Thylacine (20 page)

History shows that the first true Tasmanian conservation campaign began in the one place where there ought to have been no need for a campaign—the Russell Falls–Mount Field National Park, where in 1949 the government of the day overrode existing protective legislation in order to permit 7000 acres (2000 hectares) of its Florentine Forest to be logged for the newsprint company ANM. It was a surreptitious move, but it caused a public outcry and led to the formation of the state's first conservation group. That group did not achieve its major objective but laid the foundations for future public action against government and business acting together to put profit before environmental considerations—of which the bounty scheme had been but the first example.

At the end of World War II the director of the animal sanctuary at Healesville in Victoria, David Fleay (he who shot the famous thylacine footage), was given official Fauna Board support to head an expedition to capture a thylacine pair for breeding purposes. The group covered a lot of territory in the west, their baits including bacon, live chickens and meat. Again there were prints, sightings obtained from local bushmen, and one evening the party listened to a thylacine calling. Fleay's major recommendation after the expedition was that snaring and trapping be prohibited across the south-west. He felt also that poisoned devil baits were surely being taken by thylacines. It was another alarm bell, from an experienced zoologist.

Yet the official position on thylacine protection seemed to be somewhat muddled, even counter-productive, as a 1946 letter, written by the director of the Queen Victoria Museum in Launceston to a snarer, suggests:

Dear Sir,

I have received your letter about the Tasmanian Tiger which you have heard near your house.

The Tiger is a protected animal and can only be killed or captured by special permission. This Museum holds such a permit and will authorise you to take the animal on its behalf on the understanding that if successful you present the living animal or its carcase to this Museum. Would you please let me know if you are agreeable to this; when exhibited it would be shown as a gift from you.

Your local police trooper would be advised that you were trapping for the Tiger on our behalf.

You could try to trap the Tiger in the following ways:-

(a) Build a large cage with an entrance passage, screen it with bushes. Drag a trail leading to it with bait; you can use the intestines of a sheep or use rabbits and so on. Put the bait in the cage after you have dragged the trail. Set a trip catch at the end of the passage which would release a door set at the entrance to the passage when the Tiger knocked it.

This trap would probably be the most satisfactory but would involve considerable work.

(b) The second method is to drag the bait along a run and set strong springer snares on this track. The snares should be of the type which will catch the feet, not a strangling snare, as we want to get the animal alive.

If you catch the Tiger let the Police Trooper or myself know
at once
.

Please let me know if you will be trapping. If there is anything you are not sure about tell me when you write.
¹

The classic and frequently reprinted 1941 work of Ellis Troughton,
Furred Animals of Australia
, has already been referred to; his recommendation for the species during that early period of uncertainty was also, not surprisingly, equivocal: ‘Though the interests of the settlers must be the first consideration, there is urgent necessity for an adequately controlled reservation in some remote fastness to ensure the survival of such a unique animal.'
²
Troughton also kept alive the questionable marsupial trademark: ‘Keen observers have stated that, if hard pressed, it will rise on the hind-legs and hop like a kangaroo. This action may be for clearing obstacles in haste, but the appearance of the hindquarters supports the idea'.
³

Alas, there were those who continued to wreak havoc upon it, if only in print:

Zoologists are fascinated by the Devil and Wolf-Tiger because these are the only marsupials of their kind left in the world . . . For the average visitor, however, the pair have only a museum interest: they are never seen by the tourist, although a Devil may be found in a zoo. The man who brings a Tasmanian Wolf to an American zoo will make a fortune. Speaking of them from the purely personal standpoint, both animals are stinking and vicious, and Tasmanians are entirely agreed that outside zoos they are not missed from the Tasmanian landscape.
⁴

By the early 1950s Tasmania's population had topped the 300 000 mark, thanks in part to immigration—mostly English and Dutch—and the economy had benefited from postwar economic booms, particularly in farming. Modernisation through mechanisation greatly increased agricultural output, which had knock-on effects:

Transport and communications also changed radically . . . Roads partly based on ancient Aboriginal tracks and the easiest path for horse or bullock teams, were straightened, old settlements bypassed and modern highways pushed through to facilitate the speed and easy travel of cars and semi-trailers. In the bush, chain-saws and caterpillar-track vehicles took over from axes, horses and sheer manpower.
⁵

None of this could possibly bode well for a perilously endangered species reliant for its survival on a total absence of human interference. But interest in it continued, to the extent that at the official level there were fears that thylacines were, more than ever, being pursued for personal gain. Was it turning into a legend? The worried Fauna Board ‘became more and more sensitive to people operating without [its] knowledge or approval. By the mid 1950s, it determined to control all tiger searches and started its own investigations'.
⁶
This was a logical and welcome advancement as a protective measure. But, in a fact-is-stranger-than-fiction move, the Board was once again undermined by its own government, which secretly negotiated with a mainland media organisation and
Life
magazine to sell the visual rights arising out of any capture. Effectively, the government was auctioning off copyright in the thylacine. Guiler, the then chairman of the Board, states that the Board was ‘greatly distressed and annoyed' and exerted pressure on Labor premier Eric Reece (who was later to feature in more tiger business), forcing him to pull the plug on the deal.

So it was that between 1957 and 1966 there were eight official searches, investigations and expeditions, with Guiler involved in all of them. While the localities and methods differed, what they had in common was justified optimism at the outset and negative results at the end. The first search was prompted by apparently unmistakable thylacine behaviour in the Derwent Valley, involving sheep kills, with one lamb the victim of precise entry through the rib cage to remove the liver.

