Thylacine (27 page)

Much further south, in the Styx and Florentine Valley area, Col Bailey lives and writes about the thylacine, when not out searching. He believes that he first saw a thylacine in 1967 on the Coorong, the long coastal strip of south-east South Australia. His meeting in 1980 with the old Tasmanian fur-trapper, Reg Trigg, set Bailey on a course of writing short anecdotal accounts of thylacines, which were published in his local newspaper, the
Derwent Valley Gazette
. The column's popularity became such that it was syndicated worldwide and the tales were subsequently published as
Tiger Tales
(see Chapter 4). As a true believer, Bailey is able to write that his conviction is

gained from over thirty years of personal experience in both researching and searching for this fascinating animal, yet it has often brought me into verbal conflict with less-opinionated citizens who loudly hammer the extinction drum. Be that as it may, it is my firm and unshakeable belief that the thylacine lives on.
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Well and good for faith. But, as history has shown elsewhere, faith and science don't always get along together. Dr Bob Brown once straddled that divide. The mystery of the thylacine had intrigued him since childhood and, for him, represented Tasmania. It was to be the lure delivering him to the island state.

As a young man in 1972 he watched an ABC-TV
Four Corners
programme on the Lake Pedder controversy. It rekindled his interest and led to him taking what was to have been a short-term locum position in Launceston. That soon changed:

When I came it wasn't a tourist's interest in the thylacine, it was actually a driven and active interest that I had . . . Yes, I ran into the Pedder people, but at the same time immediately started searching out information on the thylacine [and] quickly fell in with Jeremy and James . . . They were both glistening-eyed believers—they wouldn't hear that it was extinct. I was the sceptic. I was always the sceptic and said we had to look for evidence. There were all the sightings, but we had to look for evidence.
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Brown attributes his caution to six years of medicine ‘and a few other myth-shattering experiences' he had behind him by then, resulting in a well-developed analytical mind. Over the eight-month period that the team was together they investigated some 250 sightings. For Brown, the complete lack of physical evidence—no scats, hairs, photographs, paw-prints—told only one story, but his colleagues remained otherwise convinced. Then, driving home to the Launceston suburb of Ravenswood one evening after his GP rounds, Brown saw a ‘thylacine'. So astonished was he that he insisted Griffith return to the area with him immediately. Together, they found the animal: ‘It was a greyhound with four stripes across its back'.
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There were just four sightings that the team couldn't explain. Brown's opinion is that they were probably wombats or dogs. His conviction that the thylacine is extinct extends to annoyance at deliberate, sustained misinformation surrounding it—not from fanciful sighters (Eric Guiler jested that sightings increase near pubs) but at the official level. In the 1960s, police, Guiler and others investigated a series of thylacine-like killings of sheep. They eventually trapped an animal that turned out to be an Alsatian dog. It was put down; the sheep killings stopped. But that was not made public until former police inspector Fleming recounted it to Brown.

Nor was the result of tests of hair samples of the famous 1961 thylacine kill by the two Sandy Cape fishermen who hid their slain thylacine under a metal sheet only to later discover that it had been stolen. At the time, Hobart CIB confirmed that the hairs belonged to a thylacine. A beekeeper, Reuben Charles, had also obtained some of the hairs, which he kept in a glass phial. Years after the event, Brown asked Charles for the phial and sent it to the Keith Turnbull Institute in Melbourne, which had acknowledged expertise in marsupial hair identification. The Institute reported that the hairs couldn't be positively identified, but were definitely not thylacine hairs.

In another instance, a Ben Lomond sighting yielded paw-prints which turned out to belong to a wombat. Brown holds that:

Science itself suppressed that information. They [scientists] led people out there to think, this [living thylacines] is happening. And it was wrong. It happened time and again . . . There were some decades in which it was almost disloyal, or unTasmanian, to reveal that these major sightings which had been echoed around the world were in fact false.
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The logical, scientific likelihood of the thylacine's being extinct is given further weight for Brown by looking not just at the present but the remote past; the thylacine had spent millions of years evolving and could not rapidly adapt to being targeted as vermin. He believes that, like any specialised predator, it has a range, and once moved off that range, that's the end. It is an argument that gives him no pleasure. But there may have been a twinkle in his eye when it was put to him that the animal's extinction remains unproven: ‘That is very true. You can't also disprove that there isn't a herd of mammoths or Tasmanian emus out there'.
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Senior wildlife officer with the Parks & Wildlife Service Nick Mooney has for many years been the state government's official point of contact for matters regarding the thylacine, including sightings. His involvement dates back to at least 1982, when he conducted a two-year search of an area of the Arthur River after his colleague, Hans Naarding, experienced what is still considered to be the most authentic known sighting. At night with a torch, through rain, Naarding, a level-headed individual with considerable experience of native fauna, watched an adult thylacine for about three minutes
.
He described it as being in excellent condition with twelve black stripes on a sandy coat. Mooney constructed a series of sand traps for paw-prints, but came up with nothing.

