The Tasmanian Tiger from Extinction to Identity Myth in White Australian Society and Fiction

The Tasmanian Tiger From Extinction to Identity Myth in White Australian Society and Fiction

ANNE LE GUELLEC–MINEL

HE THYLACINE OR ‘TASMANIAN TIGER’ today is a well-known and well-loved icon of the Australian world. Although it is probable that the T species had already disappeared from mainland Australia by 1788, it was still present in Tasmania when settlement of the island began in 1803. As the colony expanded, this largest surviving carnivorous marsupial came to be seen as such a formidable threat to the pastoral economy that bounty schemes were introduced to eradicate it. Since the last captive thylacine died in 1936, however, it has become a symbol of Australian and more specifically Tasmanian identity. The heraldic crests of several towns in Tasmania feature at least one thylacine as supporter and the State Tasmania has two. It also appears on licence plates and until quite recently graced the labels of the state’s best-selling beer.1 Nor are all Australians reconciled with the official view that the ‘Tassie tiger’ should now be considered irreversibly lost. Every year, there are several claimed sightings throughout Australia and thousands of dollars have been put towards the quest for the thylacine, either to try to catch it alive or to clone it back to life using DNA material extracted from museum specimens. Tourist shops cater to thylacine nostalgia by selling T-shirts, magnets, and key-rings adorned with tigers and the caption ‘I want to believe’ as well as mugs and caps

1 This, at least, was the case until November 2013, when the company decided to change the label attracting this comment posted on The Centre for Fortean Zoology Australia’s website: “In what we think is one of the strangest marketing decisions ever made, Tasmanian brewery Cascade has dumped the iconic Tasmanian Tiger from its labels. As part of its rebranding to tap into the niche market for craft beer, it has ditched the (supposedly extinct) marsupial and replaced it with… a picture of the brewery”; http://www.cfzaustralia.com/2013/11/cascade-makes-thylacine- extinct-on-label.html (accessed 24 August 2014). 68 ANNE L E G UELLEC–MINEL # that simply read: ‘I’m alive’. Such a reversal in the perceptions of the thylacine, from colonist’s bane to national icon and naturalist’s grail constitutes a striking example of the complex and contradictory uses mythical constructions of other- ness have been put to in settler communities.2 The first part of this article will deal with the origins of the Anglo-Australian thylacine mythology, on the basis of Robert Paddle’s award-winning study The Last Tasmanian Tiger: The History and Extinction of the Thylacine (2002), which shows that empiricism and taxonomic mapping did little to counter the projec- tion of imported myths onto the animal. In fact, by over-hastily relocating the thylacine in a global taxonomy, imperial naturalists made it more difficult to correctly situate the predator’s place in its native ecosystem. Scientific obfusca- tions even gave weight to popular superstitions, which were then cultivated to serve the vested interest of the Tasmanian squatter class. As the species became extinct before modern scientists could work through the contradictions present in the existing data, the thylacine remains a mystery and, as such, proves ideal mythmaking material. Although it is a sore spot in the Australian collective con- sciousness, a source of shame and guilt, it is also used as a symbol of hope and optimism in the face of impossible odds. As the title of a 2005 article on yet another sighting wryly observed, “Extinct or not, the story won’t die.”3 Many commentators have remarked on this ongoing popular fascination for the thylacine, but the second part of this essay will tackle the issue from the point of view of fiction, by studying the various cultural implications of the thylacine myth in Bruce Pascoe’s 1984 short story “Thylacine,” Tim Winton’s 1988 novella In the Winter Dark, and Julia Leigh’s 1999 novel The Hunter. In the first years of British settlement of what was then known as Van Diemen’s Land, sightings of the thylacine were rare, although the first European mentions of Tasmanian “tygers” date from the mid-seventeenth century. Be- cause these were rather vague, however, it is uncertain whether the animals re- ferred to were actually thylacines or other smaller native predators. Even in later reports of less ambiguous sightings, the colonists still seemed to be at a loss

2 Cf., for example, John Kinsella, “Sighting: The Duplicity of English, and of the English-Lan- guage Poem in Southwest Australia” (2002), in Kinsella, Spatial Relations: Essays, Reviews, Com- mentaries, and Chorography, vol. 1, ed. Gordon Collier (Cross/Cultures 161; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2013): 107–21, where the poet-environmentalist strongly suggests, from personal experience, that the animal is still present in Western Australia (or is it a doppelgänger-product of a poet’s imagination?). 3 Jason Steger, “Extinct or not, the story won’t die,” The Age (26 March 2005), www.theage.com.au /news/Science/Extinct-or-not-the-story-wont-die/2005/03/25/111169 2630378.html (accessed 24 Au- gust 2014).