SUSAN CARLAND: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this series
may contain images, voices or names of deceased persons.
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BRUCE SCATES: This episode, ‘A Land of the Weird and the Monstrous,’ is part of the series that looks at the land. It examines the loss
of a species unique to Australasia. We grapple with the ethics of cloning and
consider the cost of narrowing biodiversity.
We’ll begin in Canberra and end in Australia's southern-most capital, Hobart.
We’re here today in a special storage facility at the National Museum of
Australia. The temperature and the atmosphere here are carefully controlled,
because all around us are precious fragile artefacts and these rare
scientific specimens. And the object that frames this particular episode is just
around the corner. It’s a body – or rather what’s left of one. This is the pelt of a
thylacine, a marsupial wolf unique to Australasia. Around the spring of 1930
this creature was pursued through the rugged forests of north-western Tasmania,
it was snared and it was shot. Bounties were offered for thylacine and an adult
like this could fetch – what – a one-pound payment from the government. But that
wasn’t the only reason this particular specimen was disemboweled so carefully.
By the time this animal was killed thylacine, once considered a pest in
Tasmania, were a rarity. This is probably one of the last creatures shot by bounty
hunters in the wild. Literally thousands of these animals were caught in traps,
they were poisoned, they were bludgeoned, they were captured as curios for zoos
the world over. And today this animal is almost certainly extinct. What’s thought
to be the very last thylacine died in captivity in the Hobart Zoo in 1936. And
you know just 59 days before being declared officially extent, thylacine was
declared a protected species in Tasmania.
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SUSAN CARLAND: Why was the thylacine hunted to extinction? We’ll find out the answer
right here at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. So, let’s have a look inside.
You know I think the popular name given to this animal says it all.
Settlers dubbed it the ‘Tasmanian tiger’, a vicious, cunning carnivore – savage
dangerous, unpredictable. Early settlers were at once terrified and fascinated by
this meat-eating marsupial. Scientists studied their powerful jaws, settlers
shivered at the sound of them, and artists painted the thylacine as something
strange and menacing – a cross between a jackal, a hyena, and a wolf.
BRUCE SCATES: The demonisation of Australia's wildlife tapped into a much much older cultural
tradition. Even before Europeans had ‘discovered’ Australia, the Antipodes, the
‘great southern land’ was conceived of as a mysterious, transgressive space.
Australia was at the other end of the globe – a land where the world had been
turned upside down, inhabited by mythological monsters, the very
antithesis of Europe. So when the first settlers came here, many expected a place
of the weird and the monstrous and this great continent of curiosities, well, it
didn’t disappoint them. It’s not just that the seasons were the other way
around in Australia – Australia’s animals were like nothing anyone had ever seen
before. Our trees shed their bark rather than
their leaves, our swans were black rather than white,
and the thylacine – the thylacine was a mystery. Like the kangaroo here, it was a
marsupial – it carries its young in a pouch. But the fact that the thylacine
was a carnivore – that made it an object of dread. SUSAN CARLAND: And in a way the weird and
threatening qualities of the Tasmanian tiger seemed in keeping with the place
it inhabited. White settlers were uncomfortable in this strange and
unfamiliar landscape, a fear of the thylacine – like the Tassie devil here –
reflected our profound unease in a new environment.
BRUCE SCATES: There was a practical purpose behind the bounty placed on this animal. Many
claimed the tiger hunted in ferocious packs, preying on sheep, terrorising the
vast and the valuable flocks that grazed the open grasslands of Tasmania.
Ridiculous as it may seem, the thylacine was likened to a vampire – a blood
feeder that killed, for the most part, for pleasure. It had to be destroyed because
it threatened not just livelihoods but also what was seen in the 19th century
as a civilising mission, a quest to remake the Australian bush in the image
of Europe. SUSAN CARLAND: And all that, of course, is nonsense. The thylacine didn’t hunt sheep
in packs, this was a solitary feeder. And its prey in the wild was small macropods –
despite appearances these jaws were too weak to kill a creature as large and
heavy as a sheep. In fact, the loss of sheep in the Tasmanian wilds was mostly
due to the feral dogs settlers themselves introduced to Tasmania.
BRUCE SCATES: So the thylacine, here, was framed – an innocent victim, an ecological bystander
in the European invasion of the continent, a convenient scapegoat.
