AustLit

Thylacines and the Anthropocene

Tiger Tale is a picture book 'retelling of a pourquois folktale', in which a thylacine gains its striped coat from bushfire soot and its coughing bark from smoke. Though the source text is left ambiguous, Tiger Tale's collage-like art style seems to suggest an assemblage of different narrative traditions. 

Fire serves an etiological function in many First Nations narratives from around Australia. In How the Tasmanian Tiger Got Its Stripes, Leigh Maynard recounts a Dreaming story from the Nuenonne nation of Bruny Island where a pup is marked with healing stripes made from the blood and spiritual power of the boy-god Palana, mixed with campfire ash. This transforms the pup into a thylacine, and aligns him with the great spirit and constellation Wurrawana-Corinna.

Yet, bushfire's transformative power comes with a destructive potential. The disastrous 'Black Summer' bushfire season of 2019-2020 reignited public debate in Australia around fire management strategies and the compounding effects of climate change. The koala—its Eucalypt habitat devastated by fire and deforestation (IUCN)—emerged as a symbol for threatened Australian species at large, echoing the thylacine's own role as an icon of ecological loss. 

It is perhaps unsurprising then that a number of thylacine novels would use fire to narrative effect. Examples include Julia Leigh's The Hunter and Sarah Kanake's novel Sing Fox to Me.