Thylacine (18 page)

Another influential scientific publication at this time, by the eminent A. S. Le Souef and Harry Burrell, drew directly upon first-person layman accounts in building up its descriptions of the thylacine. It was less inclined towards the possibility of extinction:

General build dog-like. Hallux [innermost of the five toes normally found on the hindfoot of air-breathing vertebrates] wanting. Pouch opening backward. Mammae, 4. Though once found on the mainland, this peculiar dog-like marsupial is now confined to Tasmania, where it chiefly inhabits the hilly forest country, lying up in timber and scrub during the day and coming out to hunt on the edge of the thickets during the later afternoon and evening.

The thylacine hunts singly or in pairs, feeding on wallabies, small rodents and birds. When a wallaby is put up it is not chased at breakneck speed, after the manner of a dog, but the pursuer merely trots along the scent until the quarry shows signs of exhaustion; it then quickens its pace, rushes in, and secures the victim. The wolf very rarely takes a dead bait, and seldom returns to a carcass. It is by no means fast, and lacks the easy pace of the Canidae. It usually trots, or, if pressed, breaks into a shambling canter. When excited it makes a series of husky, coughing barks, the breath being indrawn with a wheeze.

Although quiet and inoffensive as far as man is concerned, the thylacine can put up a good fight against a dog, as the following incident, related by Mr Hugh S. Mackay, will illustrate: ‘A bull-terrier was once set upon a wolf (thylacine) and bailed it up in a niche in some rocks. There the wolf stood, with its back to the wall, turning its head from side to side, checking the terrier as it tried to butt in from alternate and opposite directions. Finally, the dog came in close, and the wolf gave one sharp, fox-like bite, tearing a piece of the dog's skull clean off, and it fell with the brain protruding, dead.'

The thylacine usually produces four young. These are carried in the pouch for about three months, and then deposited in a snug shelter until able to take the field on their own account. Mr Finty, of Smithton, Tasmania, states that when he was crossing a creek on a fallen tree a female wolf tried to bar his way, and he had some difficulty in scaring her off. His curiosity being aroused by the daring of the animal, when he reached the opposite bank he searched the bushes and discovered two young wolves secreted in a dry fern-bed under the drooping and still attached dead fronds of a tree-fern. These reached the ground all round the butt, thus forming a natural tent-like shelter and a perfect camouflage for the youngsters.

Adult wolves are difficult to tame, but when caught the young are quiet and tractable, and do well in captivity, provided they are given some small game occasionally, besides a ration of meat.

This animal is now getting rare in Tasmania. The inhabitants seem to have a superstitious dread of the ‘hyaena', as they sometimes call it, and will kill the wolf whenever opportunity offers. Indeed, some will even smash the wolf to pulp afterward, thus depriving science of the skeleton and skin.
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Taken together, these two descriptions present a picture that is informative but also contradictory, and questionable as to accuracy based upon sound empirical evidence. Even at that level, therefore, the future of the animal could not be said to have been in entirely safe hands.

Still, it was through Lord's efforts that, at last, there came a form of protection, in 1930. But how protective was it? Now, thylacines could not be hunted in December, for it was believed that they bred during that month. From today's perspective it seems a pathetic gesture but at the time it was a hard-won political victory.

10 A BAD FINISH:
7 SEPTEMBER
1936

Nothing in this whole world will convince me it was not a tiger. I saw the whole of its tiger like shape, its stripes, its well shaped head which I knew I'd never seen before . . . I love dogs and to me it was just another lovely dog I had never seen before. I went to call my husband from bed, but you know men—never interested in anything till after ten a.m., so I have no one to back my story, but I will take an oath it happened.

E
DITH
T
HYNNE,
T
AROONA

I
n the late 1920s, Labor Party premier J. A. Lyons, a long-serving politician who was later to become Australia's first prime minister from Tasmania, faced certain defeat at the polls. A reactionary, conservative Legislative Council had blocked much of his proposed legislation and to many of his supporters he had betrayed his own ideals, central to which had been his ‘powerful attacks on the evils of capitalism and the prospects of war and misery said to be carried within it . . . Lyons had pleased many Tasmanians but disappointed the generation which perceived in the triumph of Lenin and the Bolsheviks a harbinger of social justice and prosperity for all'.
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Clearly, Labor's newfangled, radical left-wing sentiments (forged amongst the hardened mine workers of the west and their political hero, the maverick King O'Malley), were a world apart from the equally hard conservatism that had long been practised by the wealthy rural rump of politics. Yet again, through politically laced legislation, the thylacine was to become a victim of the island's Janus-faced nature. Indeed, the animal was unwittingly setting a trend in Tasmanian politics, which has since been characterised above all by bitter battles and stand-offs associated with conservation
.

Through the 1920s Clive Lord and others had patiently built up the case for saving the thylacine. The National Park Board had come into being to protect flora and fauna within the park, and then a Tasmanian Advisory Committee re Native Fauna, of which Lord was secretary, was established. The committee made recommendations for federal legislation to wholly protect and to prohibit the export of thylacines. The latter, bizarrely, was in part prompted by the very high prices offered by overseas zoos, against which the Tasmanian zoos couldn't compete. Yet the message still didn't become apparent, neither to the public at large nor to any government, that thylacines were both disturbingly rare and extremely valuable.

This may well have been because the Advisory Committee's recommendations on protection were ‘immediately and effectively countered by rural-rump politicians and members of the conservative establishment who prevented, for as long as possible, any positive action being taken to preserve the thylacine, even as irrefutable evidence of the destruction of the species mounted'.
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Lord and his colleagues persisted, and in 1928 the new Nationalist Party of Premier John McPhee was presented with further evidence of the animal's endangered status derived from data gathered by 38 police stations across the state. According to Paddle, the government employed a stalling tactic at this point, by having the Advisory Committee recast as the Tasmanian Animals and Birds' Protection Board. This manoeuvre also enabled the government to stack the new Board with its own appointees, ‘representing vested interests supporting the timber industry, the hunting and snaring of native game, and the uncontrolled expansion of agricultural enterprise'.
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As a result, Lord's protection efforts were repeatedly turned down, until at last in 1930 he managed to steer through the partial protection measure banning hunting in December. It also enabled prohibition of exports, which could not be legally stopped while the animal was wholly unprotected.

At the practical level it is clear that this measure in no way helped the thylacine. Reference has already been made to the snarer's general disregard of legislation ordering him what not to catch. Also, the grim years of the Great Depression from 1929 to 1933, perhaps even to the outbreak of World War II, only increased the value of thylacines: as zoo stock, for their skins or, on the sly, between hunter and sheep owner as continued bounty.

In retrospect it is all the more tragic that so few Tasmanians genuinely cared for their unique marsupial predator. They had been proudly exhibited at both the Hobart and Launceston zoos for many years; countless thousands had paid to enjoy viewing them alongside other native and imported wildlife—yet few cared about them enough to become involved in their preservation. The story of Hobart's two zoos, for example, is a story of lost opportunity, not least because of the energy and commitment put into them by a dedicated few, two women in particular. Many thylacines were handled by the zoos. How easily they would have formed a captive breeding stock if they had been released for that purpose on Maria Island off the east coast, which was eventually mooted as a sanctuary and still holds that status-in-waiting.

A captive thylacine has been fed a chicken. The absence of visible enclosure wire in the
photograph renders the image as an attack upon a fowl house.
(Don Stephens)

Back in 1895, wealthy Hobart socialite Mary Roberts had, as a hobby, started a menagerie that grew into a successful private zoo, in the large grounds of her mansion Beaumaris in the suburb of Sandy Bay. Her wealth enabled her to buy exotic animals and birds and she became a formidable entrepreneur in the animal trade, while remaining an animal lover—to the extent of forming the Anti-Plumage League in 1910, which campaigned against the killing of peacocks and the like for human adornment.

Her Beaumaris Zoo contained a typical range of specimens— lions, zebras, antelope, polar bears, an elephant, many birds—as well as native fauna, of which the thylacine was a star attraction, as this recollection attests:

When a child I was taken to see a tiger in the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart. A fawnish-yellow creature with dark stripes across its powerful hindquarters and a strong rigid tail, like an Indian tiger but with the head of a wolf and a strangely hinged jaw opening at right-angles, measuring about four feet from the nose to the base of the tail, it prowled with a stealthy lumbering gait round a small netted yard.
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As well as displaying thylacines for the people of Hobart (and, it seems, most visiting dignitaries), Mary Roberts hand-reared a number, although it is unlikely that she tried to or actually bred them, since her diaries make no mention of it. She regularly used her zoo to promote animal welfare through education and fundraising. Thus an event for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was attended by the Governor Sir Harry Barron who,

declaring the function open, said how much the people were indebted to Mrs Roberts for helping the funds of so many institutions by throwing open the zoo on numerous occasions. He had been told that in Tasmania there was no animal that could not be tamed. Mrs Roberts had tamed even tigers, but he would not care to go in with them like she did!
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In the light of such apparent public feelings for the animal, it is all the more surprising that the later efforts of individuals like Clive Lord would amount to so little.

At her golden wedding anniversary in 1913 Mary Roberts was presented with a solid gold thylacine brooch. That may have been a canny gift, for she did a good trade in them and their carrion-eating cousins the Tasmanian devil—of which she famously remarked, about those favourites of hers, that she was ‘possessed by seven devils'. In the north, James Harrison was the island's other main dealer in live thylacines. Mary Roberts was generally able to onsell thylacines for double the prices she paid to snarers and trappers, with the prices themselves rising all the time. In 1910 she paid about £8 per thylacine; this had risen to £20 by 1919.
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Beaumaris Zoo was a well-managed, popular success, run for 26 years by an animal rights campaigner, yet the puzzle is that the obvious plight and value of its rarest inhabitant attracted no official interest, as Clive Lord was discovering.

Upon the death of Mary Roberts in 1921, her daughter donated the zoo to the Hobart City Council, which built new premises for it at the Queen's Domain, a large wooded city reserve on the western bank of the Derwent River. There was evidently considerable pride in this new venture and a major feature article in
The Mercury
sang the praises of its educational and scientific status as being up with the best zoos of the Commonwealth, while it had a layout that was ‘a veritable fairyland for the animals'. Real effort was made, including the cutting of a cliff to sculpt ‘a wonderfully fine rocky spot, where in comparative freedom the lions will be able to prowl at leisure'. A thylacine features as one of three animals photographed for the piece, the caption being: ‘It is intended to keep [thylacines] in the Zoo. They are members of a rapidly diminishing race'. But presumably that was neither here nor there to the newspaper's readers, who probably were better conditioned by the times to accept a decidedly warped reality:

To [the Curator's] sympathetic treatment, the devils, usually the personification of ferocity, the eagles, and other animals and birds, have responded wonderfully, and they have come to regard their prison as merely a playground where, free from that ceaseless persecution attendant on their natural conditions, they are fed and cared for . . .
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