AustLit

Thylacines and the Anthropocene

Detective Spencer, plucky youngster Kizmet and her currawong companion Gretchen are investigating claims that a "giant Tassie tiger has been terrorising goats and other livestock" (11). Local scientist Dr Simpson acts as a guide, with years of experience attempting to "reassemble the entire thylacine genome from the fragments we've gathered" (44). They discover that Dr Simpson has inadvertently contaminated his own genetic code with thylacine DNA, turning him into a were-thylacine. 

Though written as a curious mystery for children, Kizmet and the Case of the Tassie Tigers engages with two tropes typical of thylacines narratives in Australian literature: the animal's wolfish, sheep-thief associations, and scientific research into a possible genetic recovery of the species.

Both of these can be traced to colonial assumptions about the thylacine which, in turn, motivated policies of eradication. The thylacine eluded early scientific classification – was it a tiger or wolf, or more kangaroo than canine? Settlers themselves largely understood the thylacine as a southern wolf, and assumed it posed an inherent threat to sheep and other livestock. Carol Freeman explains that images of the thylacine were laden with "signifiers of violence and danger" (53), and it was made more monstrous and predatory as colonial agriculture expanded inland. Gothic and even vampiric associations were rooted in a larger existential dread felt by settlers in the strange new wilderness of lutruwita / Tasmania. 

Tim Winton's In the Winter Dark also features an unseen predator that may be a thylacine, Julia Leigh's The Hunter follows a man obsessed with hunting a thylacine to harvest its genetic material, and Krissy Kneen's Wintering explores conservation themes alongside monstrous were-thylacines.