AustLit

Thylacines and the Anthropocene

Sonya Hartnett's Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf is bookended by two human-nonhuman encounters, between Satchel—a young man from a dying town—and an impossibly extant thylacine.

The novel opens with the thylacine's sensory experiences waking up in its forest surrounds. Despite Hartnett's third-person voice and use of the neuter pronoun 'it', her description of the animal approaches something like a more-than-human subjectivity: 'the breath billowing out between its great wide jaws would take form and swirl, an echo like a memory of the animal itself'. This effect is sustained by focus shifting between the thylacine and Satchel throughout the novel, both experiencing the dampness and chill of the mountain air, and both getting on with the business of their days. Their two worlds—the human and the nonhuman animal—collide at the first chapter's close, when Satchel meets the thylacine and mistakes it for a dog. 

The highway that bypasses Satchel's community acts as a symbol for human encroachment in the landscape, prioritising efficiency over the needs of others, whether human or nonhuman. Themes of dislocation and isolation hum along in the novel but in the wild, depersonalised space of the mountain, Satchel finds a kind of lonely comfort: 'no other element of the landscape ... would overshadow him and let him feel alone'. Through Satchel and his interest in the thylacine, and his companionship with his pet dog Moke, Hartnett destabilises dominant anthropocentric worldviews. When Satchel realises he could easily capture the thylacine's young pup in the final chapter, buying his ticket out of the dying town, he instead chooses ecological empathy: 'He had no right to take its gift of survival and use it for himself'. 

As in other thylacine narratives, there is an 'associational resonance' between thylacine extinction and the colonial treatment of First Nations peoples in lutruwita / Tasmania. For more information, see Philip Mead's Extinction Island essay. 

This work is affiliated with the Thylacines and the Anthropocene dataset, tracking thylacine extinction and ecological themes in Australian literature.