Thylacine (2 page)

On an interesting point of nomenclature, the vessels were the 60-ton warship
Heemskerck
and the smaller brig
Zeehaen
, which between them today have Tasmanian mountains, a town and a winery named after them. Tasman sailed aboard the
Heemskerck
, which was skippered by Ide Tjercxszoon. Had Tasman died, Tjercxszoon would have formally succeeded him as commander, which might have led to the island having an even stranger name.

The short stop on the Forestier Peninsula had four outcomes of note. First, a sailor swam ashore and planted a flag, thereby taking formal Dutch possession of the new land which they had already named Van Diemen's Land when at anchor off Macquarie Harbour on the west coast a week or so earlier.

Second, they had no conception that they had circumnavigated the southern half of an island, reckoning this coastline to be part of
Terra Australis Cognita
, the known south land, by then referred to as New Holland. The Dutch had already explored the coastline of New Holland from Cape York in the north down the western coast to the Great Australian Bight in the south. This misconception was to endure for a long time.

Third, a small exploration party searching for fresh water found little—despite the nearby presence of pleasant Bream Creek, which also happens to have a winery named after it—but they did hear human sounds, including music, and also found climbing notches cut into trees. They correctly surmised that the treetops contained food sources (mainly possums), but the wide spacing of the notches led them to wonder if perhaps giants inhabited the place. Abel Tasman's journal described the notches as ‘about 5 foot asunder, so that we must either conclude that these people were very great, or else that they have some unknown trick'. Jonathan Swift's 1726
Travels Into Several Remote
Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver
is set in or near Van Diemen's Land and has, of course, the famous giant Brobdingna-gians. Swift had access to an English translation of Tasman's journal. Is the greatest and most profound satire on the follies of humanity owed to a race that was destined for near-genocide?

And fourth, the party in search of water ‘saw the footing of wild beasts having claws like a tyger, and other beasts'.
¹
This is the first known written reference to a Tasmanian marsupial, and is generally accepted as recording the marks of a thylacine. Certainly, thylacines were plentiful in that area—the nearby steeply wooded Ragged Tier in particular, as well as the Spring Bay area, later to be intimately associated with a government bounty to exterminate the animal—but those prints near the turquoise waters of Marion Bay could just as well have been from a wombat, which has a large pad and elongated, distinctive claws—very tiger-like. The fact is that once Europeans sighted the thylacine, with its remarkable stripes, the erroneous name originally applied by the Dutch explorers stuck.

Footprints of thylacine, dog, devil and wombat.
a
left front foot of thylacine;
b
left rear
foot of thylacine;
c
dog;
d
right front foot of devil;
e
rear foot of devil;
f
left front foot of
wombat.

Uncertainty, confusion, misinformation: when a rare species becomes victim of all three, over a sustained period of time, its chances of indefinite survival are slim indeed. The thylacine's uniqueness in part proved its undoing, because the earliest Van Diemen's Land European settlers, 150 years after Tasman, had to ‘invent' it—and they did so in a welter of confusion, wrongly ascribing to it the characteristics of known predatory mammals. In this way it became a big cat/wolf/wild dog/hyaena hybrid, an elusive New World creature as disturbing as the venom-spurred platypus was bizarre.

Immediately prior to the British establishing a precarious settlement at Risdon Cove in the island's far south in late 1803, a French expedition led by Captain Nicolas Baudin had extensively charted parts of the island's coastline. Although political motives were ascribed to this voyage—France and England were at war—its
raison d'être
was scientific. Many thousands of biological specimens were recorded and interaction with the indigenous peoples was frequent and, mostly, amicable. From them the French learnt a great deal. Yet there is not one reference to thylacines. While this may seem an unaccountably odd omission, given the great variety of animals, birds, fishes and insects described in Baudin's journal, it is, perhaps, an early pointer to this predator's elusiveness and nocturnal habits—two known characteristics which today lead many Tasmanians to the conviction that the thylacine yet exists.

What is it? Early Van Diemen's Land settlers and scientists were perplexed by the
weird marsupial carnivore, with its apparent cat-like, dog-like, wolf-like and hyena-like
characteristics.
(Robert Paddle,
The Last Tasmanian Tiger: The History and
Extinction of the Thylacine
, p. 53)

Geopolitical ambitions of the day notwithstanding, zoology, botany, mineralogy and anthropology had become of central importance to European voyages of exploration and settlement.

A massive increase in knowledge was radically changing scientific disciplines in Britain and continental Europe, which had for so long been fixed in dogma. Thus, as an example, Aristotle's faunal catalogue
Historia Animalium
was in some senses only superseded by the monumental 1735
Systema Naturae
of the Swede Carolus Linnaeus.

