record of this perhaps extinct animal in motion. Benjamin died of pleuro-pneumonia and kidney failure on a cold night in September 1936.
‘Old timers will tell you that tigers came out galore at lambing time,’ says a wine-grower outside Swansea, who claims that he saw a tiger near Sorell when he was twelve.
Kemp’s success at promoting sheep-breeding guaranteed a steady source of food for thylacines. By 1830, some 680,000 sheep were grazing in the open pastures between Hobart and Launceston. Adam Amos complained that near Swansea: ‘Tigers are plentifull amongst the rocky mountains and destroy many sheep and lambs.’ Moulting Lagoon behind my house was the site not only of an alleged Aboriginal massacre but of a slaughter of thylacines. William Cotton lived for a time on a bend of the river nearby. He claimed that on a single day in 1900 three men and their dogs killed 17 adult thylacines and their pups that had come to feed on swans’ eggs.
The original attempt to eliminate these ‘noxious animals’ was made by the Van Diemen’s Land Company as it struggled to establish sheep flocks on its huge property in the north-west. In 1830, the Company offered a bounty of five shillings for a male and seven shillings for a female. Six years later, a ‘tiger man’ was appointed at Woolnorth, the Company’s headquarters near Cape Grim, and operated as a full-time tracker on a salary of £20 (about £1,200 today). But what really signalled the beginning of the end for the thylacine was the bill proposed by Swansea’s member of parliament, John Lyne.
Sometimes referred to as ‘Leghunter’ on account of his sexual wanderings, John Lyne was the son of William Lyne who had built the Cellar and brother of Susan who was struck by an Aboriginal weapon. In 1831, he took part in Meredith’s Freycinet Line against the Oyster Bay tribe. Elected to the House of Assembly for Glamorgan, he tabled a motion to extinguish ‘the dingo’, as he called it. In a speech shot through with wild inaccuracies, Lyne claimed that ‘these dreadful animals may be seen in hundreds, stealthily sneaking along, seeking whom they may devour, and it is estimated that they will have swallowed up every sheep and bullock in Glamorgan.’ Supported by not a scrap of scientific evidence, Lyne calculated that a single thylacine could kill as many as 100 sheep a year. He assured members that the destruction of 500 thylacines would safeguard the 30,000–40,000 sheep presently lost every year on the east coast. This claim was ridiculed, but Lyne’s motion was passed by a single vote, and by a majority of 12 to 11 the government agreed to pay £1 for every adult carcass presented and ten shillings for every pup’s. The carcasses had to be taken to polling stations to have their ears or toes clipped off in order to prevent fraud.
The first bounty was paid on April 28, 1888, to J. Harding of Ross, the last to J. Bryant of Hamilton on June 5, 1909. In its 21-year operation, the Tasmanian Government Thylacine Bounty Scheme accounted for 2,184 skins. Popular belief is that many were sent to Europe to be fashioned into gentlemen’s waistcoats, but Owen claims that ‘no such waistcoat is known to exist’.
In 1909, the bounty scheme was stopped. A distemper epidemic had apparently drastically reduced the thylacine population and the toll of dead sheep and sightings grew less and less frequent, although in 1912 a new hotel in the north-west still advertised ‘Tiger-Shooting’ as one of its attractions. The highest number of claims – 600 – were in the central plains. By contrast, in Swansea, where the Glamorgan Stock Protection Society paid £2 for every dead adult tiger, there were only 17 claims. One morning, William Cotton startled farmers in the main street by walking into town with a thylacine at the end of a lead. He had snared it four miles west of Swansea and tamed it like a dog. After a few days kept chained in his stable, the animal grew restless and ‘one night jumped over the partition between the stall, and choked itself, the chain not being long enough to let its feet touch the floor on the other side’.
Benjamin’s death on September 7, 1936 caused no stir at all. The day had been fine and mild, but at night it was exceptionally cold and Benjamin was exposed to freezing temperatures without access to a protected shelter. The passing of the last verified representative of its species did not merit a mention in the local press. On the day that Benjamin succumbed to pneumonia, Hobart’s Theatre Royal (founded by, among others, Kemp) was enjoying a full house for the opening night of ‘Gaieties’, a variety show that featured the tenor Domenico Caruso (‘nephew of the late famous tenor Enrico’); some acrobatic tumbling from The Flying Martinetties (‘whose famous Riseley Act caused a furore’); and Miss Nellie Kelle, ‘the male impersonator’, whose performance was so popular that he/she ‘had to submit to numerous recalls’.
The newspapers did, though, devote plenty of space to the prize dogs on show at the Tasmanian Kennel Club in Launceston. ‘Interest in exhibition dogs in Tasmania has never been so marked as at present,’ wrote the Mercury’s correspondent. Not to be outdone, the Examiner printed the photograph of a black cocker-spaniel, Peggy of Kareem: ‘We are open to just criticism if we fail to look after our pets.’ Ironically, the correspondent ‘Kennel’ contributed a piece under the title ‘New Breed for Tasmania’ about the first arrival on the island of an Afghan hound. This ‘dignified’ dog, called Umbra Singh of Kandahar, was imported to Hobart by Mrs Pedder and had arrived by car from Launceston on the day that Benjamin was discovered dead. ‘This was the breed favoured by Noah and taken into the Ark with him,’ wrote ‘Kennel’ in a paean to Umbra’s ‘extraordinary feet’ and blue blood. ‘He has bluer blood in his veins than any other breed in the world and his pedigree traces back to centuries before the Christian era.’
September 7 is now National Threatened Species Day.
One of the leading exporters of the Tasmanian tiger to foreign zoos was Errol Flynn’s father. In October 1914, Professor Thomas Flynn visited Maria Island and proposed that a thylacine sanctuary be established there. It was finally acquired for this purpose by the Fauna (Animals & Birds Protection) Board in 1966. At the time of writing, Maria Island is still designated to become that reserve should any elusive thylacines be captured alive. But innumerable sightings since 1936 have not been followed by a live, even a dead body of the species. ‘The overwhelming evidence is that the thylacine is extinct,’ says Nick Mooney. On September 7, 1986, it was officially declared so.
It is a sombre afternoon on which I visit Mooney, one of Tasmania’s most experienced Parks and Wildlife officers. A colleague has drowned, swept into the Southern Ocean from a rock off Tasmania’s south-east coast where he was studying the endangered Pedra Blanca skink, a charcoal grey lizard four inches long and not found anywhere else. Mooney knows the rock well: he was stuck there once in bad weather. Running out of food, he had to frighten the gannets into regurgitating mackerel, which he then swallowed.
Mooney is a lean, energising figure who for more than 20 years has been the officer responsible for assessing thylacine evidence. In 1982, Mooney investigated ‘one of the best sightings on record’, by another of his colleagues, Hans Naarding. The ranger had gone to sleep in the back of his car in a remote forested area near Togari in the north-west. ‘It was raining heavily,’ Naarding wrote. ‘At 2.00 a.m. I awoke and out of habit scanned the surrounds with a spotlight. As I swept the light-beam around, it came to rest on a large thylacine, standing side on some six to seven metres distant. My camera bag was out of immediate reach so I
decided to examine the animal carefully before risking movement. It was an adult male in excellent condition with 12 black stripes on a sandy coat. Eye reflection was pale yellow. It moved only once, opening its jaw and showing its teeth. After several minutes of observation, I attempted to reach my camera bag, but in doing so I disturbed the animal and it moved away into the undergrowth.’ Naarding left his car and walked to where the animal had disappeared. There was a strong scent.
The sighting was kept secret for two years while Mooney searched 150 square miles. He pegged out road-killed wallabies south of Smithton. He planted automatic cameras in mud pits along the Arthur River. He made plaster of Paris casts of tracks and collected animal faeces that he subjected to high performance liquid chromatography. He was full of hope. The ‘wilderness’ near Togari might not have been a traditional habitat for thylacines, which preferred eucalyptus forests and coastal plains, but unexpected patterns of behaviour emerged sometimes when the equilibrium of a species was disrupted by clear-felling and settlement. Naarding had seen his thylacine in March, the start of the breeding season. Perhaps it had been travelling in search of a mate. ‘I prefer to throw frustrations aside and be optimistic that more of us will see this mysterious and beautiful creature,’ Mooney wrote in 1984.
Twenty years on, Mooney is less certain that Naarding saw a thylacine. ‘Hans Naarding is as close as you’re going to get – one of your own mates, a very reliable, extremely experienced Wild Life officer. But one could also add that he knew exactly what he should see, where, when, how.’
Nothing would excite the biologist more than to discover a healthy specimen alive: ‘The only thing that has kept me in Tasmania is that off-chance.’ Mooney has no truck with scientists who seek to clone it. ‘“Clown it”, we call it. I would argue it’s quite irresponsible. It’s teaching people “extinct” is not for ever. The same technology should be applied to preventing extinction.’
In Tasmania Page 33