Thylacine (12 page)

4 June— . . . a severe frost this night, the first I had seen this winter and the ice a quarter of an inch thick . . . The [Van Dieman's Land] Company have removed their flocks; they have had no increase but declension of stock. Mr Chitty said the Company could not keep sheep here, that if they were to fold them they would soon die, that it was only moving about that kept them alive. Wild dogs and hyaenas are numerous. Watchmen were kept to look after them . . .

18 June— . . . Showery weather. The natives searching for indications of the aborigines . . . Jack said he saw the hyaena hunting a kangaroo on the scent like a dog. He ran and speared him in the tail, and the dog caught him by the neck. They brought him home. It was a bitch hyaena. Had it skinned and the skull saved. Busy since my sojourn at this camp in writing journal and in conversation with the aborigines. God grant I may soon meet the aborigines . . .

21 June— . . . The cause of this bad weather is attributed to the circumstance of the carcase of the hyaena being left exposed on the ground and the natives wondered I had not told the white men to have made a hut to cover the bones, which they do themselves, make a little house . . .

23 June— . . . It was not my wish to encamp at this short stage but the natives were tiresome and murmuring and wanted to stop. Penderoin was walking in advance of me when he discovered a tiger cat asleep in its lair, which was under a tussock of grass and made of old grass torn in pieces. The youth run his spear through it, it was a female hyaena . . .
⁸

Robinson has long been condemned for his role in the Tasmanian Aboriginal genocide. Yet his diaries show empathy with both people and their land. His story is part of the island's peculiar tapestry woven of beauty, abomination, destruction, regret and much else besides. Its paradoxical nature could almost be summed up in attitudes to the thylacine—as, for example, witnessed a decade later by Louisa Anne Meredith, whose astute writing and paintings allowed intellectual Britain a glimpse of a different Van Diemen's Land. One day in 1846 a shepherd presented her with a juvenile thylacine. She wrote:

He had the animal secured by a chain and collar, and when it was to be carried off, slipped a strong bag over its head and shoulders, pushed the hind legs in and fastened it. I pitied the unhappy beast most heartily, and would fain have begged more gentle use for him; but I was compelled to acknowledge some coercion necessary, as when I softly stroked his back (after taking the precaution of engaging his great teeth in the discussion of a piece of meat) I was in danger of having my hand snapped off.
⁹

8 TALL TALES,
TIGER MEN
AND BOUNTIES

Sheep owners in that area never seemed to complain about losing sheep or finding any dead. All the hyinas [sic] I have seen in the wild seemed to be about half grown and about the size of [a] full grown fox terrier dog, fawn in colour, with dark stripes on their sides and back, with a very long tail continued on from their bodies, their tails were half up and down like a tired dog.

K. M. C
RAWFORD,
U
LVERSTONE

The people were fanatically loyal to the Crown and Britain . . . Hedgerows were smiled upon as a reminder of a Merrie England few if any of them had really ever known, the destruction of the native flora and fauna and its replacement by exotics went on apace, a fact which added to the picture of colonists being merely transplanted Britons.
¹

T
o the extent that the above observation is accurate, a grasp of the collective psyche of the growing colony becomes necessary in trying to determine the logic behind dislike of the thylacine. It was a consequence of the general attitude that saw the countryside as alien, finding expression in fear stories (the thylacine as a child-snatching vampire); in heroic man-and-dog versus beast stories; and, most negatively of all, in classifying the thylacine as vermin, to be exterminated through the inducement of financial reward, that is, bounties.

The first bounty came about as a result of the ill-fated scheme hatched in distant London. While official survey charts and maps of the mid-1820s have the entire north-west marked ‘This Part of the County Unknown', an earlier report on the prospects of settlement in those parts had stated, ‘That quantity of good land which was expected about the North West part of the island, is not to be found'.
²
This was hardly surprising, given the generally narrow fertile coastal strip backing on to an interior of dense forests, valleys and peaks. Yet a small group of wealthy entrepreneurs in London convinced themselves, Colonial Secretary Lord Bathurst and Lieutenant-Governor Arthur that a vast sheep-based enterprise should be established there.

In this way the Van Diemen's Land Company came into existence in 1826, with a land grant that was soon to total no less than 350 000 acres (141 750 hectares). It was allotted in great chunks at the north-west tip, named as Woolnorth, and the central north-west, named as the Hampshire Hills, Surrey Hills and Middlesex Plains. The London directors envisaged handsome profits from the fine wool of a quarter of a million merinos, with no further English reliance on the expensive German and Spanish wool industries.

Instead they, and many others, including the thylacine, were to pay for a monumental misjudgement. The climate was too cold and wet for fine wool sheep; sub-alpine grasses were unsuitable fodder; much of the land was uncleared and therefore unproductive; fencing, once built, proved inadequate, as did the inexperienced shepherds, many of whom were convicts; indentured servants disliked the primitive, remote living conditions; sealers, ‘vagabonds' and Aborigines helped themselves to sheep, as did wild dogs, devils, wedge-tailed eagles and thylacines.

Records show that many thousands of sheep died from cold and starvation during the first few winters, while records of thylacine predation are minimal. Still, in 1830 the resident Chief Agent of the Company, Edward Curr, issued this bounty scheme:

The superintendant of the Hampshire and Surrey Hills Establishments is authorised to give the following rewards for the destruction of noxious animals in those districts:

For every Male Hyena        5/-

For every Female with or without young        7/-

Half the above prices for Male and Female Devils and Wild Dogs. When 20 hyenas have been destroyed the reward for the next 20 will be increased to 6/- and 8/- respectively and afterward an additional 1/-per head will be made after every seven killed until the reward makes 10/- for every male and 12/- for every female.
³

The clear implication was that the thylacine was the major animal culprit in stock loss. The first bounty scheme operated for only a few years and its kill rate is unknown, but was probably modest. The few records that survive give no indication otherwise. Then in 1836 at Woolnorth a ‘tiger man' was appointed to trap and kill thylacines and other animals deemed a threat to the livestock. Tiger men were to be a feature of Wool-north into the twentieth century. The title gave status, although arguably they were but shepherds with an additional brief to eliminate ‘vermin'. They were paid per animal. As well, thylacine and other pelts fetched decent money for the trapper, particularly in winter when they were thicker. Catching was almost always by snaring.
⁴

A second bounty scheme began in 1840—but again, the records give no real indication that either the bounties or the tiger men were necessary at all, and the suspicion must arise that invented or greatly exaggerated ‘ravages' of ‘savage' thylacines against the flocks conveniently masked the true nature of the Company's pastoral failings.

The second bounty scheme coincided with a major economic slump in the island, which was exacerbated when transportation to New South Wales ceased and all British felons were now sent to Van Diemen's Land, adding greatly to the cost of running the colony. The pastoral struggles at Woolnorth continued, although the company's losses began to be offset as pioneers purchased parcels of its land in this hard country and began a subsistence existence on smallholdings. As the north-west was thus slowly opened up, thylacine territory, already much diminished elsewhere, was further squeezed.

It may be that this growing human presence pushed inland thylacine populations towards and into the 170 000 acres (68 850 hectares) of Woolnorth and nearby Circular Head. But during the period 1839 to 1850, stock losses recorded at Wool-north firmly point the blame elsewhere:

Sheep killed by:

thylacines        40

dogs        660

dogs or thylacines or ‘vermin'        1050
⁵

The next bounty—which had nothing to do with the Van Diemen's Land Company—lay some 40 years ahead, but conditions for its fatal operations were fast being laid:

By now the gentry had succeeded in forming a coherent class which appeared to place its impress on the society in a permanent manner. The triumph of the wool industry strengthened their confidence and increased their opulence, and there was constructed in the wool country which stretched between Hobart Town and Launceston, with spurs to the east and west, a number of colonial mansions . . .
⁶

A mid-nineteenth-century German engraving. Few, if any, predators would attack a
flock of sheep in broad daylight in the presence of its shepherd. But anti-thylacine
misinformation and hysteria obviously travelled well.
(Gerard Willems, Hobart)

This gentry's power and influence increased tenfold when, in the space of two years, transportation ceased, the island was renamed to commemorate the great severing of the penal umbilical cord and, in 1855, newborn Tasmania was constitutionally granted self-government, by the formation of a parliament with a House of Assembly and a powerful, propertied Legislative Council; another nail in the thylacine's coffin.

