May. June 81The skinned, preserved body of a thylacine (left) is
prepared for display at the National Museum of Australia
in 2005. Until then it had been held at the Institute of
Anatomy, whose director, Sir Colin MacKenzie, collected it
in 1930. Sixteen-year-old Clem Penney (above) shows off
the thylacine he shot near the Arthur River, in
north-western Tasmania, in 1924.
T
HE EARLIEST REPORT of contact
between settlers and the thylacine
appeared in Australia’s first newspaper,
The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales
Advertiser, on 21 April 1805, two and a half
years after colonists arrived in Tasmania. It
encapsulated the mindset that led to the
animal’s slaughter in a frenzy Nick Mooney
calls “European predator hysteria”: “An animal
of truly singular and nouvel [sic] description
was killed by dogs the 30th March on a hill
immediately contiguous to the settlement of
Yorkton, Port Dalrymple; from the following
minute description of which, by Lieutenant
Governor Paterson, it must be considered a
species perfectly distinct from any of the
animal creation hitherto known, and certainly
the only powerful and terrific of the carnivo-
rous and voracious tribe yet discovered on any
part of New Holland or its adjacent islands.”
In 1863, the naturalist and artist John
Gould predicted the thylacine’s fate: “When
the comparatively small island of Tasmania
becomes more densely populated, and its
primitive forests are intersected with roads
from the eastern to the western coast, the
numbers of this singular animal will speedily
diminish, extermination will have its full
sway, and it will then, like the Wolf in Eng-
land and Scotland, be recorded as an animal
of the past...”First contact
The thylacine’s fate was sealed
soon after Europeans settled
in Australia.Bushman Albert Quarrell is thought to have
sold this tiger he killed in Tasmania in 1911 to
photographer Charles Brown for £5 ($562 now).