Mooney rates a 1997 Surrey Hills sighting as virtually on a par with Naarding's, with three since then of sufficiently high quality to make him keep an open mind—just.
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There are two other features relating to fauna in Tasmania which intrigue him. One is that he sees a potential correlation between the presence of endangered wedge-tailed eagles and the existence of thylacines:

These species have very similar diets and both like secluded bits of old forest for breeding. Maybe thylacines take more adult wallabies, eagles more young, but the resource is spread similarly. Both are adapted for open forests although they can survive in other less suitable places if push comes to shove. I think the distribution of breeding wedgies would be an excellent indicator of thylacine potential.
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However, the flip side to this is something he readily acknowledges:

There is so much food for [thylacines] now that they really should be pretty common if at all. The abundance of [meat-eating] devils is good oblique evidence of a lack of thylacine. One has to come up with a pretty bizarre set of circumstances to have it exist, considering the lack of specimens or credible evidence such as prints. If thylacines exist in remote or semi-remote areas there really should be dispersion into high food areas where they are more likely to be found. That's the problem—needing a bizarre (by definition unlikely) case to be made.
¹⁴

The second faunal feature is, in its own way, bizarre. It concerns the introduction of foxes to Tasmania, apparently early in 2001, possibly years before then. A fox (or two) was supposedly seen running out of the
Spirit of Tasmania
ferry's car-deck at Devonport, having hitched a ride from Melbourne, where they're common and can be seen, for example, near the city's West Gate Bridge approaches. Subsequently, claims were made that foxes had been deliberately introduced for hunting, or even to pay back Parks & Wildlife for its stringent control of Tasmania's wilderness areas. One wild rumour had it that up to fifteen foxes had been flown in by helicopter, which dispersed groups of them statewide! The net result of all of this was the setting up of a government task force. An established fox population will devastate many native species and pose a threat to newborn lambs— probably a greater threat than nineteenth-century carnivores and rabbits ever were to the sheep industry. Foxes carry disease and are very expensive to control.

Nick Mooney's involvement with the task force has led him to reassess his views somewhat: ‘The difficulty in finding a few foxes has just been a reminder of why we cannot say thylacines do not exist'.
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The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, formerly the Tasmanian Museum, has been closely associated with thylacine business since the mid-nineteenth century. In recent years its thylacine specialists, zoology curators David Pemberton and Kathryn Medlock, have been closely involved in assessing sightings, as well as providing information and expert advice to individuals, film companies and scientific organisations worldwide as interest in the animal steadily increases. It is a small phenomenon that shows no signs of flagging and for the foreseeable future each new sighting and cloning step will keep this most puzzling of predators in the spotlight, as will strange twists such as the 2002 auction of the eight-skin thylacine rug. By pure coincidence the auction took place on Saturday, 7 September: Threatened Species Day in Australia, so named to commemorate the death of the last captive thylacine in Beaumaris Zoo.

The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery's holdings represent the world's most diverse thylacine collection, with skins, pouch young, skulls, mounts and footprints representing about 45 individuals. Medlock has identified material relating to 400-odd other specimens around the world, with relatively large collections at London's Royal College of Surgeons and Natural History Museum and also at Oxford. It's a regrettable indication of the unintended complicity of the then Tasmanian Museum, and other local bodies, in hastening the thylacine's demise through the export of live specimens when the animal was already scarce. A measure of the potential value of this scattered, mostly unseen, rare material can be seen in the major exhibition that travelled nationwide in 2001. ‘Tasmanian Tiger: The Mystery of the Thylacine', curated by Medlock, was seen by over half a million people. Media interest was constant, not least because Australian museums are not noted for taking their treasures on the road.

That public interest is explicable, resulting from both a residually guilty fascination and a collective intrigue that the intent of the exhibition was to be anything but a wake.

Certainly, David Pemberton has an open mind on the extinction issue. He completed a PhD on the Tasmanian devil, filling in many gaps in the existing knowledge of that animal, and so is able to speak with considerable authority on its closest relative. While he believes that in theory a population of less than about 500 would spell big trouble, he doesn't rule out the possibility of as few as 50 having a viable existence. He cites the examples of the Vietnamese rhinoceros—there may be ten—and the Knysna and Addo elephants, at a few hundred each. The problem is to prove that existence. Do sightings do it?

Pemberton discounts most sightings. Thus, investigating a 2002 sighting considered to have a Hans Naarding-like rating, he spoke with the couple in question and listened to their descriptions of an animal that was dark, that bounded into the bush, and was ‘square chested'. The latter, he says, simply does not apply to a thylacine. He feels they probably saw a devil: ‘Your average punter wouldn't pick the difference, I reckon. Devils do bound. And they probably would have expected a devil to be covered in white markings because of the tourist brochures, and if it's not gaping at them like the postcards they'll think it's something else'.
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Instead he looks to a statistical analysis, to get as close as is possible to a ‘proof' of sorts that it may be out there; specifically, ‘the area that most biologists would agree on, the north-west: the Arthur River, Tarkine, across to Rocky Cape—that big block in there. Or stretch it a bit further east to Cradle Mountain, Lake Lea, St Valentine's Peak'.
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That's a large area. A population of fifty to a hundred wouldn't be easy to find. Pemberton cites as an example his work with devils, where he worked regularly in the highest devil-density areas, at night, all night, without seeing one. He says the evidence for thylacines would come primarily from scats. An adult eats approximately one wallaby or wombat every three days, approximating 20–30 per cent of its body mass, producing about three scats, often in a latrine area. Statistically, the odds of finding any scats in the target area are extremely low. Add to this the animal's nocturnal habits and retiring nature and ‘the odds of one being out there are quite high because they were in that area in the fifties; they were there'.
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He supports this view with a belief that thylacines are, indeed, mobile, that just as they can follow a food source they can retreat from threat. Thus, Naarding's sighting was in an area subsequently clearfelled. ‘There were tigers there. They pissed off.'
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It is an endnote of optimism from a foremost conservation biologist with much on-the-ground experience. Perhaps the thylacine deserves no less, after suffering such sustained persecution at the hands of those who undertook the process of making Tasmania what it is today.

David Pemberton and Bob Brown are just two who have been working towards the establishment in Hobart of a thylacine centre. The idea of bringing hundreds of scattered artefacts home has great appeal. The concept seems light years removed from the early days of the muddy settlement, when the Reverend Robert Knopwood was a familiar figure on his little white pony, but it is logical.

Such a centre, which Tasmanians owe to their past, will be a permanent reminder of both the fragility of life and the endurance of hope.