In Tasmania (37 page)

 

Benjamin's death on September 7, 1936 caused no stir at all. The day had been fine and mild, but at night it was exceptionally cold and Benjamin was exposed to freezing temperatures without access to a protected shelter. The passing of the last verified representative of its species did not merit a mention in the local press. On the day that Benjamin succumbed to pneumonia, Hobart's Theatre Royal (founded by, among others, Kemp) was enjoying a full house for the opening night of ‘Gaieties', a variety show that featured the tenor Domenico Caruso (‘nephew of the late famous tenor Enrico'); some acrobatic tumbling from The Flying Martinetties (‘whose famous Riseley Act caused a furore'); and Miss Nellie Kelle, ‘the male impersonator', whose performance was so popular that he/she ‘had to submit to numerous recalls'.

The newspapers did, though, devote plenty of space to the prize dogs on show at the Tasmanian Kennel Club in Launceston. ‘Interest in exhibition dogs in Tasmania has never been so marked as at present,' wrote the
Mercury
's correspondent. Not to be outdone, the
Examiner
printed the photograph of a black cocker-spaniel, Peggy of Kareem: ‘We are open to just criticism if we fail to look after our pets.' Ironically, the correspondent ‘Kennel' contributed a piece under the title ‘New Breed for Tasmania' about the first arrival on the island of an Afghan hound. This ‘dignified' dog, called Umbra Singh of Kandahar, was imported to Hobart by Mrs Pedder and had arrived by car from Launceston on the day that Benjamin was discovered dead. ‘This was the breed favoured by Noah and taken into the Ark with him,' wrote ‘Kennel' in a paean to Umbra's ‘extraordinary feet' and blue blood. ‘He has bluer blood in his veins than any other breed in the world and his pedigree traces back to centuries before the Christian era.'

September 7 is now National Threatened Species Day.

 

One of the leading exporters of the Tasmanian tiger to foreign zoos was Errol Flynn's father. In October 1914, Professor Thomas Flynn visited Maria Island and proposed that a thylacine sanctuary be established there. It was finally acquired for this purpose by the Fauna (Animals & Birds Protection) Board in 1966. At the time of writing, Maria Island is still designated to become that reserve should any elusive thylacines be captured alive. But innumerable sightings since 1936 have not been followed by a live, even a dead body of the species. ‘The overwhelming evidence is that the thylacine is extinct,' says Nick Mooney. On September 7, 1986, it was officially declared so.

It is a sombre afternoon on which I visit Mooney, one of Tasmania's most experienced Parks and Wildlife officers. A colleague has drowned, swept into the Southern Ocean from a rock off Tasmania's south-east coast where he was studying the endangered Pedra Blanca skink, a charcoal grey lizard four inches long and not found anywhere else. Mooney knows the rock well: he was stuck there once in bad weather. Running out of food, he had to frighten the gannets into regurgitating mackerel, which he then swallowed.

Mooney is a lean, energising figure who for more than 20 years has been the officer responsible for assessing thylacine evidence. In 1982, Mooney investigated ‘one of the best sightings on record', by another of his colleagues, Hans Naarding. The ranger had gone to sleep in the back of his car in a remote forested area near Togari in the north-west. ‘It was raining heavily,' Naarding wrote. ‘At 2.00 a.m. I awoke and out of habit scanned the surrounds with a spotlight. As I swept the light-beam around, it came to rest on a large thylacine, standing side on some six to seven metres distant. My camera bag was out of immediate reach so I decided to examine the animal carefully before risking movement. It was an adult male in excellent condition with 12 black stripes on a sandy coat. Eye reflection was pale yellow. It moved only once, opening its jaw and showing its teeth. After several minutes of observation, I attempted to reach my camera bag, but in doing so I disturbed the animal and it moved away into the undergrowth.' Naarding left his car and walked to where the animal had disappeared. There was a strong scent.

