Tasmanian Devil (2 page)

Great tracts of Tasmania are unpopulated, with many areas inaccessible. The King experience provides a surprisingly close natural encounter with a rare animal that even today is wrongly assumed to be aggressive and antisocial and—until its recent devastation—a rural pest. To what extent can we come to know the true devil? As a voyage of devil discovery, this book attempts to answer the question. References are included to most devil literature, good and bad. The devil discoveries, opinions and experiences of experts and casual observers are contained in these pages.

Prior to 1803, the year in which Europeans settled in the island then known as Van Diemen's Land, the devil was known only to the island's 4000 or so indigenous people. There is no documented record of the interactions between those people and the hunter–scavenger carnivore, which was as widespread across the island as were the nine tribes, although archaeological records show that humans and devils used the same cave systems as shelters. All that we have are a few phonetic recordings by early Europeans of the names they heard used for the devil by various tribes, including
tar-de-bar
(or tarrabah),
pile-lin-ner
(or poirinnah) and
par-loo-mer-rer
.

In the two centuries since then, just a small number of individuals can be described as being true devil experts, through their professional dedication to the animal over a substantial period, including much time in the field. They are academic and zoologist Eric Guiler, wildlife officer Nick Mooney, zoologist and curator David Pemberton, marsupial specialist Menna Jones and Trowunna Wildlife Park owner Androo Kelly.

A larger, but still select group of people, have had intimacy with the devil forced upon them tragically, through the spread of devil facial tumour disease, DFTD, the disease that has been killing the animal in increasing numbers since at least the mid-1990s. From the laboratory to the field, dozens of scientists, zoologists, veterinarians, specialist volunteers and bureaucrats are combined in an effort to find the cause of and a cure for DFTD, a virulent facial cancer which causes great suffering and which kills within five months of its manifestation.

A third category knows intimately a different kind of devil, namely, those people who engage with the animal through the daily course of their professions. Tasmanian farmers have the longest unbroken relationship with the devil since European settlement, stretching back 200 years, and even today their opinions of it range from respect to indifference to antagonism. Wildlife park operators are devil experts of another stripe, because they own and nurture the animals in their care, whether captive-born or brought in as surviving dependents of a roadkill mother. Mary Roberts, who operated a zoo in Hobart in the early twentieth century, appreciated the devil like no one before her, and she holds an important place in the devil's story as the first person to study and write about them in detail.

There are also academic experts: the number of postgraduate research students at the University of Tasmania and elsewhere has grown sharply since the first doctoral thesis on the animal was conferred in 1991.

And then there are those for whom the devil has been—or one day will be—a brief encounter. Only rarely are they seen by day in the wild, hence the attraction of the state's increasing number of wildlife parks, which inevitably have devils as the star attraction. To observe three or four in a wildlife park enclosure is a highly controlled experience, but even so, whether dozing, sunbaking, splashing in water, chasing one another or competitively bolting food at mealtime, they are the real thing, almost within touching distance.

The devil's restricted habitat, the absence of devils in overseas zoos, and Tasmania's geographical remoteness—the island is closer to the Antarctic than it is to Darwin—mean that very few people have seen a live Tasmanian devil, far fewer still in the wild. (And until the onset of DFTD, Tasmanians themselves generally thought little about or of the animal.) By contrast Warner Bros.' cartoon character Taz the Tasmanian Devil, a whirling, brown, slobbering creature, has vast international recognition. This compelling paradox is an integral part of the story. Unfortunately, for many Australians the devil is no more than a two-dimensional symbol of the island's identity—even though it has been extinct on the mainland for less than 500 years. Like the thylacine's, the devil's abstracted image can become overwhelming, reducing and belittling the importance of the animal itself.

This book gets as close as it is possible to get to the Tasmanian devil. It is written with great respect for the animal which, until recently, seemed to represent a tremendous evolutionary success story in an ancient continent with a harsh environment. Yet the disease so gravely afflicting the species indicates that, far from being a robust carnivore with no predator species to fear, it is highly vulnerable, and a stark reminder of how limited is our understanding of the unpredictable natural world.

Most difficult of all to describe is the evolutionary ‘fitness' of the Tasmanian devil, its ‘success' as a species. On the one hand it has flourished for tens of thousands of years throughout its island home. Yet that is the result of a negative evolutionary outcome, its range shrinking from all parts of the continent until a remnant population died out in Victoria. Furthermore, island carnivores are among the most vulnerable of isolated species.

But the disease has shown us a glimpse of remarkable devil behaviour. Evidence has emerged that, in response to the decimation of their numbers, devils have tended to become semalparous: males are breeding when much younger—so taking the place of older males dying while still in their mating prime—but as a result are themselves dying after their first and only litter is weaned. Previously seen only in mammals in the related antechinuses and possibly quolls, it appears to be a natural response to prevent the reproductive cycle from being fatally broken. In human terms we might salute these as acts of supreme self-sacrifice for the greater good. And there is another aspect of the devil's behaviour operating in its favour. Time after time, field biologists dealing with sick and dying devils report a tenacious individual will to survive, including emaciated, cancer-ridden mothers weaning to the point of death. Tasmanian devils don't give up.