And really there’s an irony here, isn’t there?
The thylacine is the creature depicted as weird, as dangerous, as damaging.
In fact, this is a creature ideally suited to live here in its natural environment,
unlike those quaint creatures whitemen brought with them to Australia.
SUSAN CARLAND: And how quaint is this creature? Domesticating this new land really meant destroying it.
The cloven hooves of sheep and cattle damaged the skeletal soils of Australia –
their blunt teeth tore fragile grasses out by the roots.
Unlike marsupials, treading lightly on this fragile land, the march of
introduced mammals compacted soil and eroded landscapes. It’s taken white
Australians a long time to feel more at home in this new and puzzling place, to
find ecologically sustainable ways of farming, to appreciate the fragility of
this ancient land. In a way then, the tragedy of the thylacine mirrored a
greater tragedy that unfolded right across the country. At the same time that
white settlers waged a brutal war against Aboriginal people for possession
of this land, we also seemed at war with nature. BRUCE SCATES: But really the thylacine story is
much more complex than that. Not all white Australians felt at odds with the
new world in which they found themselves. Alongside fear of the bush there was
also wonder; alongside the demonising of the thylacine, conservationists sought to
preserve it. At the very moment the species was driven to extinction it
found its way onto Tasmania’s coat of arms. Here it seems a proud and noble
creature, not vermin fit only for destruction.
SUSAN CARLAND: It’s important to remember that there’s always been this more benign, more
enlightened view of nature. White Australians led the call to preserve
Australian bush lands. As early as 1879, the Royal National Park was established
outside of Sydney – second in the world only to Yellowstone.
And in more recent years, here in Tasmania, the call for so-called progress
and development has been tempered by a desire to preserve the wilderness for
its own sake, just as we might have preserved the thylacine.
BRUCE SCATES: But what did we lose when we lost the thylacine? This wasn’t just another species in that long,
long list of human-caused extinctions. In losing the thylacine, we also lost a
unique opportunity for companionship with nature, a chance to share in the
great fellowship of creatures. And when you think about it, the placental wolf –
the dog – has been one of humankind’s great companions. A friend, a worker, a
reminder that all things share some commonality. Perhaps the marsupial wolf,
the thylacine here, offered a similar opportunity and opportunity for love, for
companionship, for a bonding with nature. SUSAN CARLAND: And perhaps the story doesn’t end with a
dried specimen in the museum. It’s rumoured that almost a century ago, just
as the thylacine was hunted to extinction, a party of conservationists
released a small colony in Wilson’s Promontory, a national park on the
southern-most tip of mainland Australia. We can’t know for sure, but there’s a
chance, a slim chance, that some of that cohort may have survived. The promontory
was once linked by land bridge to Tasmania itself. It now provides a kind
of sanctuary where a fragment of an endangered species may just have lived on into our
time, into the 21st century.
BRUCE SCATES: And 21st century science may just have found a way to
clone a thylacine, crafting a creature that’s otherwise been lost to
humanity. These specimens of heart and lung and liver are all preserved in
spirit. It’s possible, just possible, there’s enough intact DNA here to bring
the thylacine back from extinction. But really cloning the tiger is as much an
ethical as it is a scientific challenge. Perhaps extinction is just that –
something that is lost forever. And perhaps the most important message of
the thylacine is never to repeat that tragedy. And Australia’s current rate of
species extinction is actually one of the highest in the world.
SUSAN CARLAND: There’s one last irony about the thylacine. Once a creature demonised and
despised, it’s now become a kind of a trademark for Tasmania, an evocation of
something wild and exciting – or a cute souvenir you can buy here at Hobart’s
famous Salamanca market. BRUCE SCATES: You know today you can drive a car with thylacine
number plates, you can take a thylacine tour through the north-western
wilderness and you can drink this terribly Tasmanian beverage – but you be
careful! Too much Australian beer would make anyone extinct. SUSAN CARLAND: It’s often said
it’s an Australian trait to celebrate the loser, and, to risk a pun, to champion the
underdog. The thylacine, and that longing for all we have lost, sits squarely in
that tradition.
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BRUCE SCATES: If you’d like to learn more about the issues we’ve raised in this episode
why not catch ‘Susan Carland: In Conversation’. This time Susan’s talking
to the museum curators Kathryn Medlock and George Main in Hobart and in Canberra.
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