The sighting was kept secret for two years while Mooney searched 150 square miles. He pegged out road-killed wallabies south of Smithton. He planted automatic cameras in mud pits along the Arthur River. He made plaster of Paris casts of tracks and collected animal faeces that he subjected to high performance liquid chromatography. He was full of hope. The ‘wilderness' near Togari might not have been a traditional habitat for thylacines, which preferred eucalyptus forests and coastal plains, but unexpected patterns of behaviour emerged sometimes when the equilibrium of a species was disrupted by clear-felling and settlement. Naarding had seen his thylacine in March, the start of the breeding season. Perhaps it had been travelling in search of a mate. ‘I prefer to throw frustrations aside and be optimistic that more of us will see this mysterious and beautiful creature,' Mooney wrote in 1984.

Twenty years on, Mooney is less certain that Naarding saw a thylacine. ‘Hans Naarding is as close as you're going to get – one of your own mates, a very reliable, extremely experienced Wild Life officer. But one could also add that he knew exactly what he should see, where, when, how.'

Nothing would excite the biologist more than to discover a healthy specimen alive: ‘The only thing that has kept me in Tasmania is that off-chance.' Mooney has no truck with scientists who seek to clone it. ‘“Clown it”, we call it. I would argue it's quite irresponsible. It's teaching people “extinct” is not for ever. The same technology should be applied to preventing extinction.'

Mooney's experience of following up thylacine sightings over two decades has inevitably left him jaded. ‘With every sighting there are four options.
Did
they see one? Was it a mistake? Did they have a vision? Are they lying?'

In a place where people seldom keep secrets, a surprising number of people will promise you that if they saw a Tasmanian tiger they would not tell a soul. While Tasmania has no shortage of people who believe that they
have
seen a thylacine, fear of ridicule or a wish to prevent a media feeding frenzy encourages most of them to keep the sighting to themselves. Others have contacted Mooney and are disappointed that he has not seemed to take their claim seriously. They say he is sitting on the information.

 

Buck and Joan Emberg are retired university teachers. Joan is the granddaughter of a Hamburg stowaway who jumped ship at Strahan and ended up in Queenstown managing the F.O. Henry store. Buck came to Tasmania in 1971 from North Minnesota for some adventure and to avoid conscription to Vietnam.

‘We were the first who really went public,' Buck says.

Late one evening in the spring of 1978, they were driving home from Launceston. It was wet, Buck says, but not raining. ‘I was travelling at 75 kilometres an hour when at about 11 p.m., two kilometres west of Lilydale, there in the lights stood a mother thylacine and baby thylacine right next to the road. We caught both of them full side on and knew immediately. The very big head, the stance – like a kangaroo on all fours – the stiff tail and the stripes. I braked and missed them and as I pulled in I said to Joan: “Don't say anything until you've thought this through, but are you sure of what we just saw?” She paused for 15 seconds. “I just saw two tigers.” “That's what I saw,” I said. We turned around, hoping. But they had moved off.'

Until that moment, Buck had accepted that the thylacine was extinct. What he encountered on the road to Lilydale changed his life. ‘I'm considered to be this crazy person. I won't go into a bar. I've been run off the road twice. They even used my name illegally in a website to say bad things about the Green Party.'

Next day, he telephoned friends. They laughed at him. He began to interview other people known to have sighted the thylacine in the same area. Quite soon, he had gathered 30 witnesses. One was an electrician who had caught a Tasmanian tiger in his gun-sights before realising what it was. Another was a Welsh woman who had trained with the police. A third was a local photographer who came to be known as the Tiger Man.

Buck showed me three black and white photographs that the Tiger Man had taken in 1995 of an animal's footprints in the mud. They were photographed within walking distance of Buck's house.

‘These are the prints of the animal,' he says.

I ask if I can fetch my camera. Buck says not. The Tiger Man does not wish his photographs to be seen and has put the negatives in a safe with a lawyer. But I may draw them if I like.

As I make a quick sketch, Buck tells me that almost everyone who reported what they saw was told to shut up and has been derided by his or her community. ‘Especially by the government, especially by Nick Mooney.'

A year after the sighting in Lilydale, Buck was out walking when he came upon a giant scat. ‘It was bigger than anything I'd seen. Like a thick cigar twelve inches long and not twisted like devil scat.' Buck put it in a plastic bag and took it to Mooney. ‘He looked at it and threw it in a drawer with other scats. “Just a devil,” Mooney told me. “We will not believe the animal exists until we catch it with the morning's
Examiner
in its mouth.” This,' Buck says, ‘is what we're dealing with.'

