Thylacine (7 page)

There remain two aspects of thylacine behaviour to consider. One is the animal's diet, the other its relationship to humans. Its speed and agility—or lack of either or both—would clearly have a bearing on how it hunts. Thylacines are believed to overwhelmingly prefer macropods (wallabies and kangaroos) as prey. Adult kangaroos are considerably larger than thylacines. These prey animals, which are both reasonably swift, are active from dusk to dawn, generally feeding on open plains beyond the treeline. This suggests an ideal scenario for the cooperative hunting seen on the African plains, in which the prey group is panicked and flees and a weak individual chased and brought down. Thylacines have been reported hunting both singly and in small, family-sized groups. Cooperative techniques would appear feasible for an animal that isn't fast, that pursues prey sometimes big or bigger than itself, and has a known ability to pursue until the prey is exhausted.

The following observation by animal behaviourists Jane and Hugo van Lawick-Goodall of East African hunting dogs (an endangered species), which they called nomads of the plains, can with some justification be imaginatively superimposed onto a marsupial meadow of the pre-European island, since it describes a technique which the thylacine is known to use:

Wild dogs normally approach a selected individual or herd very slowly, walking with their heads held low and parallel with the ground, and adopting a slight crouch in their gait. In this way the hunters can sometimes get to within fifty yards or so of a herd of zebras or wildebeests before the intended prey begins to run . . . From this point, the hunt may develop in a number of different ways. Sometimes, particularly when the dogs are approaching a small herd, it appears that the prey is selected before the chase begins, often by the leader of the pack. When he starts to run the other dogs follow suit, and all dogs pursue the same prey until it is either caught or manages to escape. At other times, usually when the wild dogs are hunting large herds, the pack makes a short chase towards a group of animals and then stands or walks slowly whilst watching intently as the herd starts to run . . . What are the dogs looking for when they stand watching a herd run past them? And why do the individuals of a normally closely united pack sometimes separate in seeming disorder? [Because] both techniques enable the wild dogs to select an individual from the herd that is, in some way, weaker and slower . . . During the actual chase wild dogs placed behind the leaders will cut corners when the prey changes direction and so gain positions farther forward in the pack, or actually in the lead. This is particularly noticeable when the dogs chase a Thompson's gazelle, for this creature usually zigzags across the plains when hunted, or describes a very large circle, so that, by the end of the chase, several different dogs may have led the pack simply by cutting the corners.
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A wallaby when hunted also flees in a wide circle, which the thylacine has been observed to cut across, finally ambushing it after what may have been an exhaustive chase. While Guiler notes a lack of evidence to support pack hunting, Paddle, on the other hand, sees ‘placental chauvinism' at work in falsely condemning the thylacine to a lack of speed and therefore to a hunting technique relying solely upon dogged pursuit. He suggests that dynamic thylacine striping enables individuals to instantly recognise each other: a vital part of daytime cooperative hunting. African hunting dogs are also vividly, idiosyncratically marked.
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So it is that the stripes possibly have a hunting function. Can the same be said for the tail? Arising out of a number of early assumptions, the thylacine was credited with being a marine predator, and a good one at that. Settlers had learned from the island's Aborigines that thylacines were strong swimmers. This in itself is a common mammalian characteristic, as most mammals have bodies of water as part of their habitat. But from the very beginning scientists reckoned the compressed– flattened–stiffened tail to be adapted for swimming, and this, combined with obvious empirical evidence—the early white settlers were all on the coast—of thylacines roaming the seashore, led to the belief that they ate crustaceans, seal pups and washed-up marine carcasses, and even chased fish! (The earliest description of the Tasmanian devil claimed that it ate blubber . . .)

