Thylacine (19 page)

The new zoo's curator, Arthur Reid, was highly experienced and diligent and his daughter Alison worked closely with him, taking on the role of de facto curator after her father's death. She worked tirelessly; to the public she became a well-known figure at the zoo with her pet leopard. She also was the taxidermist of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, of which Clive Lord was director. Unfortunately, like Lord, her efforts to promote the welfare of animals, in particular the zoo's thylacines, were to be stymied.

Meanwhile, the puzzle of a public that admired thylacines while being indifferent to their fate is nowhere better illustrated than in a piece of journalism that reads like a cheerful obituary. It appeared in the 70th anniversary edition of
The Mercury
on 5 July 1924, in a special celebratory supplement entitled ‘Preserving Our Native Animals and Birds: Phenomenal Success of the Beaumaris Zoo'—with the thylacine taking pride of place at the head of the article, followed by a summary of the history of zoos and of Beaumaris Zoo. It is a cruel celebration:

‘Living Fossil'. How would you like to be called a living fossil? Not very complimentary, is it? That's what some biologists (people who study animal life) have called our tiger, or wolf. You see, the tiger, as we shall call him, is a very old beast—much older than you would imagine. You have only to look at him to see that: His legs are relatively short, and body somewhat elongated, head narrow, with little brain capacity, a bad finish about the hindquarters; in fact, an unpro-portioned experiment of nature quite unfitted to take its place in competition with the more highly-developed forms of animal life in the world today. We have evidence that his ancestors enjoyed a distribution covering a considerable portion of the globe . . . European scientists found fossils of the creature, and wondered what he was like, when, behold, down in a little island round the other side of the world he was found to be alive, eking out a precarious existence, it is true, but spending his last days on a globe which he had inhabited for so long, in comparative peace . . .
⁸

Lord was still patiently trying to persuade the Animals and Birds' Protection Board to recommend total protection when he died in 1933. Such had been his dedication and persistence that the Board was spurred to rethink its views, and a new committee was established to look into the issue of saving the species. At the same time, barely a kilometre away at the city's edge on the Queen's Domain, Alison Reid was fighting a losing battle to save just one thylacine, the very last in captivity, whose story typifies the species' dreadful stroke of ill-fortune in having had Europeans invade its island sanctuary.

According to legendary thylacine devotee Col Bailey:

It is the 1924 capture of a female tiger and her three cubs in the Florentine Valley that entered Walter Mullins into the history books. First snaring the mother in a foot snare, Mullins had only to patiently wait around for her brood to come looking for mum before taking captive the whole family. It was to prove a most notable capture, and not even Mullins could have foreseen the consequences. He somehow managed to get them to the Fitzgerald railhead from where almost all the tigers caught in the south-west finished up after 1917. From there the group were transported to the Beaumaris Zoo . . . A deal was soon struck with the Curator, Mr A. Reid, and the four thylacines changed hands for the then princely sum of fifty-five pounds. Mr Mullins no doubt left the tigers to their fate little realising that he had just sold what was to become the last captive tiger, and indeed as some would tell us, the last Tasmanian tiger on planet Earth.
⁹

Guiler's records also indicate that this last captive thylacine was purchased by Beaumaris Zoo in February 1924 and died at the age of twelve years and seven months, according to the authority of Hobart City Council Records.
¹⁰
However, just to add to the surfeit of controversy surrounding the creature, and this last one in particular, popular opinion suggests that it was caught by Elias Churchill in the Florentine Valley in 1933.

Either this young thylacine, caught by Elias Churchill in 1933, is ‘Benjamin', the
erroneously-named last-known living member of the species …

… Or this is ‘Benjamin', caught as a cub by Walter Mullins in 1924 and surviving for
twelve long years in the Hobart Zoo until the fateful day of 7 September 1936. Recent
research by Robert Paddle indicates that this animal may in fact have died in 1928. The mystery of the last zoo tiger lives on.
(Above: Robert Paddle,
The Last Tasmanian
Tiger
, page 199; below: Collection Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery)

Paddle quotes both Alison Reid and the highly respected naturalist Michael Sharland, who was also associated with Beaumaris, in support of this date, and avers that the film footage, ‘together with other still photographs, clearly identifies the last specimen as a mature but relatively young adult female'.
¹¹

The 1981 Beresford and Bailey book had a presumably unintentional bet both ways on the issue: ‘By the early 1930s, only one tiger of the collection remained'.
¹²

As if this was not enough to lob on the last-known of a species, Paddle also uncovered a seeming act of deliberate misinformation against that particular animal many years later, in which a man called Frank Darby falsely claimed to have been its last carer and that its name was Benjamin, a name which has entered Tasmanian folklore. Beaumaris Zoo suffered the effects of the Great Depression.

Paid staff were laid off and replaced by work-for-the-dole ‘sussos' (sustenance workers), with limited understanding of and interest in the animals. Its gate takings dropped. Alison Reid herself received short shrift, possibly because she was a woman: unpaid, threatened with eviction from her cottage at the zoo, and refused possession of a key to gain access to care for the animals after hours. It seems that despite her best efforts, including a special plea to the Hobart City Council on behalf of the zoo's last surviving thylacine, the animals were increasingly neglected.

There could only be one outcome:

With genuine distress in her voice, Alison recalled to me the last weeks of her life at the zoo in 1936. Powerless, keyless and shortly to be dismissed from the zoo and turned out of her home, she listened at night to the distress calls of the zoo's remaining carnivores: the last thylacine, a Bengal tiger and a pair of lions, all too frequently locked outside in the open to face the cold, rain and snow of the Hobart winter.
¹³

There exists 62 precious seconds of film footage of that thylacine, taken by David Fleay (who was bitten on the buttock while filming). The thylacine died on the night of 7 September 1936. Just two months earlier, legislation had passed through the Tasmanian Parliament declaring the species to be wholly protected. That was not and is not the final irony in the thylacine story, not by a long measure—but as a practical demonstration of human folly masquerading as progress, it surely has few peers. Did the politicians in 1936 give any thought to their elected forebears of half a century earlier? Guiler did: ‘Those twelve parliamentarians who voted for the Bill to pay a bounty without enquiring into the authenticity of the facts and figures given have a great deal to answer for in the history of conservation in Tasmania'.
¹⁴

Tasmanian east coast resident, artist Vita Brown, 86, has a very clear memory of visiting Beaumaris Zoo and seeing the last known thylacine. In her opinion it was very old. She further describes it as being emaciated, lonely and, so far as this is possible with an animal, wearing ‘a look of despair' as it paced up and down. The sight of it upset her so much that she had to leave the zoo and never went back.
¹⁵

11 A LOST OBJECT
OF AWE

In about 1922 or 1923 I rode up the Lake Road to see how deep the snow was . . . It began to snow again so I turned my horse for home. When I got just level with the cave my horse stopped at the sound of a growl & there on my right was a full grown Tiger showing its teeth and still growling. It was 2 to 3 feet from me, & the passage between the rocks into the cave was too narrow for the Tiger to turn around. My horse blew its nostrils & the Tiger backed himself back. My horse jumped forward. Tigers are so shy & cunning . . . I was very lucky to have been so close to a Tiger.

M
RS
L
INDA
O
'SHEA,
L
AUNCESTON

‘W
ithout an end to clearfelling, our old growth forests will share the fate of the Tasmanian tiger: a lost object of awe, one more symbol of our feckless ignorance and stupidity.' These words were delivered by internationally-acclaimed Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan to a 4000-strong protest rally in Hobart in August 2001, staged outside the casino-hotel hosting the Australian Labor Party state conference. Other notable speakers included Greens Senator Bob Brown and actor Rachel Griffiths. The message was clear and loud: directed at the incumbent Tasmanian Labor government, it demanded cessation of the practice of converting the island's ancient forests into Japanese toilet paper and like products, by way of woodchipping.

Conservation has long been the touchpaper of Tasmanian politics. It traces directly, unequivocally, back to the political demonisation of the thylacine in the 1880s. The animal was neither pest nor vermin but was singled out of its environment for the apparent economic betterment of the few, by a conservative mindset demanding the continued conquest of wilderness. That Tasmanians were unable to save it from extinction—that they did not even try until well into the twentieth century— eventually spread an enormous pall of guilt, regret and sorrow. The thylacine's demise left a terrible legacy—perversely, not unlike the so-called convict stain which many families tried to hide, also until well into the twentieth century.

In the end, the tragedy of the thylacine created a rare energy in the island, a collective determination to henceforth resist environmental damage, degradation and obliteration. This has caused much conflict, conflict which still flares and will continue to do so. In some of Tasmania's environmental friends and defenders the thylacine engenders high emotion, in others reasoned logic, but both start from the same premise—that the animal was maliciously hunted to extinction.

Important though it is, the dramatic touch of having a single date to signify the ‘death' of a species obscures the facts of the thylacine situation as it then applied. Tasmanians did not go into collective mourning on 8 September 1936. They had been ignoring and persecuting the animal for so long that thoughts of its permanent loss occupied but a few minds. Nor, in fact, had the animal become extinct. But those who were concerned at least now had that date as something tangible to mount a case for action. The last known captive thylacine was dead. An attempt had to be made to disprove the alarming possibility that it might, indeed, have been rendered extinct.

To that end the Fauna (Animals and Birds' Protection) Board sanctioned two searches in 1937. The first scoured the Middlesex Plains and adjacent areas and the second went deeper into the western mountains, in the rugged Frenchman's Cap area. Both of these searches found prints, and some sightings were also investigated—but that was all. It set a depressing precedent for the many searches and expeditions, official and private, that were to follow over the next 40 years.

Still, there remained a fair amount of optimism that remnant groups of thylacines ought to be alive and well in the more remote, untouched and inaccessible parts of the island. Undisturbed, they would hopefully rebuild a sustainable population. But rebuilding human affairs in the wake of the Great Depression came first. Water and wood were the island's two great natural resources; they needed to be yoked ever more firmly to the economy, to create much-needed jobs and revitalise the export market. In the years preceding World War II a major hydro-electric power station at Tarraleah and newsprint mills at Boyer and Burnie were built. From now on, getting the wood and harnessing the water meant entering those remote and inaccessible parts. The heavy machinery developed during the war would later make this all the more possible. Thus, the battlefields of the developers and conservationists were waiting, with the thylacine's last refuges and its very future, if indeed it still had one, integral to the conflict.