I drive with Buck and Joan to the other side of Lilydale, to where they saw their thylacines. In answer to the charge that no squashed tiger has been found on any road, Buck says that there are an estimated 250,000 feral cats in Tasmania and yet how many end up as road-kill? He talks about pandas in China that were rediscovered in an area of a mere 500 square miles. ‘Tasmania has 26,000 square miles.' In
Thylacine
, Owen writes of other ‘extinct' animals that have come back. He cites the examples of the coelacanth, the golden hapalemur, the noisy scrub bird, the Vietnamese rhino and the giant sable antelope of Angola. Then there are the three Tasmanian emus, believed extinct for 25 years, seen on a beach at Emu Bay in October 1911.

At last we reach the place. There is a garage workshop opposite and cars speed by. The mother and puppy had stood at the entrance to a small, steep field in which there is a green-roofed bungalow. A notice on the gate warns of a guard dog.

‘Do you regret having seen a Tasmanian tiger?'

Joan answers immediately. ‘No.'

Buck goes on thinking. ‘No,' he says at last. ‘I feel treasured and privileged to have seen it. It has altered my life in that I don't give a damn about what people feel and it has strengthened my resolve.'

‘In the face of ridicule, I might add,' says Joan, who turns out to be blind in one eye. ‘
You
can handle the ridicule. Most Tasmanians can't.'

 

In February 2001, Mooney received a photograph purporting to show a furry red animal streaking through a pine forest in northern Tasmania. His life has not been the same since.

I meet him at the Epping service station on the Midlands Highway where he is engaged in tracking down a predator whom he believes poses ‘the greatest risk to biodiversity in Tasmania and to Tasmanian mammals since the last Ice Age'.

Better than most, Mooney is in a position to understand that Tasmania is an intensely fragile place. As the scientist seconded to the ‘Fox-free Tasmania' programme, Mooney is behind an effort to exterminate between five and ten red foxes that may have been smuggled across Bass Strait from Victoria, where foxes – introduced by the English to keep down rabbits – have made Australia, he says, ‘a world leader in mammalian extinction'.

Mooney knows of at least one previous attempt to introduce foxes. ‘In the 1890s, an English army officer imported a pair to Hobart without permission, to breed up for release. The authorities heard about it and went at once to Anglesea barracks. They shot one in the grounds. The other ran up a culvert and was cornered.' The story may have reached John Myers at his office in London Film Productions, because in one version of the biography that he concocted for Merle Oberon her putative father was fox-hunting in Tasmania when he suffered his fatal fall. Certainly, Anthony Trollope felt that he looked out over a country ‘well adapted for running a drag'. Of the road from Hobart to Launceston, he remarked that ‘the English traveller would imagine that there was a fox covert on each side of him'. Halfway to Launceston, Trollope passed through Campbell Town, where still stands the Foxhunter's Return: a grand, three-storey convict-built inn with Victorian hunting prints above the staircase –
Bolting the fox
,
Run to catch
,
Whoop
,
A sure find
– and, hung on a hook outside the office, a hunter's pink jacket made by a tailor in England. Here at the opposite end of the earth is enacted, once a year, a ritual lacking its crucial ingredient. Contemporary photographs in the hall show the riders of the Midlands Hunt Club assembled at a meet in March. Surrounded by a pack of excited hounds, they prepare to drag a dead kangaroo through the Campbell Town bush.

In the lounge of the Foxhunter's Return, the landlady shows me two 80-year-old fox pelts draped over a pair of red velvet chairs. She bought them in a garage sale. ‘That's Izzy and that's Rudolf,' she says. ‘I reckon they're the only foxes in Tasmania.'

Just then an old man enters who disputes this. He says that he saw a fox a year ago, halfway from here to Ross. ‘It was just off the road, heading for the sandstone quarry. That colour,' and he taps Izzy's fur. ‘I said “Look!” to the missus. “Look bloody there!”'

‘Did you tell Parks and Wildlife?'

‘I'm not that silly. They harass you.' He says: ‘If you rang to say you'd seen a Tasmanian tiger, they'd say “Don't be stupid.” If you rang to say you'd seen a fox, in five minutes you'd have ten men here with special dogs – and next day, 20.'