The eminent naturalist Michael Sharland, writing in the 1960s, stated as fact that ‘being essentially a hunter and a discriminating one, satisfied only with warm flesh, it was natural for it to prey upon sheep and lambs which were easier to hunt than native game'.
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A less savoury misconception relates to the thylacine's alleged blood-thirst. Experts do not disagree on its predilection for vascular tissue and some of the internal organs, such as the kidneys, heart and lungs. Not only do these organs provide excellent nourishment for a carnivore; in the natural state on the island the thylacine had no quadruped competitor obliging it to eat every last morsel of prey on the spot, or to drag the carcass to a place of safety. Graphic colour photographs show allegedly recent, selective-feeding thylacine kills.
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It is only a small step leading from selective, nutritious feeding to the tag of vampire and all the old European-based myths of lurking horrors in the dark woods. Where contemporary opinion diverges is on the extent to which the thylacine actually lapped or even ‘drank' blood. Paddle constructs a case to lay the blame for this notion squarely on the shoulders of a snobbish Oxford University academic who visited Tasmania in 1907, and whose ill-informed views were subsequently swallowed by most Australian scientists, including Guiler apparently, who as recently as 1991 wrote: ‘Tasmanian tigers would kill sheep in a very characteristic way. They used their huge gape to bite out the throat and then they drank the blood'.
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Or, as one populist account would have it: ‘Many believe it was not so much the flesh that the tigers killed for but the blood which they sucked through the neck and liver',
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suggesting a vampire-like carnivore that had little or no need of solids! (The author does, however, also state that it ate ‘almost any other animal or bird it could find in the bush'.) Kathryn Medlock has expressed concern that not only is the vampire tag wrong, it is also of recent origin. University of Tasmania senior lecturer in Zoology Dr Randy Rose is another of the opinion that, as a carnivore, the thylacine would not be too fussy a feeder.

Alas, it seems to be true that we know pathetically little. And yet very many Vandemonians and Tasmanians interacted directly with thylacines and were, mostly, honest in telling their stories. It is from them that other glimpses of the genuine creature can be seen. (In a double irony, such is its growing mystique that even today most Tasmanians know of someone who knew someone who was bushwalking at dusk when suddenly . . . and the myths and imponderables begin all over again.)

Naturalist and journalist Col Bailey has been collecting ‘tiger' stories for over 30 years and his 2001 publication
Tiger
Tales
provides an altogether different perspective on the thylacine. Bailey's first-person accounts of wild thylacines and their behaviour are important as an alternative to their demeanour in captivity; not least when the general impression, as befitted the times, seemed to be that zoo thylacines were boring and smelly.

Bailey befriended an old Depression-era trapper by the name of Reg Trigg who, back then, had caught a ‘terrified' thylacine in a snare. In time Trigg was able to feed it by hand and stroke the top of its head, but he eventually released it back into the wild.

Pet thylacines were not all that uncommon but could probably only be domesticated when caught as pups. They could apparently be walked on a lead and were generally docile and even friendly. Botanist and Royal Society fellow Ronald Campbell Gunn, who in 1842 became editor of the
Tasmanian
Journal of Natural Science
, tamed no less than three and, presumably accurately, wrote: ‘It seems far from being a vicious animal at its worst, and the name Tiger or Hyaena gives a most unjust idea of its fierceness'.
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Despite their general elusiveness and retiring nature, numerous stories relate to thylacines in the wild being naturally inquisitive about humans and following them persistently—by one account, for nearly two days. Thylacines hanging around campsites is more explicable, given the presence of food. And in the natural state thylacines and Aborigines coexisted for millennia.

The pity is that those who were interested in the thylacine represented a very significant minority, as epitomised in Bailey's account of teenager Stanley Conroy, who in the early 1900s was working with his father clearing bush. One morning the youngster

was astonished to see a fully grown male Tasmanian tiger casually inspecting the ranks of the yoked bullocks. Stanley stood mesmerised as the tiger boldly strolled among the terrified oxen. Once the animal caught wind of the human . . . however, it vanished in an instant into thick bracken lining the track. Stanley kept the sighting to himself for he knew that should his father learn of the tiger, he would not rest until he had hunted it down and shot it, such was his hatred of the animal.
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5 A RUGGED
AND
DETERMINED
FRONT: VAN
DIEMEN'S
LAND SETTLED

About half way between the Frankland and Arthur Rivers we were camped for the night, in a beautiful glade in a myrtle forest, when around the fire in the evening, my father told of the experience he and Bill Morley had as they walked into Mount Balfour to commence work at the mine, over the same track, and he told us that as they walked in they were stalked through the night by two Tasmanian tigers, and were afraid to stop for rest . . .

R. R. M
CARTHUR,
L
INDISFARNE

O
ver a period of some thousands of years a profound technological development set up conditions for civilisation to advance. This was the domestication of plants and animals, which first occurred in the Mesopotamian region. Where previously wild grains had been harvested where they grew naturally, between about 8000 BC and 3000 BC barley, oats, lentils, olives, onions, camels, cattle, sheep, pigs and horses all came under the control of man. The invention of irrigation and the plough and the warming global climate made cultivation possible. Far eastwards across the other side of the world, at the south-east tip of Australia, that same global warming had caused the Bassian Plain to be flooded, creating the strait that isolated Tasmania from the mainland.

Thus, while the peoples of the Fertile Crescent were establishing the first villages and working out rudimentary concepts of commerce, maths and philosophy, small Aboriginal tribes became isolated on a group of islands at the bottom of the continent. People had already been in those parts for tens of thousands of years and their ancestors had experienced similar comings and goings on the low-lying flat plain, bounded by mountains to its east (their remnants now the islands of the Furneaux Group) and a large promontory to the west (its tip now King Island). Unlike previous inundations, this flooding of the plain was to have major consequences for both the people and the thylacine.

Abel Tasman was not the only mariner fooled by the mountainous, formidable bulk of the place he named Van Diemen's Land in 1642. The French and English expeditioners and adventurers who called in to its shores over the next century and a half were equally ignorant of the fact that it was an island. It seems inconceivable today that the 200 kilometre wide Bass Strait could have been missed by those sailors. But that was the nature of maritime voyaging, a hazardous European occupation undertaken in the names of science, trade and national ambition.

The establishment of a convict colony at Sydney Cove in 1788 meant that the east coast strip of
Terra Australis Nullius
, together with its mysterious southern part, became the formal possession of Britain, as did Norfolk Island, further east in the Pacific Ocean. Within ten years George Bass and Matthew Flinders had proved that Van Diemen's Land was in fact an island and plans were made to settle it at once. France and England were at war and French captain Nicolas Baudin's scientific expedition to the island was considered to be evidence of Napoleon's designs in the area.

There were other reasons. Seals and whales abounded in the cold waters. Timber was plentiful, for shipping back to England for building ships and houses. And another profound technological development—industrialisation—had produced as a spin-off decidedly uncivilised crime-ridden cities, London, Birmingham and Liverpool in particular. Poverty, opportunism and draconian laws against even the most insignificant theft or misdemeanour resulted in vast numbers of convictions. Excess convicts could no longer be sent to the North American colonies, because of the outbreak of war, while hulks moored in the Thames as floating prisons could only ever be a temporary solution. Hence the settlement at Sydney Cove, followed by the even more satisfactory revelation of the existence of a whole island, ideally suited to become a prison.

In September 1803, a ship bearing 49 people, of whom about half were convicts, hove to in Storm Bay, where the Derwent River meets the Southern Ocean. Under the command of Lieutenant Bowen, they set up camp a few kilometres upriver at a site known as Risdon Cove.
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The party soon moved across the river to a more suitable base at the foot of the Table Mountain, subsequently Mount Wellington, where there was plentiful water, good timber and an islet in Sullivan's Cove where ships could be loaded and unloaded. This move was on the orders of Lieutenant-Governor David Collins, now in charge of the fledgling settlement. Collins had relocated from Port Phillip, later renamed Melbourne, which he had declared unsuitable as a settlement.

Accompanying the Collins party was the Reverend Robert Knopwood. Just a few months after Hobart's establishment he bluntly recorded a sighting of a thylacine in his journal account of the plight of some escaped convicts: