Thylacine (17 page)

‘Then I suppose you would discontinue the bounty on the destruction of Tasmanian tigers?'

‘Certainly I would: the
Thylacinus cynocephalus
is a most interesting creature; it is found on no other spot of the earth's surface except here in Tasmania. It used to occur in New South Wales, but is now extinct there. You don't know what an instructive animal it is to the comparative anatomist and zoologist, no, I would let
Thylacinus
have a sheep now and then if he wanted it.'

‘What, if you were a sheep farmer yourself?'

‘Yes, even then.'
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The naturalist Geoffrey Smith took a hardier view, appreciative of the ‘grandeur of untouched nature' that was the west coast and cognisant of the meaning of extinction, but seemingly not too fussed about either. He wrote pragmatically:

We could not reach Lake St Clair that evening, so we stopped the night with a shepherd, named David Temple, who made us very comfortable in his wooden cottage. This little cottage, with currant bushes and a few English flowers in the garden, nestling in an Alpine valley and surrounded by the silent gum forests, appeared to me an idyllic place, but the shepherd, who had lived there with his wife for about thirty years, complained of its loneliness . . . He told me many stories of the Thylacine or Native Tiger, which is more abundant here than in any other part of the island, and takes a considerable yearly toll from the flocks of sheep. Since this carnivorous Marsupial is regularly hunted and trapped by the shepherds, and since it occurs only in the little island of Tasmania, it will not be very long before it becomes extinct, so that I was careful to gain any information I could with regard to its habits . . . The shepherds wage incessant war on the creature, in the summer laying traps and hunting it with dogs, in the winter following up its tracks through the snow. A reward of a pound is given for the head by the Government, but the shepherd generally rides round with the head to several sheep-owners in the district, and takes toll from them all before depositing it at the police station. In consequence a large reward must be offered for the carcass of a Tiger, and an offer of £10 during a year for a live Tiger to be delivered in Launceston was unsuccessful. It pays the shepherd very much better just to hack off its head and take it round on his rides'.
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The new century ushered in a brave new country, the Commonwealth of Australia, in which the colonies, after ten years of discussion, joined together in 1901. Interestingly, a Tasmanian, Andrew Inglis Clarke, was the chief architect of the constitution. Tasmanians voted overwhelmingly to federate. Interestingly too, the minority against were the rural electorates of the east coast and midlands, the electorates which had spawned the lobby groups that pushed the thylacine bounty scheme through parliament. Perhaps this was another indication of how out of step they had become with the mainstream.

Alas there was to be no magical cessation of the bounty scheme through a collectively enlightened attitude. That would only happen when it was far too late; a historical embarrassment which would shape Tasmanian politics, and influence global environmental politics through the twentieth century and to the present. Back then, the bounty was good money for snarers, who presented the dead animal to a police station for their £1, or ten shillings if it was a pup. The toes or ears were removed to prevent the snarer taking the body elsewhere for another payment. During the bounty period, from 1888 to 1909, payments were made for a total of 2184 carcasses. That, however, may only have been the tip of an iceberg. Echoing naturalist Geoffrey Smith's remarks, Guiler noted: ‘Many trappers told me that up to half the thylacines killed were not submitted for bounty but were carted around the local property owners who paid a reward (usually £1) and when the carcase became too smelly it was dumped in the bush'.
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Furthermore, ‘From 1878 to 1896, 3482 Tiger skins were despatched from [a tannery] to London where they were made into waistcoats'.
¹⁰
The poor condition of any number of carcasses, either as the result of the activities of scavengers, or the thylacine's efforts to break out of the snare, would have rendered them valueless. Thylacines may also have eaten the poison baits set by snarers for the scavenging Tasmanian devils. It all suggests a wantonly high kill rate.

As if that was not enough, the Van Diemen's Land Company continued with its own bounty scheme, payments being recorded right up to the beginning of World War I. Before then, however, the already weakened thylacine population may have fallen victim to disease, as already mentioned. In 1902, a total of 119 thylacines were presented for bounty, the annual kill total having been relatively constant for fifteen years. This dropped dramatically to 58 in 1906, to just two in 1909 and none thereafter. The sudden huge decrease across the island may signify a reduction in numbers other than by human agency, although David Pemberton disagrees with the disease theory.

