The Sea Inside

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    The new museum would bestride the Oxford lawns, its iron and glass roof wrought in the image of plants and animals, and its cast-iron pillars topped with stone capitals and bases sculpted with fork-leafed and serrated ferns and fox-like animals peeking in between. Others sprouted lilies with protruding stamens, waiting for some masonry bees to pollinate them.
    At the entrance to the museum, and almost too big to be seen, hanging by a crude iron hinge and standing at more than double the height of a man, is the lower jaw of a sperm whale. Splayed like an enormous wishbone, its broad, veined bone narrows and curves to meet in a gothic arch, tall enough to create its own, alternative entrance to the museum; little wonder Melville called such a jaw a ‘terrific portcullis’. From under its shadow, I am conducted by the smartly dressed Malgosia Nowak-Kemp, who invites me, in her faint Slavonic accent, to follow her along a corridor, over a thick red velvet rope, and through a heavy wooden door. The dark, cave-like interior beyond is filled with modern, white-painted metal shelves which, as Malgosia presses a discreet button, slide apart to reveal row upon row of glass jars.
    Here is the usual array of mammalian organs and dead-eyed fish, the everyday horrors of the half-known world. A monkey’s head sits on top of a dissected spine, like something from an etching by Odilon Redon. But in a corner on the floor by the shelves stands a tall transparent cylinder, about waist-height, with an unsecured glass disc for a lid. The liquid it contains is the colour of stewed tea. And in it, held upright by a white rag tied around its neck, giving it the appearance of a convict who might escape at any moment, is a thylacine.
    Confined in its glassy prison, the animal is difficult to distinguish. It might be an oversized rat. I peer in at the sides and over the top, trying to imagine its living magnificence. From one of the shelves, Malgosia fetches a smaller jar. In it is thrust the skinned head of another thylacine, its skull removed, the deboned face swirling in its alcohol like a pickled glove. The fur is that of a dog or a fox, Labrador-pale and in good condition, as though someone had preserved a much-loved family pet.
    Back in her office on the far side of the building, Malgosia opens the wooden doors of a cupboard to another pair of specimens: busts of Truganini and Woorrady. Briefly, dramatically revealed, they stand blank-eyed on their pedestals in the shadows, simulacra of their country-men and women whose bones lie in other cupboards and drawers of this museum, awaiting repatriation.
    In an anteroom, perched on top of a set of dusty metal-framed shelves as though it leapt up there one day and was afraid to come back down, is a stuffed thylacine, donated to the museum by the Royal Society of Tasmania in 1910. When Malgosia steps out of the room, I illicitly climb up the ladder-like shelves to unveil the marsupial from its inelegant plastic wrapping. It’s fixed to a wooden base in an upright position, like the toy dog on wheels my sister pushed about as a child. Its fur is threadbare, and its lips have been sealed by the taxidermist’s art. Having photographed it, half hanging onto the shelves, I reach out and stroke its leg, much as I once surreptitiously stroked the behind of a dozy koala in Sydney’s zoo. Had I attempted such an intimacy with a living thylacine, the result might have been quite different. When Dr Fleay attempted to photograph the last tiger in Hobart’s zoo, he was rewarded with a snap of its jaws; another visitor was bitten on the buttocks. Yet this stiff semblance of an animal is charged with a mystique; perhaps it will rub off on me, just as when I once shook the hand of a man who’d shaken the hand of a man who’d shaken the hand of Oscar Wilde.

    In the shoebox-sized study room, I look through the careful notes and drawings made by Professor Tucker, who dissected the thylacine from London Zoo – or, at least, its head – in 1942. The world might have been at war, but these learned men were exchanging letters over soon-to-be extinct marsupials.

Oxford Museum of Natural History
5 Aug 1942
Dear Tucker,
Huxley has passed to me your letter of the 3rd inst, re. Thylacine material etc. I regret we cannot supply the trunk of the Thylacine, the head of which you are now dissecting, because the remainder of the animal was sent on Oct 8th 1931 by order of the Society, to Professor Rowan of