Thylacine (15 page)

The Mercury
reported the ballot in a manner probably reflecting waning public perception of the animal as a menace:

The tiger, or dingo, received a very bad character in the assembly yesterday; in fact, there appeared not to be one redeeming point in this animal. It was described as cowardly, as stealing down on the sheep in the night and wantonly killing many more than it could eat, as being worthless even for its skin.
¹⁷

Certainly, being a predator, the thylacine ate sheep. It had been doing so since 1804. Severe encroachment upon its territories may even have forced dislocated populations to target sheep, lacking their natural prey forced away from enclosed lands, and thereby giving an impression of increased thylacine numbers. But that can only ever be speculation. What is beyond doubt is that after 80 years of fitful skirmishing, this symbol of the untamed island had been sentenced to death.

9 ‘THEM
BLOODY
USELESS
THINGS'
1888–1930

We own a property called Tiger Hill. The original owners were the French family, and it was my privilege to have met & had long conversations with Mr Ab. French. His brother had hold of a Tiger by the tail, & Mr Ab. French clearly remembers taking a possum snare from his pocket, slipping the noose over the animal's jaws, then both dragging it to an enclosure near the house. The Tiger was kept for five months, till a traveller called and offered the boys five pounds for it. In the year 1914 five pounds was a lot of money, so the Tasmanian Tiger was sold.

W
ILLIAM
L. F
ERRAR

U
ncertainty, confusion and misinformation: to this list of strikes against the thylacine may now be added irony, for even as the government bounty took effect and profitable slaughtering started in earnest, live specimens were also acquiring value. Thylacines had been sporadically displayed in public and private collections in Tasmania and elsewhere since 1817, but demand increased as zoos flourished.

A thylacine pair in the National Zoological Park, Washington DC. They appear to be
in remarkably good condition, given their long sea voyage from Australia. Thylacines
were also bought by zoos in New York, Antwerp, Berlin, Cologne and London.
(Smithsonian Institution Archives)

There is a marked size difference between this male and female, at Hobart Zoo. Fifteen thylacines were displayed at the two Hobart locations between 1910 and 1936,
with an unknown number before then.
(Collection Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery)

In adding thylacines to their collections, zoos helped to slowly shift public perception of the animal. And its confirmed rarity meant that some urban Tasmanians, at least, began to cautiously reappraise their strange carnivore's terrible image: ‘On Saturday last two fine specimens of the Tasmanian tiger were brought to town and lodged in the garden attached to the caretaker's house, Town Park. They were captured by a young man in the vicinity of Bridport. Many visitors have been to see them, and admired them greatly'.
¹

By the late nineteenth century, European zoos had become important centres of scientific research and, to an extent, public education. They were also potent flagwavers for the glories of imperialism, holding in their cages exhibits from the far-flung ends of the conquered world. Distant Tasmania's marsupial wolves were as exotic as any other creature, even though they apparently lacked charisma behind wire.

Thylacines were shipped to zoos in Antwerp, Berlin, Cologne, New York, Washington and, mostly, London. In Australia they were displayed in Adelaide, Melbourne, Launceston, Hobart and Sydney's Taronga Park. Although the numbers were never large—seventeen to London between 1856 and 1926, out of a grand total of about 60 zoo specimens—they were keenly sought by these institutions, particularly when extinction warnings began to be made and it was also realised that they did not breed in captivity.

As the century drew to a close, there arose evidence of a new Tasmanian pride in being able to offer up rather than only put down the thylacine: ‘A fine specimen of the Tasmanian tiger is to be seen on board the Barque
Ethel
. . . The
Ethel
will maintain the reputation of her predecessor in taking home Tasmanian animals to the Old Country'.
²
This 1891 report reflects a noticeably different attitude to that insisting on their obliteration.

While Tasmanian loyalty to and love for the Crown remained very strong, as action in the Boer War was soon to show, the desire was no longer to replicate Merrie England in the Southern Hemisphere. Instead, exports to the mother country showed that love: fruit, fine jams, soldiers and, amazingly, thylacines. Prices offered for them rose steadily. The absurd situation came to bear in which the Tasmanian government bounty scheme, over a twenty-one year period, steadily paid £1 per dead thylacine while zoos offered greater and greater sums for increasingly rare live specimens. The last £1 bounty was paid in 1909. The export price at that time was about £7 or £8. In 1926, London Zoo purchased its last thylacine for no less than £150.
³

AN UNWELCOME VISITOR. A short while ago several sheep were found dead in this district [Tyenna], and the mischief was put down to dogs, although none could be caught. One morning Mr. Quarrell, being on the road at daybreak, was surprised to see a tiger a short distance ahead. He immediately went to the attack, armed only with a stick, and aided by his dog. Mr. Quarrell's object was to get the tiger alive, as the price obtainable for a specimen was a consideration. He managed to get a hold, and to retain it for some considerable time, but unfortunately his cries for assistance were unheard, and he was obliged to let go. The tiger made off into the scrub, followed by the dog, but he was not to get away, as Mr. Quarrell obtained assistance, and followed. After a rough scramble the fight was renewed. Unfortunately, it was found necessary to kill the tiger, which was a very large one. The sheep mystery was thus cleared, and a subscription started among the sheepowners was well contributed to. Fortunately, Mr. Quarrell came out of the contest with only a bitten foot, but with a good deal of the tiger's blood on him to bear witness that the struggle had been a hard one'.
⁴

Mr Quarrell's object—to get the tiger alive—is a sure indication that this new post-bounty financial incentive had become common knowledge, and this would remain the case well into the future. One wonders how many thylacines suffered the same fate, killed trying to avoid capture. Lacking tranquillisers and other humane and safe ways of securing wild animals, the trappers of those times can't be blamed for their actions. First their government, and then international scientific institutions, called upon their skills to deliver thylacines—dead, but then alive. It was a strange and sadly late turning point in the animal's history.

The dreaded Tasmanian wolf had therefore come to profit numerous groups: snarers and hunters through the bounty and the sale of pelts, exporters, zoos through their admission fees, and the sheep farmers twice over, for the thylacine had become a convenient cover for stock losses through mismanagement, and the government, not the farmers, was stumping up the bounty fees. The irony of all of this has yet to peak, with the costs associated with cloning a single thylacine sure to reach astronomical levels.

That pleasure could be taken in the concept of saving a thylacine, as suggested in the report of the
Ethel
taking one ‘home', is an indicator of a change taking place in the collective psyche of the population. At the end of the nineteenth century, there were many new preoccupations to drive that change. The frontier mentality associated with the taming of old Van Diemen's Land had become history as industries such as mining, dairying and timber began to power the economy and create a modern society. Tasmania's population was always small but in the decade of the 1890s it rose from just under 115 000 to just under 186 000: a manifold leap. Yet it was claimed that even greater progress and prosperity were being held back because ‘the best agricultural land remained locked up in sheep and cattle runs . . . these owners were driving the industrious settler away'.
⁵

This put new pressure on the heretofore all-powerful rural lobby. The island no longer needed to ride on the sheep's back. Furthermore, could the unthinkable now be thought? Might that curse of the wealthy sheep farmer, the Tasmanian tiger, actually have sympathy extended towards it and be seen as worth saving? Apparently:

A SICK TIGER.—The Adelaide
Register
says:—Latest advices from the sick chamber of the ailing tiger at the Zoo state that the patient is as well as can be expected. Veterinary-Surgeon Bickford lanced the bad foot, and the poor beast was much relieved. It had suffered so much pain that its ferocity was quite gone, and it submitted quietly to the relieving operation. The head keeper of the Zoo has been a kind nurse to the sick tiger, and the animal has recognised a friend in him, allowing him to constantly bathe the swollen foot with hot water and rub it with ointment prescribed by Mr. Bickford. This tiger is a valuable animal, and worth all the attention bestowed upon it.
⁶

It is to be assumed that the word ‘valuable' was applied by the journalist in a monetary context, referring to moneys originally paid by and then received by the Adelaide Zoo, but there is in that final sentence something approaching genuine acknowledgement of its true worth.

Naturalists were also out and about, and their published thoughts and beliefs went against the grain of common thought, insofar as they called for a respect for a Nature which ought not to be dominated—implying, partly, a continuing fear suppressed through force—but admired. This was radical, harnessing the Romanticism of a century ago to the burgeoning scientific power and certainty of the fossil-fuelled, electric new world (Launceston was the first city in the Southern Hemisphere to switch on, in 1895). The naturalist Reverend Henry Dresser Atkinson, an Englishman who fell in love with Tasmania, who was Truganini's friend and has real claim as an early Tasmanian environmentalist, included this turn-of-the-century ‘conversation' in his diary:

This three-dimensional topographic map of Australia's south-east ocean floor shows clearly the huge Bassian Canyon cutting across the continental shelf. Its
flooding, 12 000 years ago, isolated the Tasmanian thylacine population and saved it from the circumstances that led to the mainland extinction.

(Geoscience Australia, CSIRO and the National Oceans Office)