Thylacine (9 page)

Somehow Palana managed to get up, but when he tried to run away Tarner caught him in his arms and quickly throwing him again to the ground, began to stamp the life out of him.

Palana screamed as loudly as he could, ‘Help! Help!'

The echoes chased around the bush, rushing from tree to tree, crag to crag.

A nameless hyena pup, enjoying an unequal chase with Lenira, the Bandicoot, heard the cries. He stopped chasing Lenira, who could not believe his good luck, and raced to help.

Fearless, the pup leaped into the fight, ripping and tearing at the big boomer. Tarner picked up the boy, and backing against a rock, squeezed until Palana felt his life almost ebbing. The Great Kangaroo kept the young hyena at bay with his big raking hind feet.

The smart pup quickly dashed up onto the rock and sprang at Tarner, driving his sharp fangs deep into the big animal's throat. Holding the boy with one forearm, Tarner clutched desperately at the brave pup, trying to break the deathhold he had on the kangaroo's throat.

But the little hyena was there to stay.

Body tense and eyes closed, he concentrated all his strength in a mighty effort to close his jaws. Slowly he felt the flesh and sinew give under the pressure of his grip, and suddenly his teeth crashed together with a loud snap.

The big boomer, staggering and trembling violently, crashed to the ground, taking Palana and the pup with him.

There they lay motionless, exhausted and stunned beside their dead enemy.

Some time later a party of blackmen picked up the unconscious pair and carried them back to camp. The pup recovered first. Soon Palana stirred and looked about him.

There he saw Moinee the god, his father.

Walking up to Palana, the god smiled down at him and said, ‘You have done well for one so young, my son. You have come through your baptism of danger bravely and unaffected. In a very short period of time you have passed from childhood and now stand on the threshhold of young manhood. So be it.'

Straightaway the little boy arose and stood proudly.

He appeared to ignore his father so intent was his gaze on the hyena pup. Moinee read Palana's thoughts and a look of admiration crossed his stern face.

‘From today you will make your own decisions,' Moinee said, ‘and you will bestow your own rewards.'

But Palana heard not a word.

Walking over to the little hyena, the boy put his arms around the torn and bleeding neck, gently helping the pup as he rose painfully to his feet on tired, wobbly legs.

Looking into his weary yellow eyes, Palana said ‘Truly you are the bravest of the brave. Today you fought not as a pup but as the Wurrawana Corinna, the Great Ghost Tiger.'

Kneeling down beside the pup, Palana reached down to where his blood had run into the ashes of the fire, and with his fingers, mixed the blood and the ashes into a thick paste.

Then, with this thick brown paste, Palana described a number of dark stripes across the pup's back from the top of his shoulders to the butt of his rigid tail, saying as he did so, ‘From this day forward, all shall know you as Corinna the Tiger.
⁶

In contrast, the island's other sizeable carnivore
,
the scavenging devil, is called by Timler ‘Taraba, the Nasty One'. He is disliked by all because, with his coal-black coat, ‘he would skulk around on very dark nights, silent as a ghost, attacking the very small, the very young and the very old'. The contrast with the heroic young thylacine is starkly obvious and suggests a potential for the kind of man–animal relationship that had developed elsewhere with
Canis familiaris
, the domestic dog.
⁷

Geographically, the island may broadly be described by four regions running from west to east, in three of which thylacines were well distributed and probably abundant, subject to the usual interruptions to a food supply such as prolonged drought or severe cold. The regions are the mountainous west, the central plateau, the midland plain and the east coast and south-east peninsulas.

Much of the west consists of cool, wet rainforest, the mountains, valleys and river systems of which are unsuitable not only to a pursuit predator but to its prey as well. This was not always the case, however. At the height of the last Ice Age, about 20 000 years ago, rainforest cover was minimal. The Kuti Kina cave in the heart of the south-west, on the Franklin River, was home to a human population whose hunting grounds were the nearby tundra plains where wallabies browsed. Wallabies are prime thylacine prey, so they too would have flourished there, until gradual climate warming produced rainforest conditions and caused the wallabies to disappear, followed by their predators.

These spectacular western mountain ranges of Ordovician sediments in places soak up annual rainfall of more than 3500 millimetres, and can experience snow at any time, but are equally vulnerable to the fires that are such a feature of the Australian seasonal cycle. Dense stands of beech, sassafras, King Billy pine, pencil pine, Huon pine, celery top pine and others— many of which are original Gondwanan stock, which is why they're also found in New Zealand and South America—produce some of the planet's tallest trees and a sunless floor thickly covered in decaying matter. The forest near Cox Bight in the south-west contains the world's most ancient living clonal organism, the 40 000-year-old
Lamatia tasmanica
plant (King's Holly), the breeding ground of one of Australia's rarest birds, the orange-bellied parrot, and is home to the terrestrial mountain shrimp, which has a 200-million-year lineage. Lichens and mosses are prolific. Impenetrable woody thickets of
Anodopetalum
biglandulosum
, commonly known as horizontal, together with leeches, make the area hard going.

Yet the temperate maritime climate enables these forests to support animals like the devil, the carnivorous spotted-tailed quoll and the forest-specific eastern pygmy possum (which, however, is obliged to enter a torpor-like state to survive winter). Echidnas, pademelons (the small rufous wallaby) and possums also inhabit the less rugged areas of the west. All of the latter are prey for the thylacine, which is capable at the least of inhabiting rainforest fringes.

Salt marshes, dunes, wet sedgeland and buttongrass plains make up a generally narrow coastal strip along the entire west coast, but despite being in the face of the wet, cold Roaring Forties, the strip supported both man and thylacine. It is a good example of the animal's ability to adapt to a somewhat uncomfortable microclimate.

