Tenacious Tiger

The Tasmanian Tiger or thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) continues to stalk the Tasmanian imagination. Miasmas resembling it figure in reports from tourists and bushwalkers, who happen upon the slinking apparition in the wilderness. Fanciful meanderings of wishful hearts and minds? Perhaps. Tantalising suspicions that the thylacine may still exist will not go away. No matter that the last thylacine died in the Hobart Zoo on 7 September 1936. With it died a species, but not the legend

Perhaps the interest in the thylacine suggests something more than an insistent sense that a small community may have thwarted nineteenth-century eradication. The parochial and national, even international, desire to find the thylacine may be associated with the mysteries of the Tasmanian wilderness. Then there is the sense of guilt that it was deliberately hunted to extinction and that stuttering attempts at preservation were belated. By the 1930s the survival of a population in the wild was untenable.