From pest to quest: how the Tasmanian tiger captured the imagination

As a one-time Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service officer, Nick Mooney devoted much of his career to investigating the more credible thylacine sightings in the state.

In 1982, for instance, he spent months in the bush near Smithton after an experienced parks officer called Hans Naarding reported a night-time encounter with an adult male thylacine.

Naarding delivered his account – described by the PWS director at the time as “irrefutable and conclusive” – with calm confidence, explaining that he swept his spotlight across the animal from a distance of 6 or 7 metres and counted the 12 stripes on its sandy coat.

“We thought we were on to something,” says a laconic Mooney, “and I operated up there for a year trying to confirm it. Because he was one of our employees, we were able to keep it pretty quiet.”

Related: From 300,000 rabbits to none: a Southern Ocean island is reborn

Only after the exhaustive search proved inconclusive did Naarding speak publicly. A similar incident would, Mooney thinks, be much harder to contain today. He fears a modern sighting would be perceived as a potential goldmine, with scientific protocols abandoned in the rush to cash in.

“The Naarding case was pre-social media – and social media, as we’ve seen many times with this issue, dominates it completely. It’s quite possible – likely even – that someone would show us footage and never tell us where they took it.”

Palaeontologists say thylacines became extinct on the Australian mainland thousands of years ago. In the Western Australian museum, you can see a mummified specimen that once hunted on today’s Nullarbor plain.

Some have suggested that the creatures may have been introduced from Tasmania to other states in the late 19th or early 20th century. It’s known that the naturalists of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria sought to introduce to the colony “all innoxious animals, birds, fishes, insects and vegetables, whether useful or ornamental”. For the most part, the society imported European species (one report proclaimed proudly that the rabbit had been “so thoroughly acclimatised that it swarms in hundreds in some localities”). Yet it also took an interest in native animals, and thylacine enthusiasts have uncovered an Argus article from 1868 with a tantalising reference to acclimatisation breeding farms containing “a tiger rat, a Tasmanian wolf and two Tasmanian devils”.

Thylacine sightings in Wilsons Promontory reached their peak in 1996, when Peter Hall, the National party environment spokesperson, urged the government (unsuccessfully) to investigate one supposed encounter in the area.

Other sites have a similar history. In the mid-1990s, former assistant police commissioner Fred Silvester claimed to have seen, standing by his garden fish pond in Loch Sport near the Gippsland Lakes, an animal “about the size of a medium-sized dog, with a thick tail that came to a point, and dark stripes that went right to the butt of the tail”.

In Wonthaggi, locals have wondered, ever since the 1950s, about the town “monster”: a cat-like creature said to haunt the nearby bush. One witness described it as “a strange animal with a blood-curdling yell … with large claws, large head, furry body striped like a zebra, and a long tail”.

These and other stories circulate widely on the many online thylacine forums and Facebook groups, though most scientists don’t give them much credence.

Destroyed by decree

Today, the rediscovery – or re-creation of the thylacine – would generate worldwide headlines. By contrast the last thylacine’s death did not generate any headlines at all.

As the writer Nicholas Shakespeare points out, on 8 September 1936, the Hobart Mercury said nothing at all about how, on the previous day, the female thylacine known as Benjamin had perished after being inadvertently locked out of her cage in the old Beaumaris zoo on a freezing Tasmanian night.

Related: Scientists picking over ice age bones discover vultures once soared in Australia’s skies

Rather than recording what now seems an environmental calamity of almost epochal proportions, the paper concerned itself with the “unseemly conduct” at the Bothwell Hall during a recent concert, noting with disapproval the “empty liquor bottles … found in the dressing rooms”.

The Mercury’s indifference reflects, of course, a colonial indifference to antipodean ecology, one deeply enmeshed with the broader project of white settlement.

Indigenous lore gave the Aboriginal Tasmanians a demonstrably higher standard of living than most early modern Europeans. Yet, when the British established their military outpost on the Derwent River in 1803, they classed the natives as crude primitives, dismissing as worthless a culture they could not understand. As an 1820 visitor to Hobart remarked, “[t]he aborigines of this island are supposed [by white settlers] to be the most degraded of any known in the world”.

Sporadic conflict intensified into the murderous Black War of 1824 to 1831. The white press became openly genocidal: the Colonial Advocate called for Indigenous people to be “exterminated or removed”, the Colonial Times urged the “annihilation of the whole race” and the Tasmanian declared “extermination […] the only remedy”.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Aboriginal people were killed – and those that survived were forcibly transferred to a bleak reservation on Flinders Island. In many ways, the subsequent war against the thylacine mirrored that earlier campaign against Indigenous people. Just as Tasman’s fascination with the unknown southern land’s enigmatic people gave way to a British scorn for Aboriginal “backwardness”, curiosity about the mysterious tiger became overt contempt for an animal blamed for thinning the settlers’ flocks.

The colonists spoke variously of “a Tasmanian wolf, a Tasmanian hyena, a Tasmanian zebra, a Tasmanian dingo, a Tasmanian panther and a dog-faced dasyure”. Whatever it was, they wanted it gone.

Towards the end of the Black Wars, the authorities proclaimed Government Order No 2, offering “a reward of £5 […] for every adult aboriginal native and £2 for every child, who shall be captured and delivered alive to any of the police stations”. To destroy the thylacine, they used a similar expediency. As historian David Owen notes, by 1830, the Van Diemen’s Land Company was offering a reward for the killing of “noxious animals”, a category under which it listed the “hyena”.

In 1882, a Mercury headline promised “Tiger Extermination”, as landowners in Buckland discussed wiping out both thylacines and eagles, with “a reward of £5 to be paid for each full-grown tiger caught in the district, and £2 10s, for all cubs equal in size to a full-grown domestic cat, the skins of all the animals caught to become the property of the association”.

A few years later, the politician John Lyne – a representative of the Tasmanian rural lobby – proposed the government bounty that constituted an official death sentence. In the debate at the House of Assembly, Lyne claimed, quite preposterously, that “30 000 or 40 000 sheep” were taken each year by the animals he described as “dingoes” and “one of the greatest pests the colony had”.

Scientists estimate the total thylacine population pre-white settlement as perhaps 5,000. Between 1888 and 1909, the authorities paid so-called “tiger men” for 2,184 carcasses – a figure that doesn’t include the separate rewards offered by local farmers.

In 1902, hunters claimed 119 skins. Four years later, the figure had fallen to 59. The next year, it was two – and, after that, thylacines had become so rare that no one delivered hides at all.

In 1914, the biologist Prof Thomas Flynn (father of the Hollywood swashbuckler Errol Flynn) warned that thylacines faced extinction. But nothing came of his call for a sanctuary’s establishment. Legislation protecting the species only passed the Tasmanian parliament in 1936 – and, by then, just one animal remained.

Today, National Threatened Species Day falls on 7 September, the anniversary of Benjamin’s lonely death outside her cold, concrete cage.

‘We all have to be sensible if it gets found’

“On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays,” says Nick Mooney, “I think the interest in the thylacine is a positive and on the other days I think it’s a distraction. I’ve had to make the decision as to whether, in my own small way, I keep servicing it. But there is a slim possibility the animal’s still there – pretty slim but a possibility. And so you have to remind people that we all have to be sensible if it gets found.”

But, yes, he does worry that an obsessive focus on rare, endangered animals obscures more systemic problems. “I’ve always been interested in birds of prey,” he says. “When people ask me about my favourite, they always expect something incredibly rare and exotic like the harpy eagle. But my favourite bird is the common brown falcon because you see it every day and so you can get to know it really well. What’s the point of having a favourite bird that’s so rare that it’s almost just an idea?”

On that basis, he proposes supplementing Threatened Species Day with Common Species Day. “Exactly the polar opposite in the year, six months away – a day we look at all the common animals that actually drive the ecology. We tend to know the most about the rarest animals and the least about the most common, even though you can argue, from a simple ecological point of view, the most common animals are the most important.”

Environmental scientist Barry Brook from the University of Tasmania sees the matter somewhat differently. The popular attachment to certain animals cannot and should not be ignored, he says, not least because, when iconic species die, the public – quite understandably – despairs. “It has a depressive effect. People think, well, you can’t even be bothered to save these things we really care about, so why should we invest emotionally in anything else?”

Conversely, the allure of particularly exotic animals – and what could be more exotic than a thylacine? – serves, at least potentially, as a force multiplier, creating environmental opportunities that may not otherwise exist. For instance, a rejuvenated thylacine population would, almost by definition, require a rejuvenated habitat, which would assist all manner of other creatures.

“If you found a handful of thylacines, you’d want to restore them to being thousands of thylacines. You’d want to get them back to their former ecological position and that would involve investments in habitat protection and restoration and connectivity: all the issues that go along with restoring a wide-ranging predator. That brings benefits for other species, the other mammals and birds that need habitat protection, as well as the invertebrates and the fungi and the mosses and all the other things that are otherwise invisible.”

Related: CSIRO researchers identify 139 new species, including an ant that ‘babysits’ caterpillars

It would be foolish, Brook says, not to harness the undeniable pull of charismatic animals. He points out that prior to colonisation, Tasmania possessed its own distinctive emu, a smaller subspecies isolated from the rest of the population during the Late Pleisotocene. Within 30 years of white settlement, the emus were gone, wiped out so thoroughly that we lack even basic information about where and how they lived.

Some scientists think that, because collectors sought the more exotic variant, the Tasmanian bloodline might persist in overseas zoos and could, perhaps, be recovered through selective breeding. Whether that’s true or not, the re-introduction of emus (even mainland ones) would almost certainly benefit the environment, since the birds probably played an important ecological role in distributing seeds.

Yet the restoration of emus would require active community support – and, for the moment, no one can guarantee that such support would be forthcoming, precisely because Tasmanians don’t have any emotional attachment to the species.

Email: sign up for our daily morning briefing newsletter

App: download the free app and never miss the biggest stories, or get our weekend edition for a curated selection of the week's best stories

Social: follow us on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or TikTok

Podcast: listen to our daily episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or search "Full Story" in your favourite app

Thylacines would be different. The worldwide interest in a recovered thylacine population would, almost certainly, inspire locals, with ordinary people volunteering to do whatever is necessary for the animals to flourish. That enthusiasm might set a precedent. You could imagine that farmers newly accustomed to living with the once-hated Tasmanian tigers might, perhaps, warm to the prospect of emus once again striding over a rewilded landscape.

Mind you, none of that implies that Brook expects a healthy thylacine to surface any time soon. In a recent academic paper, he and his colleagues pored over every thylacine sighting documented since poor Benjamin’s demise. Their statistical analysis suggests that a remnant population most likely survived in remote areas for several decades – but then, heartbreakingly, faded away, probably some time between the late 1980s and the early 2000s.

So what makes a once-despised creature so attractive?

Brook wonders if the answer lies in a perception of an avoidable tragedy. “This is effectively a member of the Pleistocene megafauna that survived the extinction even 40,000 years ago – and then we lost it in the 20th century. We’ve still got the devil, we’ve still got other animals but not the thylacine … and we were just so close.”

Mooney thinks the “tiger” nomenclature makes the difference, invoking an animal whose fearful symmetry resonates in both western and eastern mythology. “I’m convinced,” he says, “that if it was called by its Aboriginal name, we wouldn’t be having this discussion because no one would care less.”

This is an edited extract from Provocations – New and Selected Writing, by Jeff Sparrow, published by New South