In Tasmania

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Mooney’s experience of following up thylacine sightings over two decades has inevitably left him jaded. ‘With every sighting there are four options. Did they see one? Was it a mistake? Did they have a vision? Are they lying?’

  In a place where people seldom keep secrets, a surprising number of people will promise you that if they saw a Tasmanian tiger they would not tell a soul. While Tasmania has no shortage of people who believe that they have seen a thylacine, fear of ridicule or a wish to prevent a media feeding frenzy encourages most of them to keep the sighting to themselves. Others have contacted Mooney and are disappointed that he has not seemed to take their claim seriously. They say he is sitting on the information.

  Buck and Joan Emberg are retired university teachers. Joan is the granddaughter of a Hamburg stowaway who jumped ship at Strahan and ended up in Queenstown managing the F.O. Henry store. Buck came to Tasmania in 1971 from North Minnesota for some adventure and to avoid conscription to Vietnam.

  ‘We were the first who really went public,’ Buck says.

  Late one evening in the spring of 1978, they were driving home from Launceston. It was wet, Buck says, but not raining. ‘I was travelling at 75 kilometres an hour when at about 11 p.m., two kilometres west of Lilydale, there in the lights stood a mother thylacine and baby thylacine right next to the road. We caught both of them full side on and knew immediately. The very big head, the stance – like a kangaroo on all fours – the stiff tail and the stripes. I braked and missed them and as I pulled in I said to Joan: “Don’t say anything until you’ve thought this through, but are you sure of what we just saw?” She paused for 15 seconds. “I just saw two tigers.” “That’s what I saw,” I said. We turned around, hoping. But they had moved off.’

  Until that moment, Buck had accepted that the thylacine was extinct. What he encountered on the road to Lilydale changed his life. ‘I’m considered to be this crazy person. I won’t go into a bar. I’ve been run off the road twice. They even used my name illegally in a website to say bad things about the Green Party.’

  Next day, he telephoned friends. They laughed at him. He began to interview other people known to have sighted the thylacine in the same area. Quite soon, he had gathered 30 witnesses. One was an electrician who had caught a Tasmanian tiger in his gun-sights before realising what it was. Another was a Welsh woman who had trained with the police. A third was a local photographer who came to be known as the Tiger Man.

  Buck showed me three black and white photographs that the Tiger Man had taken in 1995 of an animal’s footprints in the mud. They were photographed within walking distance of Buck’s house.

  ‘These are the prints of the animal,’ he says.

  I ask if I can fetch my camera. Buck says not. The Tiger Man does not wish his photographs to be seen and has put the negatives in a safe with a lawyer. But I may draw them if I like.

  As I make a quick sketch, Buck tells me that almost everyone who reported what they saw was told to shut up and has been derided by his or her community. ‘Especially by the government, especially by Nick Mooney.’

  A year after the sighting in Lilydale, Buck was out walking when he came upon a giant scat. ‘It was bigger than anything I’d seen. Like a thick cigar twelve inches long and not twisted like devil scat.’ Buck put it in a plastic bag and took it to Mooney. ‘He looked at it and threw it in a drawer with other scats. “Just a devil,” Mooney told me. “We will not believe the animal exists until we catch it with the morning’s Examiner in its mouth.” This,’ Buck says, ‘is what we’re dealing with.’

  I drive with Buck and Joan to the other side of Lilydale, to where they saw their thylacines. In answer to the charge that no squashed tiger has been found on any road, Buck says that there are an estimated 250,000 feral cats in Tasmania and yet how many end up as road-kill? He talks about pandas in China that were rediscovered in an area of a mere 500 square miles. ‘Tasmania has 26,000 square miles.’ In Thylacine, Owen writes of other ‘extinct’ animals that have come back. He cites the examples of the coelacanth, the golden hapalemur, the noisy scrub bird, the Vietnamese rhino and the giant sable antelope of Angola. Then there are the three Tasmanian emus, believed extinct for 25 years, seen on a beach at Emu Bay in October 1911.

  At last we reach the place. There is a garage workshop opposite and cars speed by. The mother and puppy had stood at the entrance to a small, steep field in which there is a green-roofed bungalow. A notice on the gate warns of a guard dog.

  ‘Do you regret having seen a Tasmanian tiger?’

  Joan answers immediately. ‘No.’