A 1958 sighting in the Ben Lomond area, with a confirmed thylacine print, led to a large baited trap being set up by Guiler and a team near a group of cave lairs. Nearby trees had sheeps' heads nailed to them and at a later stage bullock livers were dragged around. Again, all to no avail.

Like so many Tasmanian ‘localities' (defined as having 200 inhabitants or less, with some facilities), Trowutta is little known and off the beaten track. South of Woolnorth, it is an entry point for the Milkshake Hills Forest Reserve and the uninhabited wilderness beyond and is very much thylacine country. Here Guiler investigated an alleged sighting by an experienced snarer who claimed to have seen a thylacine on, of all things, the woodheap at Trowutta Mill. Again, the investigation went nowhere, but later in the same area a large unknown animal escaped from a snare set by James Malley (who remains one of the state's major tiger resurrectionists). Guiler's opinion was that Malley's snare had not caught a thylacine because the disturbance at the scene didn't fit with ‘the agreed opinion of thylacine hunters that they just gave up in a snare'.
⁷
Such is the frustrating mystique of the animal that this contrasts directly with the experience decades earlier of an experienced bushman who bought and sold thylacines to zoos: ‘Mr Bart thinks he caught one himself in a snare, judging by the way it had chewed its way out, making a terrific mess of the surrounding vegetation. Dog very scared'.
⁸

In the late 1950s and early 1960s Guiler led a number of expeditions and investigations at Woolnorth. This locality held promise for a number of reasons, not least its being largely unchanged since its initial use for sheep pasturage in the 1830s. These searches were notable for the first use of fixed cameras, purchased for the purpose from RAAF disposal stores. At this time too, a little further south at Sandy Cape, there occurred a famous and controversial incident in which two fishermen were awoken by a sound and one of them, seeing a pair of eyes glowing in the dark, struck out with a piece of wood. The next day they discovered that they had killed a thylacine. Had they? Whatever the truth, from that point their story became the bush equivalent of an urban legend, in which they stashed the carcass underneath a sheet of roofing iron and went off to tell of the deed. Alas, when they returned it had been stolen and was later, apparently, offered for sale to Sir Edward Hallstrom of the Taronga Park Trust, who refused it, after which it was dumped in the sea. (Hallstrom had earlier conducted three unofficial thylacine searches and it was these that prompted the Fauna Board to step in and mount searches of its own.)

Eric Guiler with a small stuffed thylacine head. Guiler devoted much of his adult
working life to the thylacine, trying to protect it through habitat preservation, searching
for it and writing about it.
(
The Mercury
)

Guiler made two more west coast trips, the first funded by the government, with Premier Reece hoping for good thylacine publicity. Thousands of leg snares were fruitlessly laid. The second—supported by a World Wildlife Fund grant—was inspired by the government's acquisition of Maria Island as a sanctuary where captured thylacines could be released. This happened in 1966, after considerable lobbying by Guiler and his Board. In turn, the Board was itself being vigorously lobbied at this time by a public group seeking protection for a much bigger area, the south-west wilderness. That group, the South-West Committee, had recently been formed in response to growing public and commercial interest in one of the world's most unspoilt tracts: the great swathe of mountains, forests and rivers stretching from the central plateau to the remote southwest coast.

The Board was under pressure because it stood between the South-West Committee and the Hydro-Electric Commission (HEC), which had for a decade been investigating the area's great commercial potential. Already there existed, at the very core of the south-west, the Lake Pedder National Park (legislated in 1955 thanks to the efforts of the Hobart Walking Club). What might come next? The committee wanted a sanctuary declared, but that would have shut out commercial exploitation. The three parties compromised and agreed upon a 646 000 hectare Faunal District encompassing Pedder:

Dr. Guiler said Tasmania once again had gone to the front in conservation programmes. With the exception of the Northern Territory, it would be the biggest area reserved for wildlife in Australia . . . No one will be allowed to take any animal or bird from the area, or enter it with guns, dogs, traps or snares without the written permission of the Board.
⁹

It may have seemed like a comprehensive victory in the belated attempt to save the thylacine, but in reality this deal marked the first—and decidedly least bitter—three-way contact between Tasmania's officialdom, its economic oligarchies and its conservationists. The fight for Tasmania's future was about to start, and at its heart was Lake Pedder. Extinction, exploitation, preservation, had inevitably come together. As was so wryly reported in
The Mercury
:

People fighting to preserve the South-West as a wilderness reserve were grabbing the Tasmanian tiger by the tail, the Premier (Mr. Reece) said yesterday . . . He said the south-west had ‘a few badgers, kangaroos and wallabies, and some wild flowers that can be seen anywhere'. An Opposition member interjected: ‘And the Tasmanian tiger'. Mr. Reece: ‘We haven't been able to catch up with him yet. These people (preservationists) are grabbing him by the tail when they grab this issue.'
¹⁰

Reece had handed the Fauna Board £2000 to find a thylacine; his government could happily give a little on one side, knowing how much would be coming in from the other.

In the nineteenth century the thylacine had been deemed a negative, dangerous part of the natural environment. But when in the twentieth century that environment came to be considered a highly lucrative and therefore positive resource, it was the people trying to protect it who were now considered negative and dangerous. Tasmania's battles over water and wood, in the ever-lengthening shadow of the tiger, were set to begin in earnest. The proto-conservation groups were under no illusions as to what they were up against. Regarding water: ‘Hydro-industrialisation is the policy of building dams to provide electricity for heavy, energy-intensive industry. It is a policy that pleases many. Unions get construction jobs, the Hydro-Electric Commission gets a bigger empire, the companies get heavily subsidised power and politicans get re-elected'.
¹¹
Regarding wood: