People come to talk about the
thylacine.
Because I believe I know more about
the thylacine than anyone else
in the world.
Footprints.
Scats.
This is all the cameras I've got.
Miles of cameras.
Man, they're a hard animal to
photograph, I have photographed them.
And I've seen them plenty of times.
You usually smell them before
you see them.
But they won't hang around, once
you make eye contact with them
they're gone.
It actually became an obsession.
People used to ridicule me.
It got to the stage where I actually
took up smoking cigarettes
after being a health fanatic for 28 years.
And then I took up drinking
because of the stress and pressures
of knowing
what I knew
and not being able to say to people
come and have a look at this.
If you were to walk in my shoes
for a week
tiger hunting,
I'll prove to you they exist.
The thylacine, it's a really
tragic example
of very clearly human-driven extinction
where they were aggressively hunted
in the wild.
There was a one-pound bounty
for every skin that you could bring in
for a thylacine, which was a huge
amount of money
back in the early 1900s.
So the government realised that
they were endangered
but it was too late by the time
that they had made that call.
It was about one month before the final
animal died in Hobart Zoo
and then there was sadly not enough
animals left in the wild to ever recoup
those populations.
And it did indeed go completely extinct.
There has been no
bona fide scientific evidence
ever proven
for the thylacine
existing in the wild
since they went extinct.
I'm about 99.9 per cent
convinced that that is a
front foot print from a thylacine.
The male ones get to about four
and a quarter, four and...
just over four and a half inches maybe,
when you get a real big adult male.
I had a sighting
not far from here over the road
and that
really blew my mind actually
because it followed me for about
20 minutes, it was quite an
interesting 20 minutes,
because I could hear something was
following me as I was walking along.
That's what got me triggered,
that started me.
I'm the founder of the Thylacine
Awareness Group of Australia and
recently elected president of
said body.
I'll be spending the next 12 to 18
months, maybe two years, out here
trying to get either
some DNA evidence
or an irrefutable video of photo
of what is a thylacine in the wild.
I'm not the first person to come up
with this crazy idea
and I probably won't be the last.
There's the tail end of the
female, she's ran across
and see her legs.
Now, four days later
there's the male in an identical
same spot but thicker and bigger.
See the short, stocky legs on it again?
And that tail?
Yes.
That's pretty good.
I reckon they're the best four.
Those ones.
If people know they're out there,
they're going to go looking for them.
I think it's best just to leave it alone
that's why I haven't gone public
with the photos and said where it is.
One of the cameras is just here.
And the other one's down here.
I think they just instinctively know to
stay away from humans,
like most animals do.
They just have a natural fear of
humans because
they know what we're like.
You know, we don't have a real good
rapport with a lot of nature and
some animals know
instinctively to stay the hell away
from people because it means
you get in lots of trouble.
I think there are people out there
that are just desperate to see a
thylacine.
You know and I think it's like
anything else, if you really, really
want to see something,
you will see it.
I think it is part of that guilt
and that want
to not have something so precious lost.
That we really want to see it back.
Devil.
It's not quite big enough
to be a tiger.
See the footprint here.
I study footprints.
That's part of the job.
I spent too much time
chasing tigers
and I neglected my farm,
my family
and I think that's why I'm single today
and I work seven days a week
on a farm because
I wasn't home.
I lost a daughter in a car accident
in 2009.
And
that turned my whole world
upside down, that's why I moved
to Tassie.
You know, I still saw her,
I saw her
probably 20 or 30 times after she died.
I caught up with her, I found her,
wherever she is
I found that place.
This is why I'm here.
Because I ran.
I chose to run.
I wasn't taking the kids camping
and my partner
out to tea and those type of things.
So I don't blame them for leaving.
I know it's out there, I know it's
still alive.
I think if we just leave it alone,
it's either going to survive
or it won't.
I won't not sleep and lose my mind
because I didn't prove the
thylacine exists.
I've been fortunate enough to see two,
I've had one bark at me
and I find their evidence
of them being around
all the time.
Not everybody agrees with me
on the evidence but that's okay.
I feel quite content
knowing that they're there.