  Buck goes on thinking. ‘No,’ he says at last. ‘I feel treasured and privileged to have seen it. It has altered my life in that I don’t give a damn about what people feel and it has strengthened my resolve.’

  ‘In the face of ridicule, I might add,’ says Joan, who turns out to be blind in one eye. ‘You can handle the ridicule. Most Tasmanians can’t.’

  In February 2001, Mooney received a photograph purporting to show a furry red animal streaking through a pine forest in northern Tasmania. His life has not been the same since.

  I meet him at the Epping service station on the Midlands Highway where he is engaged in tracking down a predator whom he believes poses ‘the greatest risk to biodiversity in Tasmania and to Tasmanian mammals since the last Ice Age’.

  Better than most, Mooney is in a position to understand that Tasmania is an intensely fragile place. As the scientist seconded to the ‘Fox-free Tasmania’ programme, Mooney is behind an effort to exterminate between five and ten red foxes that may have been smuggled across Bass Strait from Victoria, where foxes – introduced by the English to keep down rabbits – have made Australia, he says, ‘a world leader in mammalian extinction’.

  Mooney knows of at least one previous attempt to introduce foxes. ‘In the 1890s, an English army officer imported a pair to Hobart without permission, to breed up for release. The authorities heard about it and went at once to Anglesea barracks. They shot one in the grounds. The other ran up a culvert and was cornered.’ The story may have reached John Myers at his office in London Film Productions, because in one version of the biography that he concocted for Merle Oberon her putative father was fox-hunting in Tasmania when he suffered his fatal fall. Certainly, Anthony Trollope felt that he looked out over a country ‘well adapted for running a drag’. Of the road from Hobart to Launceston, he remarked that ‘the English traveller would imagine that there was a fox covert on each side of him’. Halfway to Launceston, Trollope passed through Campbell Town, where still stands the Foxhunter’s Return: a grand, three-storey convict-built inn with Victorian hunting prints above the staircase – Bolting the fox, Run to catch, Whoop, A sure find – and, hung on a hook outside the office, a hunter’s pink jacket made by a tailor in England. Here at the opposite end of the earth is enacted, once a year, a ritual lacking its crucial ingredient. Contemporary photographs in the hall show the riders of the Midlands Hunt Club assembled at a meet in March. Surrounded by a pack of excited hounds, they prepare to drag a dead kangaroo through the Campbell Town bush.

  In the lounge of the Foxhunter’s Return, the landlady shows me two 80-year-old fox pelts draped over a pair of red velvet chairs. She bought them in a garage sale. ‘That’s Izzy and that’s Rudolf,’ she says. ‘I reckon they’re the only foxes in Tasmania.’

  Just then an old man enters who disputes this. He says that he saw a fox a year ago, halfway from here to Ross. ‘It was just off the road, heading for the sandstone quarry. That colour,’ and he taps Izzy’s fur. ‘I said “Look!” to the missus. “Look bloody there!”’

  ‘Did you tell Parks and Wildlife?’

  ‘I’m not that silly. They harass you.’ He says: ‘If you rang to say you’d seen a Tasmanian tiger, they’d say “Don’t be stupid.” If you rang to say you’d seen a fox, in five minutes you’d have ten men here with special dogs – and next day, 20.’

  Mooney is unrepentant about his response to fox sight
ings. He calculates that 70 species in Tasmania would come under pressure if a fox population established itself, including the eastern quoll, the bettong, the barred bandicoot and the small native kangaroo known as the pademelon. He is concerned that not enough people are taking his alarm-call seriously and that many in authority, including the Premier, do not even believe that such a threat exists. ‘Once we’ve got proof of foxes breeding, we’re screwed.’

  He walks me through an area of bush where 60 baits impregnated with ‘1080’ poison were buried recently, stopping occasionally to check footprints.

  Of 25,000 baits laid in a $2.4 million programme (compared to a budget of $200 allocated to investigate thylacine sightings), ten have showed signs of being dug up by foxes.

  ‘Have you caught one yet?’

  ‘No,’ Mooney says, with frustration. ‘They’d have to be in my office for me to catch one.’

  His twelve-man team have found fox scat with grooming hair in it as well as a set of pug-marks on a clay pan, and at least 20 fox baits have been taken in a style characteristic of foxes. But despite 600 sightings, they have yet to produce a body. To date [June, 2004], only two corpses have presented themselves: a 14-month fox with a partly digested endemic mouse in its stomach shot by a pensioner near Longford, and one road-killed near Burnie.