David Owen
David Pemberton
2005

1

BEELZEBUB'S PUP: A REAPPRAISAL OF THE TASMANIAN DEVIL

Over the years it got to be a war between Dawn and the devils as the stones, wires and other defences around the house foundations got bigger and bigger. Most years, however, the devils won. The growling would be heard and on inspection next morning they had dug their way through the stones and rocks to get back to their nest. Some nights the noise from the devils was amazing. Dawn had a big stick that she would bang on the lounge room floor to quieten them down . . .

D
EBBIE
S
ADLER
, O
RIELTON

G
ood stories, no matter how unalike, share a tried and tested formula: intriguing setting; protagonist (good guy) and antagonist (bad guy); plot strength through mystery, drama and action; climax and resolution. In 1863 Morton Allport, a respected Hobart solicitor and naturalist, wrote a letter to his son Curzon describing a trip he had undertaken with a companion into Tasmania's alpine wilderness. An incidental paragraph of that letter exactly covers this formula, in small, slightly slanted handwriting:

Before leaving Boviak Beach [setting], Packer [good guy] was considerably scared [drama] at meeting [action] what he called a Beelzebub's pup [mystery], in other words, a Tasmanian devil [bad guy], near to the camp but it made off [resolution] before the gun was ready [climax, suspended].
¹

The story of the Tasmanian devil is a remarkable one, surprising, controversial, funny, tragic. Nor has it been told before.

Few mammals have been so negatively named. In 1803, when a ragged boatload of English officers, sailors and convicts settled on the banks of the broad Derwent River, deep in the south of Tasmania, they wrongly assumed the island to be a physical extension of the east coast of New Holland, the name at that time for the Australian mainland. Their mistake was understandable, for in this new place were familiar eucalypt trees, kangaroos, wallabies and parrots. The devil, however, had been extinct on the mainland for centuries and so its vocalisations were unknown to these newcomers who, lying in their tents at night, listened nervously to the beast's alien shrieks and screams emanating from densely wooded mountains and valleys.

A case can be made that the settlers heard devils before seeing them, since the animals are nocturnal and rarely about during the day. Why else christen a small, lolloping scavenger after the supreme embodiment of evil? On the other hand, there is some- thing practical about the name. Beelzebub was Satan's first lieutenant, the prince of devils and ‘lord of the flies'. Carcasses, flies and Tasmanian devils have a lot in common.

Early written reports of the animal condemned it to persecution. It was incorrectly, though perhaps understandably, described as untameably savage, highly destructive to livestock and with such a fierce bite that ordinary-sized dogs were no match for it. How to classify such a creature? The devil has had an array of taxonomic names, including the scary
Sarcophilus
satanicus
(satanic meat lover) and
Diabolus ursinus
(diabolical bear). The most commonly accepted name is
Sarcophilus harrisii
, after the Deputy Surveyor General George Harris who in 1806 described and sketched the devil for the London Zoological Society. But some scientists have in recent times opted for
S. laniarius
, after mainland fossils so named in the 1830s by the French naturalists Georges Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and the English palaeontologist Richard Owen. To add to the uncertainty, there is also
S. moornaensis
, an even earlier mainland fossil, as well as another possible species nestled in time and size between
S. moornaensis
and the extant species.
²
On the other hand, in good Australian vernacular the devil might well be called the pied jumbuck-gobbler,
Gulpemdownus woollyturdii
.

In 1830 the devil was singled out, along with the thylacine, as stock-destroying vermin to be eliminated through bounty schemes. Yet neither of these species was to blame for livestock losses, as shown by 80 years of bounty records painstakingly collected by Eric Guiler. The real culprits in the hard early years of the colony of Van Diemen's Land were poor management decisions and practices, and large packs of feral dogs. It has to be said, though, that the sight of a few devils tearing into a cast sheep or sick lamb does leave a strong impression.

Tasmanian bush myths perpetuate an incorrect fear that devils will attack and eat wounded or incapacitated bushwalkers. No such attack has ever been recorded.
(Courtesy Nick Mooney)

And what of Packer's fear on Boviak Beach? It is true that devils will eat people, but only cadavers and only if the opportunity is there, such as finding a suicide or murder victim in the bush. Tasmania Police forensic services invariably call upon Nature Conservation Branch officers Nick Mooney and Mark Holdsworth on such occasions.

There are, needless to say, Tasmanian devil bush myths, such as the couple hiking in the wilderness: one slips and becomes trapped under a fallen log, the other goes to get help, returns the next morning, and . . . only femur bones and boot-soles are left. In another, a drunk falls into a cattle trough and drowns with his arm hanging out, which gets eaten off.

But an element of caution is probably no bad thing. Alan Scott is manager of the Cameron family farm ‘Kingston', at the foot of Ben Lomond. He describes the sprawling property as being ‘in the middle of nowhere'.
³
(The late Major R. Cameron swore that in 1998 he saw a pair of thylacines on the property.) Scott says of the disease—that has struck hard in the region— that it is terrible no longer having devils about the place. Yet when he first began working on the property many years ago, and was required to do lone mustering on horseback in remote back paddocks, he feared the prospect of taking a fall, of being incapacitated far from help with night coming on. Indeed, Mooney says he has come across this fear many times.