S
O, ARE THEY unquestionably extinct? Or might a
few be holding out in remote bushland somewhere?
Unfortunately, despite the hopes, dreams and pro-
digious efforts of a surprising number of people, there’s
not a shred of conclusive proof of this possibility – no
convincing photographs or video, no verifiable footprints
and no roadkills.
“Nowadays fast roads go through just about all the
high-quality thylacine habitat and there are plenty of
reported sightings, so we should have had a roadkill by
now,” Nick Mooney says.
Kathryn Medlock, senior curator of vertebrate zoology
at TMAG in Hobart, agrees. Even though there are more
people in Tasmania than ever and hundreds of remote
cameras (up to 500 by some estimates) operating in the
bush at any one time, none have come up with any
convincing evidence, she says.
“All the fauna people do their surveys using remote
cameras,” Kathryn explains. “They’d be the first to say if
they’d photographed a thylacine. There are hundreds of
thousands of roadkills every year but none of thylacines.
There’s not even a manky skeleton that’s been lying beside
a road for 20 years.”
Tammy Gordon, the collection officer at the Queen
Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston and
co-author of the book Tasmanian Tiger: Precious Little
Remains, says no thylacine has been brought to the museum
in the past 80 years. “The museum has a file of sightings
dating from the 1930s, but in the 30 years that I have been
here I have not seen anything I would consider evidence.”
And yet the search goes on. Why? Are tiger-hunters
deluding themselves? Are the true believers too starry-eyed
to face the facts? What drives them?
Some searchers may have quite basic motives, such as
a desire for fame, notoriety or fortune. Others say they
love the bush and that looking for the thylacine gives them
a good excuse to be in it. But a number raise more com-
plex issues. “By searching for this animal I feel I’m hon-ouring its existence,” Mike Williams says. “We treated it
savagely, we did horrific things to it, but if we find it we’ll
know we haven’t destroyed it and could say we humans
aren’t as bad as we thought we were. It would be a form
of redemption.”
Eric Schwarz, a senior wildlife management officer in
Tasmania’s Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water
and Environment, agrees. “There’s definitely an element
of guilt in this,” he says. “I think people hope that a wrong
will be righted by the knowledge that we didn’t extermi-
nate it. It’s almost as if we’d be exonerated.”A
FTER 35 YEARS of thylacine work, Nick Mooney
remains open-minded. “It could be out there, but
it’s unlikely,” he says. “On Mondays, Wednesdays
and Fridays I think it’s there, on other days it’s not. If
somebody found one, I would be elated but not surprised.
Perhaps we haven’t found it yet because we are simply
much less good at finding very rare things than we think
we are.”
Kathryn Medlock would be overjoyed if one were
found. But she’s not optimistic that government bodies
or the public would ever hear about it because most
tiger-searchers insist they’d tell no-one if they were suc-
cessful. And that means the myth of the thylacine’s survival
will probably never die and the hunt will go on forever.
In 1986 AG 3 carried an 18-page feature about the
Tasmanian tiger written by Andy Park. In it he quoted
Michael Archer, currently a professor at the University of
NSW School of Biological, Earth and Environmental
Sciences, and a former director of the Australian Museum,
where he became involved in a plan to clone the thylac-
ine. The belief that the species survived, Michael told
Andy, was “a stunning example of over-optimism”.
But 30 years on, Michael wrote the foreword for Col
Bailey’s latest book and in it he generously praises Col for
his absolute conviction that the tiger survives. Then he
adds, “With all my heart, I hope he is right.”Long lineage
This meat-eating group of
marsupials first appeared
millions of years ago.T
HE THYLACINE WAS the last
member of a family of ancient
dog-like carnivorous marsupi-
als that survived to modern times.
The history of the thylacine goes back
30 million years and more than half-a-dozen species once lived in
Australia and New Guinea. They
apparently became extinct on the
mainland 2000 years ago, possibly
due to competition from dingoes.
Tasmanian Aboriginals, who called
thylacines coorinna, laorinna, lagunta
or laoonana, are believed to have
hunted the animal occasionally. In
their book Tasmanian Tiger: Precious
Little Remains, authors David Maynard
and Tammy Gordon suggest that by
conducting regular burnings, the
Aboriginals created a landscape that
attracted herbivores such aswallabies and kangaroos, providing
a food supply for both themselves
and the thylacines. So, by forcibly
removing most Aboriginals from
Tasmania by 1835, European settlers
hastened the thylacine’s demise.AG86 Australian Geographic
PHOTO CREDIT, OPPOSITE PAGE: MATTHEW NEWTON; THIS PAGE: WIKIMEDIAA rock etching of a thylacine
on an island in the Dampier
Archipelago, off WA.