Thylacine (24 page)

The above three examples, prominent in their respective areas of tourism, commerce and sport, clearly demonstrate the financial worth of the animal. What, one wonders, would struggling early Vandemonians—free, or wretched in chains—have made of that? It is beyond the scope of this book to calculate the earning power of the thylacine but, as the face of Tourism Tasmania alone, it's up there with the primary industries.

To many, however, the thylacine is about anything but tourist dollars, brewing or sporting excellence. Every depiction of the animal by a contemporary artist represents a rebirth—and such representations are innumerable. For some artists the thylacine is the centrepiece of their work and career. Melbourne artist Daniel Moynihan has been incorporating the thylacine into his paintings for over three decades, in the process depicting it thousands of times. He tends to use settings alien to the animal, which renders his imagery more dramatic. An example is his large 2001 canvas
The Meeting—Wickerman and the Tasmanian
Tiger
(see plate section), in which

he has brought together his ancestral Celtic past and joined it with the myth of the thylacine. According to the Celtic myth, before crops were planted the Celts and later pagans would build an effigy and then burn the Wickerman, gather up the potash it left behind and spread the fertiliser on their fields for a successful season of crop production. The destruction of the thylacine was also considered beneficial for the growth of the early colonial farmers and its sacrifice a small price for the overall benefit of the community . . . The thylacine, the Wickerman, the cityscape, the convict tools of labour have all been collected and placed within the canvas embodying thirty years of memory and the representation of myth and its associative value to the individual and the society which it inhabits.
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By contrast, Moynihan's contemporary Michael McWilliams, who lives near Launceston, generally places his thylacine in a rural setting. But there the reference to its natural state ends and, like Moynihan, McWilliams gives life to the animal as a form of penance for what has been done to it.

McWilliams runs an antique business in Longford. Many of his works are painted on furniture, or wood panels, reflecting both his appreciation of the material and the fact that it is accessible. In particular he paints on colonial furniture, arousing in the viewer an odd sensation through the placement of his watchful acrylic thylacines on the meat safes, cupboards and boxes that were crafted when the animal was very much alive.

His paintings, say the catalogue notes for a 2001 exhibition,

have a perverse juxtapositional quirk of some kind where the presentation is not quite as expected. A persistent half-real, half-imagined, surreal sensibility runs throughout . . . Rural scenes are framed in painted borders, animals are presented on pedestals as monuments or they stare out with the considered and conscious presence of formal portraits. The stare is always engaging and often challenging; we cannot help but become involved in the directness of the exchange. Is it a look of confidence, of accusation or detachment? Even when not the main subject of the painting, the elusive but determined thylacine has the presence of a figure in a tableau. It lurks like a prompt for both consciousness and conscience.
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The major work from that exhibition,
Up On A Pedestal
(see plate section), is particularly symbolic, showing the animal in its desired terrain (felled logs excepting):

Where once a bounty was collected and tanned skins sent to the United States for waistcoats, a thylacine now stands on a stone monument, mounted in a magnificent tramp-art frame (that has waited over ten years for the right subject). It reflects—too late—the extraordinary shift in status, from pest to pedestal, that we have conferred upon this animal in the recent decades of our living memory.
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Such is the wealth and variety of thylacine visual imagery that it is the subject of a PhD thesis researched by Carol Freeman at the University of Tasmania's Literature and Environment Unit. The unit is headed by well-known academic and writer Peter Hay, whose first published story,
Lagunta
, is about thylacines as both hunters and the hunted:

Nta slid through the mottled moonshadow of rainforest, the attendant kindred matching his silent tread. Unseen they were, but palpably there at each flank; eldritch stone-eyed hunters threading a noiseless path through the tangle of moss and log . . . In the fire's halo stood the two strangest creatures Nta had ever seen. They were enormous; huge erect monsters, standing easily on their hindquarters . . .
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Freeman's thesis is motivated partly by a desire to contribute to information about the role of representations in constructing, perpetuating and changing the perceptions and actions of humans toward animals:

To make sense of the multitude of thylacine images and the accompanying narratives and discourses, I focus on groups of images in a particular medium or representational space. These include zoological illustrations . . . photographs and films of killed and captive animals . . . logos, emblems and coats of arms . . . advertisements . . . artworks . . . Some images seem to encourage destruction of the animal, others assume or ignore the probability of extermination, while many interrogate the possibility of death or resist the notion of loss. At present, artworks and advertising are emerging as sites of vigorous resistance to extinction . . .
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In yet another medium, the 2001 CD-ROM
The Tragedy and
Myth of the Tasmanian Tiger
is as artistically and technically creative as it is comprehensive. The company responsible, Hobart-based Roar Film, coincidentally happens to have a cartoonish roaring thylacine as its logo.

The interactive nature of this medium makes it particularly suited to the telling of a story such as the thylacine's, where a chronological linear history is but one of many aspects relating to the animal. Thus, there are about six main entry points of equal weighting—biology, distribution, extinction, and the like. Taking one of these as an example, ‘Spirit of the Tiger' invites the user into a further range of topics—commercial value, the thylacine in art, searches, vampire myths and more. The prompts are visually enticing, being objects such as a painting on a wall or the drawers of an old filing cabinet in the cluttered rooms of a colonial-style house. The work is rich in imagery, music and commentary from contemporary thylacine experts.

Steve Thomas, creative director and co-writer of
The Tragedy
and Myth of the Tasmanian Tiger
, moved to Tasmania in his late twenties and, like many others living in the country, used to drive the pitch-black windy little roads at night wondering if he might just see a thylacine—but today he's reached a conclusion:

I believe that thylacines are extinct. Every credible authority I've spoken to believes that. I know there are some extremely knowledgeable bushmen out there who believe in it, but I do think people are grasping at straws. It's very unlikely that once a species gets below a critical mass it can still sustain itself. It's very likely that the species didn't become extinct in the 1930s but in the 1960s or 70s . . . The debate has become much less about whether the animal exists and more about its demise and why we now find ourselves in this position where we're making art and writing books and talking about this animal which no longer walks the planet. And I think that's an interesting and welcome change. Talking for instance to the people at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, I discovered that their focus is now almost on a kind of natural history and forensic archaeology. Using what they've got, they're trying to piece together stories of the animal while it was still alive. They have a wonderful archive of material and I think that their work, and Paddle's, has contributed to a new consciousness about the animal. One of the best recent uses of the thylacine was in the anti-old growth forest ad where the question is posed: do we want this to happen again? That's a real progression from where we were twenty years ago.
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The first book devoted exclusively to the thylacine—
Search
for the Tasmanian Tiger
by Quentin Beresford and Garry Bailey— has its own interesting story, as related by Bailey, the current editor of
The Mercury
newspaper (which of course has its own long tiger connection):

The idea for the book came from my brother-in-law Quentin Beres-ford . . . and his then girlfriend Sue Dyson. The idea bumped along without coalescing into a firm idea of where it was going. Because there was little or no co-operation from the then thylacine expert Eric Guiler, who was working on his own book, they were limited in their scope . . . I suggested they limit it to the relationship between man and thylacine and target a market that might actually bring sales . . . I [also] made a few suggestions about structure, snappy intros and some racy prose. About the only thing I left out was a love interest! Eventually it ended up in bits at my home so I basically wrote it using their research. I did more of my own sleuthing using newspaper libraries here and interstate, interviewing people and organising pictures from our archive and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Quentin meanwhile approached Dan Sprod of Blubber Head Press . . . [who] took the manuscript and actually added to it with some research of his own, including finding the actual date of the death of the last Tasmanian tiger in captivity. That alone corrected the popular record, which was a year out. Dan decided on a soft-cover book (or booklet, to be more correct) and went for a print run of what I believe was 5000 copies . . . It sold like mad. I . . . still receive a very modest stipend through its use in libraries and the photocopying. I did have a strong personal interest in the thylacine, having done quite a few stories as a reporter on sightings and having had regular contact with James Malley the renowned tiger hunter and Bob Brown who also conducted a search with the mercurial Jeremy Griffiths. However, my main motivation was proving to my argumentative brother-in-law that you could write a popular history and make a quid. The most interesting recollection is that the release of the book seemed to spark an increase in tiger sightings and I received lots of calls from people wanting to relate their experiences . . . Does the tiger exist? No. But, as always, that's head ruling heart. If it does exist I want the picture first.
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The thylacine is sparsely represented in adult fiction. Unlike a visual creative image, depicting it imaginatively to a mature reading audience has built-in limitations and traps for the unwary author. Still, there have been a spate of novels in recent years—accompanied by, inevitably, controversy. Erle Wilson's
Coorinna: A Novel of the Tasmanian Uplands
(Melbourne University Press, 1963) is distinguished by being one of the first thylacine-specific novels; it would be hard to find today and perhaps worthy of a tiger-style hunt for that reason.

Since the 1980s there have been about fifteen works of fiction published in the junior and young adult categories, either about the animal as it was or about its present mysteriousness and felt presence—both of which are exploitable fictional territory, though perhaps easier to shape for juvenile markets. Thus in Beth Roberts's
The Magic Waterfall
(Rainbow Books, 1990) for the preteen reader, marsupial facts, extinction facts and the problems of inbreeding in a remnant population are openly presented but the parallel imaginative tale holds sway, as ageing Winnie Wombat helps Nenner the young Thylacine return over the mountains to his partner Corinna. Cleverly resolving the irresolvable, Roberts has Winnie render Nenner invisible through the agency of her magic moonlit waterfall. (There are also touches of humour— Winnie remarks condescendingly: ‘Most wombats would not go out of their way to help a carnivore'.)

At the other end of the teen market, Melbourne author Michael Hyde's
Tyger Tyger
(Vulgar Press, 2001) is about a seventeen-year-old

young gun footballer, following in the sprig marks of his late father and doing so by playing with the men of the Ballantyne Tigers instead of the boys. The coldly omniscient talent scouts have spotted him, but for dark mysterious reasons he can't always play at his best . . . The best parts of the book are set in Tasmania where Johnny goes to get over a hammy and also manages to unravel the mysteries of his recurring dream featuring a Tasmanian tiger and to better come to terms with his father's death.
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Like
Tyger Tyger,
Heather Rose's
White Heart
(Anchor, 1999) also works the thylacine into themes of loss and understanding, though as an adult novel it operates at a different level of complexity. Here the narrator Farley, who grew up in a Tasmania she loves, seeks inner understanding through a series of visits to the United States, where she participates in American Indian spiritual rituals: sundancing, sweatlodge purifying, praying and fasting. The thylacine connection, likewise, is mystical but very strong. While Farley moves between the United States and her Melbourne bookshop, her wise, feral-like brother Ambrose camps out in the wilds of Tasmania looking for thylacines. But neither are in fact there. (‘Both extinct. Both mystical.') It's a tragic and moving novel, considerably underrated.

Rose says of her novel that it

emerged at the end of a very intense part of my life. I think if I believed I would only write one novel in my life I would have set out to write a book that journeyed beyond the everyday into the realms of magic and spirit. A companion to our private quests for a deeper knowing of ourselves. Strangely,
White Heart
achieved that but only in retrospect. At the time it was very much a story unravelling. I was as surprised by it as anyone . . . To live in Tasmania is to live with beauty. But it is also to live with the threat of destruction and loss. The tiger illustrates that but so too has the past decade of forest practices. If Tasmanians are demonstrating a new Western sense of environmental consciousness it is because rivers, sky, mountains, plains, sea, wildlife and forests have quietly taught us the concept of stewardship. To harness that teaching is to tap into a powerful source of magic, as all indigenous cultures know.
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