  Mooney says: ‘Once foxes get below a certain density it’s very difficult to find them.’

  I am still puzzling it out. ‘Here you are, trying to get rid of an introduced animal which you are convinced exists – even though you can’t find it. And yet you don’t believe in the existence of a native animal, which you dearly would love to find?’

  Mooney stoops to check a footprint. He admits: ‘The difficulty of finding foxes has made me re-question the thylacine a bit. It reminds me that we could have overlooked finding a thylacine.’

  The closest relative of the Tasmanian tiger is the Tasmanian devil, known by the Aborigines as Taraba, the Nasty One. In a legend recorded by Jackson Cotton: ‘He would skulk around on very dark nights, silent as a ghost, attacking the very small, the very young and the very old.’

  When I first lived in Tasmania, I sometimes startled a pair of devils in my garden after dusk. They would pelt off in a black blur, leaving behind a hole chewed in the wire. In 2003, the wire remained unbitten. It turned out that the devil was suffering from an epidemic known as Devil Facial Tumour Disease, possibly related to the distemper that reduced the thylacine population in the first years of the twentieth century. Mooney’s latest information was that about one-third of devils had succumbed to the epidemic across eastern Tasmania, but it had not yet reached the south or west of the state. Only adults developed the disease and they died within five months of showing symptoms. Diseased animals could breed, but one huge risk was foxes. ‘It’s the best opportunity foxes will ever get for establishment.’

  I drive to the west coast where there is a friend of Mooney’s who knows about devils.

  On a farm south of Cape Grim, Geoff King ties a road-killed possum to the back of his pick-up and drags it through a scrub of boobyalla to leave a scent trail. It is 7.30 p.m. and in the evening light a young male wedge-tail eagle glides over the ti-trees on the hunt for a pademelon. ‘They can crush a skull, like that.’ King stiffens his hand into a talon.

  He turns off the engine and we watch the eagle settle in the fork of a peppermint gum. The light in the sky is brilliant and intense. There is no haze or humidity and it produces in me a feeling I frequently experience in Tasmania, an absurd illusion that I can see an enormous distance, back almost to when this landscape was looked upon for the first time with human eyes.

  I confess this to King. I am glad I do. He tells me that on his own property the last surviving Tasmanian Aborigines in the bush surrendered themselves to sealers in December 1842. They were a family of middle-aged parents and five sons, one of them the young William Lanne. King says laconically: ‘There’s been a quiet noise in the landscape since 1842.’

  He restarts the engine and we drive on, dragging the dead possum behind us in the hope of enticing our prey.

  King is surely the world’s most enthusiastic ‘devil watcher’. His fisherman’s shack near the Arthur River is one of the few places where it is possible to observe Tasmanian devils feeding in the wild.

  The Tasmanian devil or Sarcophilus harrisii is a nocturnal marsupial the size of a small bulldog and so elusive, says King, that the animal rarely appears in early records and journals. ‘It’s unlikely the first settlers would have seen them. Devils would have announced themselves only by damage and noise.’ He reconstructs the scene: the glow of a campfire, the cooked wallaby remains thrown to the side, the black flash through the bush. At York Town, Colonel Paterson lamented the loss of 76 of his ducks to quolls and other animals. ‘Some say they have seen the Devil, but none as yet have been caught.’

  Tasmanian devils, once found on the mainland, are now restricted to Tasmania. King estimates that a population of circa 50 roams in a 12-mile radius of his property.

  The shack lies a few hundred yards from the ocean. A south-westerly has blown up and the waves crash into an inlet of lethal-looking rocks. The biggest of them by far is Church Rock. It was named by Clement Lorymer who camped here with Jorgen Jorgenson in 1827. Another surveyor, Charles Sprent, left this description. ‘This is a wild, desolate looking coast. The sea has a hungry rattle about it as it roars on the beach. Savage rocks stick up in all directions and the surf goes flying over them. The vegetation is stunted and low …’

  In the dying sun, King pegs out the possum carcass. A baby monitor and a lamp are attached to his pick-up’s battery, and he switches them on. The light will not frighten the devils.

  ‘Why are they called “devils”?’

  ‘Because of their scream.’

