The Sea Inside

years the thylacine, as it was more properly known, had survived in Tasmania long after its mainland population had been forced out, a result of an ever drier habitat and competition from dingoes. On this temperate, predator-free island – a residue of what Australia once was – it was preserved in its insular splendour, protected by the surrounding sea. Until now.
    ‘It is very evident this species is destructive,’ Paterson announced; and he had the evidence to prove it. ‘On dissection his stomach was filled with a quantity of kangaroo, weighing 5lbs. the weight of the whole animal 45lbs. From its interior structure it must be a brute particularly quick of digestion.’ Guilty from the inside out, the creature’s every part was measured and itemised: from its eye, ‘remarkably large and black, 1¼ inches’, to its tail, ‘1 foot 8 inches’. Paterson was nothing if not precise. He counted nineteen bristles on either side of the animal’s face, and found its body to be covered with short smooth hair, ‘of a greyish colour, the stripes black; the hair on the neck rather longer … the hair on the ears of a light brown colour, on the inside rather long …’ Despite these anchoring details, one might have forgiven the reader of the
Sydney Gazette
, secure in his convict-built house in Port Jackson or Hobart, if he had assumed that this was a fabulous portmanteau of a beast, barely more credible than any of the other extraordinary fauna that leapt or crept or flew or swam around these islands. ‘The form of the animal is that of a hyæna, at the same time strongly reminding the observer of the appearance of a low wolf dog. The lips do not appear to conceal the tusks.’
    Such sins! The animal was betrayed by its features as much as any Victorian criminal by his photograph. The physiognomy was exact: unconcealing lips and low wolfishness, indicating cunning. Such strangeness added up to a sentence of death, and the thylacine, suspected of manifold offences, could hope for little mercy.
    In 1808, George Prideaux Harris, Deputy Surveyor-General of Van Diemen’s Land, sent Joseph Banks a sketch of another animal, which had been caught in a trap baited with kangaroo meat. He noted the tiger’s ‘near resemblance to the wolf or hyæna’, and that its eyes were ‘large and full, black, with a nictitant membrane, which gives the animal a savage and malicious appearance’. As newly discovered as it was, the thylacine was being coopted for the roles it had been assigned, according to the level of threat or scientific interest it evoked. Illustrating what he called the ‘Zebra or Dog-faced Dasyurus’ in an 1827 edition of his encyclopedic
The Animal Kingdom
, Georges Cuvier concluded, ‘Its compressed tail seems to indicate that it is a swimmer, and it is known to be an inhabitant of the rocks on the seashore of Van Diemen’s Land, and to feed on flesh … fish and insects.’ In Cuvier’s text, the thylacine resembles one of the early evolutionary mammals that took to the water to become entirely marine, the ancient ancestors of the whales, on whose descendants it now fed: ‘They also seek, with avidity, the half-corrupted bodies of seals and cetaceous animals on the sea-shore.’ Joseph Milligan, writing in 1853, agreed with this Darwinian demeanour: ‘The Aborigines report that this animal is a most powerful swimmer; that in swimming he carries his tail extended, moving it as the dog often does.’
    Gradually, more certain details began to accrue, bringing into focus a composite creation. Classified as
Thylacinus cynocephalus
, dog-headed pouched animal, the thylacine was one of only two marsupials – the other being the water opossum – in which both sexes had pouches, the male’s covering its genitals to protect them as it ran in the bush (a refinement which is surely the envy of other males). It could raise itself on its back legs like a kangaroo, and ran at speed when hunting. Its elliptical pupils were perfected for night viewing, and its one-hundred-and-twenty-degree gape geared for scavenging. However, it would later be proved that the animal’s jaw had little strength, and that its yawning gesture – often accompanied by the straightening of its tail and a peculiar strong scent – was not a sign of boredom, but a warning that it felt threatened and could be about to attack.
    This fearsome reputation convinced settlers that the Tasmanian tiger was a danger to their stock. As early as