Thylacine (8 page)

Engaged all the morn upon business, examining the 5 prisoners that went into the bush. They informed me that on the 2 of May when they were in the wood, they see a large tyger; that the dog they had with them went nearly up to it, and when the tyger see the men which were about 100 yards from it, it went away.

Knopwood's journal is the most complete account of the mud and toil of the tiny, convict-built settlement at the southernmost edge of the world. Getting about on a little white pony, he was a ‘quaint character, fond of shooting and fishing, especially fond of good living and the society of boon companions'.
²

The island remained almost wholly unknown, its interior a formidable challenge. By night, fearsome screams came out of the thick woods. The earliest settlers were not to know that those were the calls of the island's other carnivore, the scavenging
Sarcophilus harrisii
, a creature they named to reflect their fear: the devil. And by day, in that first summer of 1803–04, the sky was blanketed with vast plumes of acrid smoke, as the natives burnt their homeland, using the fierce heat of the malevolent northerly wind to speed the process.

What must it have been like clinging so precariously to the unknown? Collins wrote this revealing descriptive account, in which nature surely has all the power:

The extremity of Van Diemen's Land, like that of Tierra del Fuego, presents a rugged and determined front to the icy regions of the south pole . . . It abounds with peaks and ridges, gaps and fissures, which not only disdain the smallest uniformity of figure, but are ever changing shape as the point of view is shifted. Beneath this strange confusion, the western part of this coast-line observes a regularity equally remarkable as the wild disorder which prevails above. Lofty ridges of mountains, bounded by tremendous cliffs, project from two to four miles into the sea . . .
³

Robert Knopwood, MA, the first Church of England Chaplain of Van Diemen's Land. This 1804 painting by Thomas George Gregson is in the possession of the Diocese of
Tasmania.
(State Library of Tasmania Heritage Collections)

During their circumnavigation Bass and Flinders had entered the island's northern Tamar River and reported favourably on prospects for a second settlement there. At this time, the Norfolk Island colony was being wound down; its convicts, free settlers and governor, Lieutenant Colonel William Paterson, consequently founded Port Dalrymple; the settlement was later moved down-river and named Launceston. In this way the island was divided into two ‘provinces': the quaintly named Cornwall and Buckinghamshire.

Paterson wrote the first extensive description of the mysterious Vandemonian ‘tyger'. It appeared in the
Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser
of 21 April 1805, which prefaced his description with its own:

An animal of a truly singular and novel description was killed by dogs the 30th of March on a hill immediately contiguous to the settlement . . . It must be considered of a species perfectly distinct from any of the animal creation hitherto known, and certainly the only powerful and terrific of the carnivorous and voracious tribe yet discovered on any part of New Holland or its adjacent islands.

Paterson's description reads, in part:

It is very evident this species is destructive, and lives entirely on animal food; as on dissection his stomach was found filled with a quantity of kangaroo, weighing 5lbs, the weight of the whole animal 45 lbs . . . length of the eye, which is remarkably large and black, 11.4 inches . . . from the shoulder to the first stripe, 7 inches; from the first stripe to the extent of the body, 2 feet; length of the tail, 1 foot 8 inches; length of the fore leg, 11 inches; and of the fore foot, 5 inches; the fore foot with 5 blunt claws; height of the animal before, 1 foot 10 inches; stripes across the back 20, on the tail 3; 2 of the stripes extend down each thigh . . . on each side of the mouth are 19 bristles . . . 3 fore teeth in the upper jaw, and 6 in the under; 4 grinders of a side, in the upper and lower jaw; 3 single teeth also in each; 4 tusks, or canine teeth, length of each 1 inch . . . the body short hair and smooth, of a greyish colour, the stripes black . . . The form of the animal is that of the hyaena, at the same time strongly reminding the observer of a low wolf dog. The lips do not appear to conceal the tusks.

Paterson, an avid naturalist and optimist, confidently predicted that within a few years his tiny settlement along the Esk and Tamar Rivers would be thriving. It would do so thanks to cattle and sheep. Far south in Hobart Town (a brave walk of eight days and nights along the midland plain, or two days on horseback), free settlers were hoping for the same as they expanded timidly north along the Derwent, planting potatoes and wheat. In both places starvation became the grimmer reality. Indifferent soils, poor animal husbandry, lack of supplies from Sydney—itself suffering hunger—and aggrieved natives put paid to visions of bounty and splendour. The European presence may have intrigued some bands of Aborigines, but for others the invasion, though still minuscule, had an immediate impact. Not only did their hunting grounds become cut off; the very food itself, kangaroo and emu, began to be taken in ever larger quantities by the invader.

The inevitable clash over land and its worth set a precedent for mistrust and mutual suspicion. Needless to say, various levels of relationships between invader and indigene would develop, some decent, but ‘the settlers were warned to be on guard against the people of the island who, from what were described cryptically as circumstances that had formerly taken place, had become very much irritated against the Europeans'.
⁴

What was the nature of the place they were attempting to tame in order to turn it into a prison? The ironies inherent to the task became very real in the first few years.

Irony one: lack of food became so acute that Hobart Town's convicts had once again to resort to theft in order to survive. Collins's reprisals included flogging and hanging—but these achieved little. Everyone was suffering. Lack of seeds and livestock and Aboriginal hostility hindered attempts at expanding the feeble little settlement. So awful were circumstances that the pigs had to be fed on scraps from the whaling vessels which put into the Derwent; the pork began to taste of lamp oil.

Irony two: convict servants were given guns and dogs in order to go into the bush to secure kangaroo and emu, thereby saving the colony. They took to the task with relish. Soon enough they, and many others, were wearing kangaroo shoes and cloaks and in time ‘tiger' hats may have become sought-after items.

Irony three: the European invaders were forced to adopt survival techniques not far removed from those of the indigenous people, subsisting and making full use of what the island provided. The Europeans did so, but in achieving this success lost sight of its intrinsic value.

Irony four: a new breed of colonist, the bushranger, soon began to terrorise both native and settler
.
They were feral, they continued the often brutal offshore islands sealers' tradition of taking native women, and they reflected society as a whole. To the extent that Hobart Town and Port Dalrymple might call themselves genteel—for the benefit of the Crown—this description would always be undermined by commoner observations on the ground. Those two little hot spots of Van Diemen's Land, in their second or third summer, were each a rum economy, ‘in the hands of what one newcomer described as a set of the biggest rogues and scoundrels in the world'.
⁵

How might such a base society at the top of the food chain treat a shy carnivore itself at the top of a food chain determined over hundreds of thousands of years? The thylacine had no specific meaning for Bowen, Collins, Knopwood and their people. It was merely a creature somewhere out there, as vague as the large interior was unfathomable. The Tasmanian emu may have helped to save the fledgling colonial outpost from starvation, but in doing so its fate was sealed. Easy to catch or shoot, it soon became extinct—a tiny sign of ‘progress', perhaps, towards controlling the unpredictable island. There were those who warned, to no avail, of the emu's likely extinction, but such attitudes had no place in the young colony. Today, the known local remains of the Tasmanian emu amount to a few eggs and one feather.

6 BEFORE
THE FALL:
TROWENNA

My Grandfather had a farm there. He and his sons were doing some clearing land, burning stumps at night, and I went with them while they stoked the fires. There was a gully just a way from where the fires was, and these Hyenas or tigers would come and watch, we could see there [sic] eyes shining, we had a clear look at their outline if we went towards them then they would dissapear [sic] but would come back, when we went home they followed us but didn't harm us. Dogs were afraid of them. They done no harm to any stock I can recall.

S. M
ITCHELL,
C
OSGROVE
P
ARK

T
he island upon which the thylacine became isolated had geographic and climatic features rendering it doubly unique. Not only was it part of an ancient floating laboratory but subsequently, through various Ice Age-induced phases as a true island, it developed diverse temperate conditions supporting a variety of life forms. As will be shown, the thylacine population may have been able to benefit significantly from the presence of the Palawa Aboriginal people on the island they knew as Trowenna over the past 40 000 years.
¹

The island is an extension of mainland Australia's Great Dividing Range. Its mountainous western side receives copious rain delivered by the constant winds of the Roaring Forties. Large areas to the east in these mountains' rainshadow are dry for much of the year. Vegetation types and the animals feeding off them are adapted to this west–east, wet–dry pattern.

Prior to European settlement of the island, Trowenna had enjoyed a seemingly benign existence. There is no evidence of tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes, dramatic extinctions or other major natural calamities. Indeed, its greatest mystery may be why its people stopped eating scale fish (at about the time when, in the Middle East, chickens were being domesticated and the making of popcorn discovered, say around 3500–4000 BC).
²

A number of natural conditions have operated together to the benefit of the thylacine since the island's existence in its geographically modern form. One is the climate—even during its colder periods and tundra-like conditions, prey was in good supply. Another is the island's size. At nearly 70 000 square kilometres, it is large enough to support a variety of microclimates and the relative abundance of prey in each. Then there was the absence of quadruped carnivores in direct competition with the thylacine. (Earlier, Tasmania's carnivorous megafauna, specifically
Thylacolea carnifex
, may well have been at the top of the food chain, until wiped out through a likely combination of Aboriginal hunting, fire and adverse climatic changes, none of which impacted negatively on the small thylacine.)

Most importantly, Aborigines did not fear and therefore did not persecute the thylacine, nor was it a traditional part of their diet, although most other terrestrial creatures were: macropods, the native cat, possums, wombat, echidna, seals, penguins, swans, emu and more.
³

Pre-1803 hard data on the animal in Tasmania are virtually non-existent, whereas something is known of the pre-contact Aboriginal tribes, derived from archaeological studies and oral sources, and of the Aborigines in settlement times, in particular from the diaries of George Augustus Robinson, the controversial Aboriginal–settler ‘conciliator'.
⁴
Because the thylacine's distribution across the island was strikingly similar to that of its indigenous people, a look back at the animal in its natural state becomes possible through what is known of the people of Trowenna in their natural state.

There were a number of Aboriginal languages, resulting in various names being given to the thylacine:
lagunta
,
corinna
,
laoonana
and
ka-nunnah
amongst them. Just one thylacine legend is known to be recorded. It is part of the Cotton collection as told by the ‘high priest' Timler, and attributed to Mannalargenna, ‘a great Warrior, Sage and overall Chief of a North-East Coast Federation of Tribes'.
⁵
It is an insight into possible Aboriginal attitudes towards the thylacine. The legend is named ‘Corinna, the Brave One'.

Palana, the little star, was the son of Moinee [the great spirit god, ruler of Trowenna]. As a boy he loved to wander in the bush and had many happy adventures. One day, however, he had a nasty encounter with Tarner, the big boomer kangaroo.

Tarner was huge and powerful, and in a very short time Palana, even though he was the son of the great Moinee, was in dire trouble. The boomer knocked him sprawling and attacked him with his huge heavy hind feet.