The Sea Inside

animals, they appear intimidated by the photographer’s lens. The vividness of these images renders their subjects almost domestic; I imagine finding one curled at my feet – not such a far-fetched idea, since captive thylacines were often given collars and walked on leads like dogs.
    From the 1880s to the 1920s, a total of nearly two dozen thylacines were sent to London Zoo, a hub for such exotic specimens, an imperial animal clearing house. Many went on to other compounds, in New York and Berlin. In captivity, these unassertively, subtly strange creatures did not speak up for themselves. ‘It is unfortunate that only rarely did anyone take time to observe them,’ writes one modern commentator; ‘their tranquil nature did not arouse much interest in zoo visitors, or zoo directors, either.’ Their calls were said to resemble the slow opening of a door, but their cells would stay shut.
    It was only in 1986, fifty years after the death of the last known specimen, that the thylacine was declared lost to the world. Even now CITES qualifies the tiger’s status as only ‘possibly extinct’. Given such a recent extirpation in an island as untamed as Tasmania, it was inevitable that stories would persist of its survival.
    In 1957, a photograph was taken from a helicopter flying over Birthday, on the west of the island, of a ‘striped beast on the deserted beach’. ‘It was probably a thylacine,’ the Belgian naturalist and cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvlemans claimed, matter-of-factly. ‘An expedition was at once mounted in order to capture a specimen, which would be released again after it had been studied.’
    Heuvlemans’ confidence was misplaced. Despite other reports of tracks and attacks, and the best efforts of a Disney film crew and an expedition led by Sir Edmund Hillary in 1960, no specimen was found. However, in 1961 a pair of fishermen apparently came close to capturing one by accident when it was snared in a trap. The two men, Bill Morrison and Laurie Thompson, risked ridicule to talk to the Hobart
Mercury
. ‘The tail was rigid,’ said Morrison. ‘The animal’s coat was dark, and I could discern only one stripe behind the shoulders and extending around the chest.’ The beast was understandably maddened, reported the newspaper, although the sound it made was ‘rather peculiar, and different from the barking of a dog’. As the two men attempted to release it, it escaped – although not at any great speed. ‘It seemed to be a slow mover,’ said Morrison.
    The thylacine had become a shadow of the past projected onto the present. Did it still exist, or not? In 1966, a six-hundred-thousand-hectare game reserve was set up in south-western Tasmania, partly to protect any animals that might remain in the area. It was both a futile and an optimistic gesture, as if a space had been made, ready to be restocked with all the flora and fauna that had disappeared from the island.

    Since extinct animals no longer exist, we must take their once-existence on the word of others, especially if they seemed improbable in the first place. Even living animals defy our comprehension. The narwhal, for instance, with its icicle-like and onerous tusk, seems too strange to have survived into the twenty-first century, and yet, having never seen one, I take its existence on trust. Equally, the tiger-striped stuffed dogs with kangaroo legs which I saw in Hobart’s museum might well be clever fakes, just as the first duck-billed platypus brought back to Europe was declared a preposterous and obvious forgery.
    Set back from the city’s Parks Road, Oxford’s University Museum was built, from 1855 to 1860, on what was then an open plain north of the city. Despite its splendid stone and slate façade, it is an only half-finished building. It was designed by Benjamin Woodward, a civil engineer from Cork with a fondness for medievalism, but its presiding geniuses were John Ruskin and his friend Sir Henry Acland, who determined that here, on the university plain, art and science would meet in a glorious hall of knowledge. ‘I hope to be able to get Millais and Rossetti to design flower and beast borders,’ Ruskin told Acland, ‘– crocodiles and various vermin – such as you are particularly fond of – Mrs Buckland’s “dabby things” – and we will carve them and inlay them with Cornish serpentine all about the windows. I will pay for a good deal myself, and I doubt not to have funds.
Such
capitals as we will