  Half an hour after sunset, I hear it on the baby monitor: a low-intensity growl growing to a banshee screech. To King, it sounds like an exhaust pipe dragging on bitumen.

  ‘Here she comes.’

  If Tasmania has gained an image as a sort of Lost World/Jurassic Park, then part of the credit must be given to the artist Robert McKimson of Warner Brothers who adopted the Tasmanian devil for a character in one of his cartoons: a stylised dog on hind legs whose signature is to spin in a whirlwind and scamper here and there, devouring all in its path.

  A whiskered face emerges from the tussock grass, attached to a large boxy head and a compact black body with a white streak across the chest. It belongs to a hungry female, who tears into the possum’s intestine. Now and then she glances up, her nose glistening with blood.

  ‘Let her get committed to the carcass,’ whispers King.

  A 10-kilogram Tasmanian devil has the jaw strength of a dog four times its size, which explains why this scavenger approaches all it meets with an open mouth. According to King, devils can eat 40% of their body weight at one sitting. ‘They fill up like you’ve never felt on Christmas Day.’

  I ask what is apparently the most commonly asked question. ‘Do they eat everything?’

  ‘Everything,’ nods King. ‘Big bones, offal, fur.’

  Just occasionally the lower jaw of a pademelon is left intact. Otherwise devil scat has been found to contain echidna quills, bottle tops, cigarette ends. Strong acids in their stomach as well as a bone-dissolving enzyme help to break down this hotchpotch.

  Another screech. Suddenly, the animal freezes. We have not made a sound, but she can hear up to distance of a mile and smell up to five. Her ears give a nervous twitch.

  The Tasmanian devil has no natural predator. And yet within the cast of living memory it competed for protein with its larger marsupial cousin. I read in the Mercury of June 21, 2002, that a Tasmanian tiger was spotted north of King’s shack, not far from where William Lanne grew up. ‘The tiger was no further than five metres away,’ reported the witness who saw it for ten seconds. ‘It just stopped and stared.’

  I ask King: ‘Do you think Tasmanian tigers still exist?�
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  He considers the black shape still frozen in the lamplight and says carefully: ‘If the Tasmanian tiger exists, it’s in the mind of the Tasmanian devil who doesn’t know that the thylacine is extinct.’

  The potter moves slowly through his small bright drawing room overlooking Hobart. Yes, he saw Benjamin alive. Edward Carr Shaw, a cousin of George Bernard Shaw and great-grandson of the magistrate at Swansea, was a pupil at Hutchins School in 1930. ‘We used to walk down to Beaumaris Zoo at weekends,’ he says. ‘The tiger was in a little cage half the size of this room. It used to wander backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. It was the last one.’

  It was in the quixotic hope of finding a thylacine in the wild that the state’s best-known public figure came to Tasmania. In 1972, Bob Brown, a policeman’s son from New South Wales, accepted a six-month locum post as a GP in Launceston. On the ferry, as he arrived, he looked out and saw the Western Tiers and headed straight for them. His reaction to the crags and lakes and the pencil-pine forests is typical of the attachment felt by most of the 8,700 bush-walkers who hike the Overland Trail each year.

  Next day, he sent a postcard to his parents in Coffs Harbour. ‘I am home,’ he wrote.

  With two others, Brown started the Tasmanian Tiger Research Centre and for eight months spent his weekends in ‘chook sheds’ in north-east Tasmania, monitoring a network of wired boxes. Each box was fitted with a live chicken and a camera bought from an RAAF disposal store, a little Kodak flash camera with a fishing-line trip. ‘We had stacks of pictures: devils, wombats, wallabies, everything you could think of – except the tiger.’ He also checked out 200 tiger sightings dating back to 1936. ‘I accounted for all but four.’ Most were dogs.

  Brown had hoped to emulate the medical doctor in New Zealand who in 1948 went walking in the Murchison Mountains and heard calls and rediscovered a family of takahe, a bird similar to a turkey. But with each passing weekend he grew more sceptical. He had spent his formative years in Bathurst, where he had come across the Black Panther of Emmaville, presumed to be a giant marsupial cat. Sir Edward Hallstrom had offered £1,000 for anyone who caught it. A man claiming to have observed it some weeks earlier led Brown to a patch of grass where the panther lay partially concealed. ‘I went slowly along the fence with a pair of small binoculars, and it got up, grunted a number of times and ran off. I got the shock of my life.’ The panther was a wild pig.