AustLit

Thylacines and the Anthropocene

I Saw Nothing: The Extinction of the Thylacine is the first picture book in Gary Crew and Mark Wilson's Extinct Series, published by Hachette. The series titles—beginning with I Saw Nothing, I Said Nothing, and I Did Nothing—emphasise human culpability in species decline and extinction, as well as our individual capacities to help change these outcomes.

Young Rosie, the daughter of a timber cutter, witnesses the capture and transportation of Benjamin, the last known thylacine, to the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart. Though a young child, she regrets not intervening in some way: "I was sorry that I ever saw it ... I should have had the guts to set it free." 

Associations are drawn between the captured thylacine, transforming Tasmanian environments, and bushmen's declining way of life in the interwar period. After Rosie's father dies in an accident, trapped beneath a log for three days, the family is forced to relocate from the bush to the city. Here, the warm ochres and silvered greens of Wilson's bush illustrations give way to the charcoal smudges of an industrialised landscape. Rosie's mother has taken up domestic work, and Rosie is keen to help with deliveries because, like her bushman father and the captured thylacine, she relishes her freedom. 

While the picture book is sympathetic to the fate of the Benjamin and the species—and considers the role of real historical figures, trapper Elias Churchill and zookeeper Alison Reid—it centres more on human perspectives than nonhuman ones. In her grief, Rosie even takes on a kind of ownership of the thylacine: "That's my tiger-wolf!", "The thylacine in the photo was mine". 

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