In 1806 the island's Deputy Surveyor-General, George Harris, was the first to scientifically classify the ‘tyger'. He named it
Didelphis cynocephala
, the first Latin term placing it in the sub-order of South American marsupials, the second meaning ‘dog-headed'. But this was found to be incorrect by, horror of horrors, French scientists following the groundbreaking work of their compatriots Georges Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who had earlier redefined zoology by introducing the science of comparative anatomy. This meant that classifications were to be established, and when necessary re-established, on the basis of anatomical relationships. In this way Cuvier and Saint-Hilaire set up the fundamental genera and classification schemes still in use. The animal so confused science that its classification changed three times until the correct
Thylacinus
cynocephalus
was arrived at in 1824.
²

So much for science. But what were the early perceptions of the convicts and the settlers slowly spreading out from Hobart Town and Port Dalrymple (Launceston), who almost without exception had no knowledge of or interest in the nature of this creature?

Interactions with it were infrequent. Yet it soon developed a fearsome reputation, well-founded or not. In 1822 the Surveyor General, George William Evans, published an account of the island, in the zoology section of which he refers to the ‘opossumhyena' that ‘few . . . have seen'. In somewhat contradictory fashion, Evans further observes that:

this animal of the panther tribe . . . though not found in such numbers as the native dog is in New Holland, commits dreadful havoc among the flocks. It is true that its ravages are not so frequent; but, when they happen, they are more extensive. This animal is of a considerable size, and has been known, in some few instances, to measure six feet and a half from the tip of the nose to the extremity of the tail. Still it is cowardly, and by no means formidable to man: indeed, unless when taken by surprize, it invariably flees from his approach.
³

So even after twenty years, the creature remained ill-defined in the popular imagination, as well as the scientific mind. This is amply demonstrated by the multitude of names it acquired.

The names known to have been bestowed on the thylacine include: zebra opossum, zebra wolf, Tasmanian zebra, marsupial wolf, striped wolf, tiger wolf, Tasmanian wolf, Van Diemen's Land tiger, Tasmanian tiger, bulldog tiger, greyhound tiger, hyaena tiger, dog-faced dasyurus, dog-faced opossum, hyaena, native hyaena, opossum-hyaena, dingo/Tasmanian dingo and panther. Aboriginal names will be addressed in a later chapter.

This list may seem improbable and suspiciously long, but the explanation is relatively simple. Genuine confusion and uncertainty aside, the sad fact is that the thylacine attracted names of opprobrium from human forces increasingly opposed to its existence. (Unlike, for example, the herbivorous and generally docile giraffe, which the ancient Romans called
camelopardalis
: the camel marked like a leopard.)

University academic Robert Paddle, whose landmark work
The Last Tasmanian Tiger
is scholarly, original and insightful, makes the point that the common, but incorrect, translation of its classification name
Thylacinus cynocephalus
as ‘the dog-headed pouched-dog' is not just inelegant, but ‘borders upon the stupid and crass'.
⁴

Thylacines have approximately sixteen
stripes. This is one of very few photographs
showing thylacine–human interaction. Is it
being fed? Petted?
(Collection Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery) Other translations, such as Ellis Troughton's version in his classic text on Australian mammals, seem little better: ‘the pouched dog with the wolf head'. Troughton, for all his experience, prolonged an unsubstantiated belief. He wrote: ‘The thylacine is usually spoken of by country folk as the “Tiger” in reference to the sixteen to eighteen dark chocolate stripes across the lower back, which provide a similar protective camouflage to that of the tiger when moving amongst foliage barred by sunlight'.
⁵
A presumptive statement of fact—and who, perhaps, can blame the author?—it nevertheless was unhelpful, continuing to rely on a cross-species assumption. Tiger stripes, which are broken striations, and thylacine stripes, which are firm bands, don't necessarily have the same function.

What did the word ‘tiger' mean in the consciousness of the early nineteenth-century Britons and Irish transplanted to remote Van Diemen's Land? Colonial experience of, for example, Bengal tigers, meant stealth, ferocity, cunning, near-invisibility, powerful swimming, nocturnalism, awesome strength and, from time to time, man-eating. What fledgling Vandemonian sheep farmer would happily go to bed with that on his mind? An accurate examination of the thylacine's predatory habits shows that it has virtually none of those tiger-like characteristics.

The terms ‘bulldog tiger' and ‘greyhound tiger' were scientifically applied in a short-lived attempt to prove that the island was inhabited by two species of thylacine, an elementary error caused by confusion over relative size differences between males and females, adults and juveniles. In the early 1920s anti-thylacine forces tried to resurrect this false notion in order to suggest thylacine plenitude.

The simplistic logic of applying the tag ‘zebra' to the animal is also understandable. The very last thing those earliest settlers and their convicts were concerned about was the proper naming of flora or fauna; not when starvation, unpredictable indigenes and foul weather combined to obstruct the development of muddy Hobart Town. But the sheer inappropriateness of the connection is worthy of comment. Does the zebra, like the tigers of Asia, have stripes to blend in? Not with the African landscape! There is genuine uncertainty about this most distinctive of mammalian patterning. Perhaps the zebra has stripes to blend out, thereby aiding predators to identify the weaker individuals in the herd and saving all concerned unnecessary energy expenditure, for as soon as a kill is made the herd stops running.