The South-West Tribe occupied territory from the natural mid-coast boundary of Macquarie Harbour to the far south-west, including the large offshore Maatsuyker and De Witt Islands, which were visited seasonally for sealing and muttonbirding. This 450 kilometres of coastline supported just four bands, making up a tribe of up to 250 people.
⁸

Not surprisingly, archaeological evidence from middens shows that theirs was a largely marine diet of shellfish, crayfish and seals, supplemented by wombat and wallaby from the narrow coastal plains. The comparatively small human population suggests a similar thylacine pattern, that is, thylacine numbers would also have been governed by modest terrestrial prey populations.

Just as the west coast bands adapted by building fully enclosed huts to cope with the weather, so too the western thylacines might have adapted to their harsher surrounds (although devils show no evidence of such adaptations). Paddle notes that western thylacines may have been darker than their more temperate relatives:

It has been suggested that both size and background colour were associated with thylacine habitat preference, and hence particular subpopulations of the species . . . Such suggestions, that rainforest specimens were darker than those living in the drier, more open central plateau or coast, and that a larger body mass was associated with living in colder, more extreme environments, are not unusual for any mammal.
⁹

The Aborigines' huts were built in groups at intervals along the west coast and were permanent bases. Evidence of them exists in the form of ‘hut pits': circular depressions dug into the soil. The dwellings were constructed over these pits, from a framework of poles bent into a dome shape and thatched with grass and bark. Groups of huts were also built on the cold central plateau. Although a retiring and elusive animal, the thylacine was known to be inquisitive about humans, even if this was only when they had food about them. But that is the first step in semi-domestication. Hand-reared thylacines apparently made manageable pets. They did not have the antisocial nature of the devil. It is not impossible to imagine a permanently settled village having a nearby, non-threatening thylacine presence, the animals waiting to feed on offal and carcasses. But any such relationship would have ceased once Aborigines adopted dogs in large numbers in the early 1800s.

Mount Wellington and Hobart Town from Kangaroo Point 1831–33
, by
John Glover, oil on canvas. One of Glover's earliest and most important works, the
Aborigines it depicts, the last of the Big River and Oyster Bay tribes, were rounded up
by George Robinson and taken to Hobart.
(Collection Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery/National Gallery of Australia)

In contrast to their southern coastal neighbours, the bands of the North-West Tribe numbered perhaps as many as 600 people, making them the second most populous tribe. Five of their eight bands were associated with the extreme north-west, which included a swathe inland to the mountains. This was a particularly fertile area. The coastal lands and islands were rich in maritime foods, such as elephant seals and muttonbirds, and seasonal swan and duck eggs from the lagoons, as well as the usual macropods. The people ‘moved seasonally up and down the coast, travelling along well-marked footpaths or roads to gain easy access through swampy country covered with dense scrub', and further east they used to travel ‘regularly into the high inland country belonging to the North people, particularly to the Surrey and Hampshire Hills region to collect ochre. They travelled through a chain of open plains kept clear by regular firing'.
¹⁰

These deliberately created alterations to the land, for ease of passage, would inevitably suit animals on the move, in the way that, for example, elephant herds bashing clearings through the jungle create pathways and light and thereby openings for other faunal (and floral) species. It was land management of a kind that encouraged, rather than frightened off, animals. Cruel proof of the thylacine's active presence in this fertile corner of the island was to come later, with the establishment of the Van Diemen's Land Company and its disastrous sheep runs on those same Surrey and Hampshire plains. The Company, headquartered at Wool-north at the north-west tip of the island, was to institute the first thylacine bounty scheme. The Company, so its directors claimed, was being greatly harmed by thylacine predations upon its sheep.

East of the mountain ranges, the island's next distinct geographic region is dominated by the high central plateau, much of which is 600 metres above sea level, rising to 1200 metres. Repeated glacial activity created many thousands of highland tarns as well as larger lakes, including Australia's deepest, Lake St Clair, described as ‘incomparable, the loveliest lake in the world'.
¹¹
Rich soils, snowfalls at any time of the year and severe frosts ensure alpine and coniferous forest conditions at higher levels. The plateau is also resplendent with cushion plants, mosses, pandani (
Richea pandanifolia
, the world's largest heath plant, is endemic to Tasmania), poa tussocks, bog, sedgeland, montane grasslands and, at lower elevations, eucalypt-dominated dry sclerophyll vegetation associations.

Devils, quolls, bandicoots and native hens are notable among the species occupying the colder, higher parts. At more moderate levels forests are interspersed with fire-managed plains of silver tussock grass, resulting in wallabies and kangaroos, in very considerable numbers, grazing the grasses, herbs and taller shrubs occurring on these plains and at the forest edges. Later bounty records show that the greatest number of thylacines killed for that purpose were on the central plateau, although that in no way implies that thylacines were most numerous there. (Many snarers operated there, for the valuable fur industry.) Furthermore, the ‘distribution of thylacines bore no relation to altitude. They were found throughout the state, and, if anything, favoured the coastal plains and scrub. However, open savannah woodland was used extensively by thylacines and they were not “confined to the mountainous regions” as was so frequently stated in the literature. This was substantiated by all of the old trappers I talked to about thylacines'.
¹²

Questions of thylacine abundance and distribution will never be adequately answered while there are fundamental gaps in knowledge, such as the size of the family unit and the size of the family home range. Estimates of the latter vary so much as to be completely useless, ranging from a few square kilometres up to almost 300 square kilometres. The Tasmanian devil is known to travel up to about sixteen kilometres at one time in search of food, which suggests an ability in its larger relative to cover considerable ground.