The Sea Inside

1850, the indefatigable John West was protesting its innocence, allowing that the thylacine did kill sheep, but only one at a time, unlike a wild dog or dingo, ‘which both commit havoc in a single night’. Yet the Reverend had to accept that his defence was futile. Rewards offered by sheep-owners meant it was probable ‘that in a very few years this animal, so highly interesting to the zoologist, will become extinct; it is now extremely rare, even in the wildest and least frequented parts of the island’. A male and a female were sent to the Zoological Society of London during the present year [1850], and were the first that ever reached Europe alive.’ To many Tasmanians, it might as well have been an invention. Given its rarity, it is unlikely that my transported cousin James ever saw one, at least not in the wild.
    While their peers were caged in foreign prisons, wild thylacines had bounties placed on their heads and hides. Five shillings was offered for a male, seven shillings for a female, with or without pups, and from 1878 to 1909 more than four thousand thylacines were culled. Some became waistcoats and rugs, allowing men to both wear and walk on their trophies. The animal’s steep decline was only accelerated by the reduction of its habitat, a distemper-like disease, and predation by domestic dogs. By 1910 the population was scarce; the last confirmed thylacine to be killed in the wild was shot in 1930 by a farmer, Wilfred Batty. A photograph of the carcase propped up against a fence displays the power of this creature even in death. The farmer’s sheepdog backs away in fear, flecks of spittle around its mouth. The last capture of a thylacine took place in the Florentine Valley in 1933. Thereafter all is supposition, although in 1946 Dr David Fleay came close to trapping a thylacine on his expedition into the Tasmanian interior. And that was the final encounter – as far as science is concerned.

    In Hobart’s museum, next to a gallery lined with Duterreau’s paintings of Tasmanian Aborigines, a video plays on a constant loop. It shows a female thylacine that was bought by London Zoo in January 1926, and which would die on 9 August 1931, shortly after the film was made. It also displays footage from Hobart’s zoo, where the Florentine thylacine had been brought. This hapless beast was a victim of human circumstance twice over, since at that time Tasmania was subject, like much of the Western world, to economic depression. In the mid-1930s, Beaumaris Zoo (‘beautiful marsh’) had become run-down, and its inhabitants – among them polar bears and elephants – neglected in their concrete compounds.
    Like the stranded sperm whales of the Mediterranean, every factor seemed to conspire to precipitate this last captive’s demise, as Robert Paddle, a doctor of psychology at the Australian Catholic University, writes. The deciduous tree which had covered the thylacine’s cage had shed its leaves. ‘Without access to her den, the thylacine was unshaded from the extreme, unseasonal heat by day, and shelterless from the extreme cold by night. Thus, unprotected and exposed, the last known thylacine whimpered away during the night of 7 September 1936.’ It is a mournful scene, worthy of a Victorian oil painting: the bare tree, the freezing night, the crossed paws as the forgotten tiger lays down her head. Like the Aboriginal people, she too had pined away, homesick in her own homeland: collected, and abandoned. A year later, the zoo closed, and the site became a fuel store for the Australian navy.
    But in the technology of the twenty-first century, the thylacine lives on. The Hobart and London films are remarkable for the tantalising glimpses they allow us of an animal so recently made extinct. Their subjects resemble flickering ghosts, pacing up and down, caught in a loop, yet their physicality is certainly not spectral. In bright sunlight, the Hobart specimen is seen in precise detail. It is a living chimera. The mountain-lion head. The narrow, almost cetacean jaw, yawning as if to display distress at its observation. The lemur-like stripes on its hindquarters and the kangarooish tail, thick at the base and tapering to a whip-like point and which, I guess, must have felt as heavy as the wallaby’s tail I once weighed in my hands while its owner foraged on the ground.

    In other photographs of a thylacine family group at Beaumaris in 1909, taken only a century after Paterson first described the