The Sea Inside

powered by thickly-muscled back legs, which look more kangaroo-like than canine, and in the sunlight, magical stripes appear across its back. Rerun in slow motion, the images seem at once both eerie and ordinary, something caught between worlds.
    In 1982 Hans Naarding, an experienced field ranger with the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Department, was in north-west Tasmania, conducting a survey of the Latham’s snipe, an endangered migratory bird. He’d been sleeping in his vehicle when he awoke to heavy rain.
    It was two o’clock in the morning. Out of habit, Naarding scanned the bush with his spotlight. ‘As I swept the beam around, it came to rest on a large thylacine, standing side-on some six to seven metres distant.’ The ranger’s camera was out of reach – sceptics might say it always is – but anyway, he didn’t want to disturb the animal. His decision allowed him to make detailed, and convincing, observations. ‘It was an adult male in excellent condition with twelve black stripes on a sandy coat. Eye reflection was pale yellow. It moved only once, opening its jaw and showing its teeth.’ Having watched it for several minutes, Naarding took his chance and reached for his camera. As he did so, the animal moved off into the undergrowth, leaving a strong scent in its wake. Because of his professional position, Naarding’s sighting was taken seriously. It was also kept quiet while an intensive two-year search was made over two hundred and fifty square kilometres. Nothing was found.
    Even as I write, Dr Stephen Sleightholme, who has made a lifetime study of the thylacine, shares with me a message he has just received from a witness who, a few weeks before, had apparently watched a Tasmanian tiger at eight o’clock in the morning, in broad daylight. As Dr Sleightholme notes, the thylacine was a shy animal that preferred the twilight; even when it was relatively common, it was rarely seen in any great numbers – it was no pack-running, predatory wolf. But perhaps the most intriguing evidence for its putative survival is supplied by dry statistics. In the early 1990s, Professor Henry Nix of the Australian National University developed a computer-generated map to correlate recent sightings, using a programme, BIOCLIM, created to predict where specific flora, fauna or ecosystems should occur.
    Professor Nix used this map to compare historical records of thylacines hunted or trapped in Tasmania during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the frequency and location of sightings from 1936 onwards. The two sets of data coincided almost exactly, leading the professor to conclude that these witnesses might indeed be seeing thylacines, and he proposed that an official search should be made before going ahead with the considerable expense of attempts to clone the species from its DNA.
    As to what all this adds up to, I do not know. There are always hoaxes and misidentifications and rumours of conspiracies and vested interests. Indeed, if a living thylacine were to wander out of the bush and be wrestled to the ground – as one Tasmanian professor of zoology fantasised – it might mean an end to the exploitation of the island’s virgin forests, an industry that angers many Tasmanians as they see ancient trees being cut down and shipped out to make toilet paper.
    What I do know is that in one institution I visit, a curator lets slip a quickly retracted remark, telling me it is not their secret to reveal. It is clear from what this person says, or does not say, that this strange half-life limbo of an animal which may or may not exist may soon be resolved, in its favour. That history is about to be reversed. That the thylacine is no longer extinct.
    If it ever was.

The wandering sea

Far from land, far from the trade routes,
In an unbroken dream-time
Of penguin and whale,
The seas sigh to themselves
Reliving the days before the days of sail.

D EREK M AHON , ‘The Banished Gods’



T ake out your atlas and look at it.
    You can’t. Just as no two-dimensional map of the world represents the true proportions of its continental masses, so no chart presents the reality of its greatest ocean. If you were to rise up, like an impossibly elevated albatross, from the centre of the Pacific, the Earth would appear almost entirely blue. No wonder Arthur C. Clarke thought a better name for our planet would be the Sea.
    The facts defy that paltry layer of land which we call home. The Pacific contains one