While Tasmania began to be touted as a wondrous natural sanitarium for worn-out expatriates from such British colonies as India, for the ordinary folk of the island, far removed in all ways from the hubris of the new government in Hobart, life went on, generally as a struggle. An atrocious lack of urban sanitation, pitifully bad education and ongoing lawlessness were just a few hazards of colonial life. But these were considered to be almost natural. By contrast, to the collective mentality nature often seemed unnatural—never mind the paradox of that—as exemplified by the tiger-hyaena-wolf-marsupial thylacine. Despite or perhaps because of its being rarely seen by common folk, the animal was feared. Killing a thylacine became something of a rural duty, and also implied considerable bravery.

The following feature appeared in the
Launceston Examiner
of 22 November 1862
,
headed ‘Tasmanian Tigers' and written by J. S. of Forth:

It [sic] was emerging on to a small plain which is situate about a mile north from the east end of the Black Bluff Mountain, when I saw the bushes in motion a short distance in front of me. I thought the movement was caused by a number of the wombat tribe, the flesh of which is considered to be good eating by travellers in the bush, to whom meat is a luxury, and I sent forward my young though nearly full-grown dog—a setter spaniel—thinking that he might chase the supposed wombat into a hollow tree, where it could be easily captured. But just at the moment two tigers emerged into the open space, and one of them made off, while the other turned fiercely upon the dog, which running back regarded me with an expression which seemed to ask as clearly as instinct could, whether he was to attack in earnest. Again I sent him forward, and this time he advanced with such a display of determination, that the tiger, after a faint show of resistance, began to retreat, when the dog, seizing it by the tail, suffered himself to be led along at a quickish pace, while I followed with the view of overtaking them, till I stumbled and fell, and narrowly escaped being cut by a tomahawk which I held in my hand. Here the dog rushed back as if to see what was the matter; but I again sent him forward, and the tiger, now finding escape impossible, turned upon its assailant, and both fought with the utmost ferocity for about two minutes, when the dog seizing the tiger by the throat and keeping his hold overpowered it in a few seconds, and I then knocked it on the head, thinking I was doing right in destroying one of a kind of animal which is often very destructive to sheep and lambs. The tiger was sixteen inches high and two feet six inches long from the nose to the tail which was fourteen inches in length.

A short time after the incident above-mentioned I was on the north side of the River Lea, and seeing my dog suddenly bound off, I looked in the direction he had taken, and saw him approaching the largest tiger I had ever seen, and which seemed disposed to treat him with the utmost defiance, rushing at and driving him off whenever he approached within a few feet, and then steadily resuming its course. Thinking, from the size of the tiger, that it might prove dangerous even to a man, should it meet one when without a weapon wherewith to defend himself; and thinking that if it effectually intimidated the dog it might return in the night with its mate—for they often go in pairs—and cause me some annoyance, I resolved upon attempting its destruction, and I ran forward for this purpose, tomahawk in hand; but the moment it saw me advancing it reversed its course, and made for a scrub at the margin of the river; but the dog being encouraged by my voice and presence rushed at and fastened upon it repeatedly, but was as often repulsed with a sharp bite; he, however, so retarded its progress that I was enabled to overtake it when, thinking to despatch it at a single blow, I struck it on the head with my tomahawk and fractured its skull; but, notwithstanding this, it reeling and staggering, fought the dog for fully two minutes, inflicting bite after bite in his neck in rapid succession; and placing its fore feet against the upper part of his breast pushed him off by main strength whenever he fastened upon its throat. While this was going on I could not strike a second blow for fear of wounding the dog, at such a rate did they roll about; at length, however, seeing that the tiger was becoming weak, I seized it by the hind legs, and, placing my foot on the dog to keep him steady, I struck it again with my tomahawk severing the spine of its neck and causing its instant death. The height of this tiger to the lowest part of the top of the back was twenty-one inches; the length of the head and body, three feet four inches; of the tail, seventeen inches. It was a female and had in its false belly four young ones, each adhering firmly to a teat and well covered with hair, and just able to walk.