AustLit

Thylacines and the Anthropocene

One Careless Night opens with a thylacine mother teaching her young pup how to hunt and 'survive' in the forests of lutruwita / Tasmania. This 'ancient', natural order is encroached upon violently by the 'crack of a whip' and the 'blast of gunpowder', signalling the arrival of settler-hunters. By aligning the thylacine with its pre-settlement environments, Booth invites comparison between the thylacine's extinction and broader ecological challenges facing a contemporary Australia. Noticeably absent are First Nations peoples, however, who also hunted and revered the animal (Owen, Paddle). 

The thylacine pair are snared in a trap, and their shift from animal predators to human prey is punctuated by shifts in Booth's illustration: the safety of the shadows—of misty mountains, and ferny undergrowth in the 'deep, dark bush'—gives way to an industrialised landscape and the stark white glare of a zoo pen. 

The pup outlives her mother and forgets that 'she is tyger', before she too dies of exposure. Booth's illustrations here mimic archival photographs and footage of Benjamin, the last captive thylacine who died in 1936. While there is some debate around whether Benjamin was male or female—due largely to the quirk of the thylacine's marsupial pouch—Booth chooses to imagine her as female (see Author's Note). 

In fact, many narratives imagine the last thylacine or a surviving thylacine as female, overlaying the animal's extinction with gendered themes. Notable examples include Julia Leigh's The Hunter and Sonya Hartnett's Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf.