The Sea Inside

the Natural History Museum, Edmonton, Canada, in exchange for a collection of live stock Rowan sent to the London Zoo! We have had no other Thylacine and it is doubtful if we shall ever get another …
Yours very truly
A.E. Hamerton.

    The Huxley to whom Hamerton referred was Julian, brother of Aldous and grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘Mr Darwin’s Bulldog’. He was Secretary to the Zoological Society of London, and that year was also corresponding with T. H. White in Ireland on the subject of whether animals had a ‘mind’.
    Spilling over the desk, page after foolscap page details every aspect of the animal’s anatomy with exhaustive descriptions written in Professor William Tucker’s neat hand. His is an update of William Paterson’s report in 1805; and as Paterson’s had been the first detailed description of the thylacine, so Tucker’s might be the final one. As far as the professor knew, he was the last person to have direct physical contact with the extinct animal. It was as though he had been able to perform a necropsy on a velociraptor.
    Putting the professor’s minutiae to one side, I turn to another document in the file, one which purports to summarise thylacine sightings in north-eastern Tasmania in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Assembled by a husband-and-wife team, it is a painstakingly compiled list of encounters experienced by people used to the Tasmanian bush, one of the most protected wildernesses left on earth. These witnesses are well qualified and reliable, the report is eager to stress, and include practised bushmen and retired university lecturers. They were going about their ordinary lives when something extraordinary interrupted them.
    One couple, driving back one night after having been to the movies in Launceston, saw a pair of strange shapes amble across the road. At first they mistook them for dogs. But as the animals were caught in the headlights, they saw erect ears on large heads, unlike any canine. The pair moved slowly, even nonchalantly, said the witnesses: ‘It was almost as if they were disdainful of the car’; as if it, not they, were the interlopers. Amazed by the sighting, the couple reported it to the Parks and Wildlife Department, where an apparently uninterested official heard them out, then said, ‘Yes, it looks like you saw what you saw. Now, will you do us a favour and shut up about it? Don’t tell anyone.’
    Such encounters stress the odd motion of the animals. One experienced bushman in his fifties was logging in the forest with three other men when an animal that corresponded to a thylacine – ‘Couldn’t have been anything else’ – ambled out of a tree, ‘as slow as you please … He wasn’t in a hurry. But, then, they aren’t very fast, anyhow.’ All four men saw it for long enough to observe its strange gait and the rigidness of its hindquarters, the way that it couldn’t turn around like a dog because of the stiffness of its back, but instead had to move in a circle. And in 1980, a woman in her own garden found herself face to face with a creature which she too identified as a thylacine. It was standing on her chicken coop. ‘It stared at me and I stared at it. It was really quite beautiful. Sort of golden. It had a big head and stripes across the base of its rump.’ In this brief moment, both were transfixed. ‘We just sort of stared at each other.’ She called quietly to her husband inside, at which point the animal disappeared. When she went back inside, she was grey and shaking.
    Many witnesses remarked on the animal’s serenity and stillness; ‘No wonder they got killed.’ Others claimed to have smelled its pervasive aroma, described a century ago as that of an unknown herb. Some came close enough to look into its large yellow eyes. Nor are these sightings confined to Tasmania: others have been reported from the Australian mainland, where video cameras captured dog-like animals ambling through the bush. Yet nothing definitive exists, only blurry smears that may or may not be anything other than a mongrel and yet which, like the ‘true’ films of the tiger, take on a strangeness all of their own.
    One sequence, shot in 1973 through a windscreen (the wipers occasionally get in the way), is perhaps the most persuasive, since it is a mixture of the banal and the potentially astounding. An animal runs out of the trees and across a road. It might be a wild dog, but it has a long, stiff and pointed tail. It is