The date 1914 also marks the year in which the professor of biology at the University of Tasmania, Professor Thomas T. Flynn, called for a sanctuary to be established somewhere in Tasmania to save the thylacine. His was not the first contemporary voice to raise the alarm, but his academic standing, the fact that he was a Tasmanian rather than an eminent outsider, and that he was calling for a reserve, places him in a notable position in the history of the Tasmanian conservation movement. (That he was the father of the actor Errol Flynn must remain a mere footnote in the thylacine story but not the fact that he later embarked on some questionable deals selling thylacines.)

Then as now, however, an urban academic calling for rural change could not readily expect that change.

The naturalist's view (let the thylacine take the odd sheep) and that of the academic (create reserves to save them) were well ahead of public opinion in the critical early years of the twentieth century, when the bounty and disease together were hastening the destruction of the species. There was then no understanding of, nor a desire to understand, the value of wild animals as parts of complex ecosystems. Why should there be? To use a contemporary analogy, snakes and spiders are routinely killed for being ‘dangerous'. That they inhabit urban areas and eat rats, mosquitoes and flies, all of which cause human illness, is apparently beside the point. Spiders and snakes induce a primal fear—and from that day in 1804 when Knopwood's escaped convicts saw a ‘large tyger' in the bush, the island's people had been taught to fear and loathe a dangerous animal.

Effectively breaking down that attitude would not happen while a government bounty remained in place. But more and more voices in favour of protection began to be heard and the public became at least prepared to think about it, rather than be horrified or offended. After all, war had been waged against the creature for a hundred years; in defeat it could be safely viewed in zoos—even safely admired.

The Tasmanian Field Naturalist's Club, formed in 1904, became the first official group to actively promote conservation. At a later meeting in Launceston, ‘There was a consensus of opinion that national parks should be reserved in different parts of the State for the preservation of native fauna. A general committee was appointed to take such steps as may be necessary to cause a bill to be passed through Parliament . . .'
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The theory of protecting thylacines in this way was a sound one. Within a year, however, the government bounty had come to a de facto end because there appeared to be none left to kill. Were they already extinct? Not quite: three were presented for Van Dieman's Land Company bounties at Woolnorth in 1914. The following year saw the creation of the Tasmanian Scenery Preservation Board, which set up the first of the island's reserves and the 11 000 acre (4455 hectare) Russell Falls–Mount Field National Park, an hour north-west of Hobart. This park contained some of the world's tallest flowering trees, the mountain ash (
Eucalyptus regnans
)
.

At this point, therefore, a fundamental shift had occurred. There were no longer any bounty schemes, safe havens were becoming available, and the public had begun to accept that the thylacine might be an asset, not a menace. Now, perhaps, science rather than politics might begin to chart a future for the seriously endangered animal. But in the bush, snaring and hunting went on, for skins and zoos. Thylacines were not to receive full protection for many years.

Snaring had long been an important part of the rural fabric:

Not only was it a cheap, simple and reliable method of providing meat and skins, it also controlled animal populations eager to devour emerging crops. In the financially precarious years of clearing the forest to form a farm, wallaby meat often fed the family and skins constituted the only cash flow. Snaring was a practice with which most farmers and rural workers were familiar . . . With the European markets putting a premium on the pelts of wallaby and possum, men whose homes fringed the high country—farmers, timber workers, shearers, prospectors—would drop whatever they were doing during the slack winter months, and head to the mountains where the best skins were.
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That meant a lot of snaring—up to a million possums, wallabies and pademelons annually, sometimes many more—and thylacines were, of course, valuable financial catches. It will never be known how many were killed this way, even after their rarity had become a matter of genuine public concern. Snaring was a legally controlled primary industry with open and closed hunting seasons, but:

This control of the seasons did nothing to encourage the snarers to operate within the confines of the law . . . With a skin being valuable whether the season was open or not, the vast number of snarers kept the skin. To evade the attention of the police who often raided even the most isolated runs, most snarers had their special hiding places for their out-of-season skins. Hollow trees, clefts in rocks, false panels in huts—all were used.
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Such a culture of ignoring and evading early faunal protection measures suggests a lack of care for the thylacine's particular future in those who were the last to interact with it in the wild. ‘Them bloody useless things' was a comment offered to Eric Guiler by H. Pearce of Derwent Bridge, a member of a family which collectively took many thylacines.
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Hunting as a sporting activity would not have done the thylacine's cause any good either. An amusingly written account of holidaying in Tasmania about the time of World War I, by a mainlander and his friend in the company of a local guide, devotes space to a day's hunting:

The Battler was the cheeriest man in Tasmania—in Australia we thought. We spent a day with him in the tall timber a-hunting the wild beasts of the Tasmanian jungle. It is true, however, we worried the rabbits and kangaroos but little. Our friend the Battler had armed us with borrowed guns, decent double-barrelled breech-loaders . . . There was not a homestead or a hut in the bushland of Tasmania where the Battler could not get food and sleeping quarters . . . The porcupine [echidna] is fine eating, our friend said . . . The badger [wombat], a harmless, inoffensive beast, was to be found among the foothills . . . The opossum was fairly plentiful . . . Away back in the big hills, the Tasmanian Tiger was to be found . . . After banging away, in blissful ignorance of the Game Laws, and missing everything, it seemed to the scribe that the joke was against him. If he had seen the rabbits, kangaroos, bandicoots, and wallabies he had shot at, peering out from behind the gum trees, and holding their sides with laughing, he wouldn't have been at all surprised. The parrots and the cockatoos shrieked their derision at any rate.
¹⁵

Ecotourism it was not.

The desire to kill animals other than for food, clothing or profit has always been labelled a sport by its practitioners. Thylacines must have rated at the very top of the hunter's list, along with wedge-tailed eagles. There can be no telling how many became the victim of sportsmen, although ‘One record of 1910 indicates that there was still much “fun” to be had knocking off Tigers'.
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Along with Thomas Flynn, Clive Lord, the director of Hobart's Tasmaniam Museum, played an important role in attempting to save the thylacine. In 1917 he published a paper describing the island's mammals. He noted that it was only the fourth such compilation and that the previous three were not only incomplete but out of print. What was worse, he had had to rely extensively on British Museum catalogues since no local reference collection existed. This indicates all too clearly the almost total lack of official interest in the state's natural heritage or, put another way, demonstrates the difficulties that Lord and like-minded colleagues faced in their attempts to highlight the plight of the thylacine. He wrote:

It is remarkable that more attention has not been paid to the Mammals of Tasmania. Many interesting species occur here, and as they are decreasing in number, the following notes have been compiled in order to attempt to arouse interest ere it is too late. Unless unforeseen circumstances occur, many of our Mammals will share the fate of the Tasmanian Emu . . . owing to their partiality for killing sheep, a war of extermination has been waged against the ‘Tigers'. They are now rare, and are only found in the most rugged parts of the island . . .
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Ten years later, and to his credit, Lord was able to claim that that massive indifference had been overcome. But his prognosis for the thylacine was gloomier still. Most of the entries in his updated paper, ‘Existing Tasmanian Mammals', are short paragraphs; that for the thylacine runs to nearly two pages. It reads in part:

Within the last few years considerable attention has been directed to the present state of the Australasian marsupial fauna. The meetings held during the recent scientific congresses in Australia have served to stress the importance of our native animals . . . Our fauna consists, to a very large extent, of archaic types, which, when brought into sudden contact with more advanced forms, rapidly decline . . . Australian Zoologists might well consider plans whereby at least an outline biological survey of our indigenous fauna could be attempted . . . [the Thylacine] is now also being killed out even in the rugged and more inaccessible parts of the country, which tends to reduce still further the remnants of this species. The explanation of this is that the Thylacine interferes with the trappers' snares. As a result, a powerful ‘springer' snare is set often in the vicinity of their ‘skinning yards', which are situated every quarter of a mile or so along the lines of the snares. Thylacines or other animals caught in these powerful snares are, as a rule, too severely injured to be kept alive as specimens for zoological gardens, even if the trappers would take the trouble to bring them in . . . Its eventual doom seems apparent unless such attempts as are being made . . . to breed these animals in captivity are successful . . . It is doubtful if the shy animal will breed within the confines of a Zoo . . . During the breeding season a male Thylacine has even been known to follow the same route across many miles of country, and one particular animal used to regularly leave a trail of slaughtered sheep along the same line of march each year, but he was trapped eventually. If a Thylacine kills a sheep it will usually only suck the blood, and may also take a little of the kidney fat.
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