AustLit

Thylacines and the Anthropocene

In this paranormal fantasy for young adult readers, Tessa is found alone and without her memory in the Tasmanian bush. She is taken in by a kindly policewoman named Connolly, who lost her own daughter Cat in mysterious circumstances. Tessa learns to navigate the drama of high school amid strange bodily transformations, and it is Rhiannah—the daughter of environmental activists and a passionate bushwalker—that helps her to understand just who and what she is, a were-thylacine. 

While the novel does not explicitly engage with ecological themes, themes of  shapeshifting mirrors the transformation of the lutruwita / Tasmania's since settlement. The collision of colonial pasts and hybrid 'more than human' futures gestures towards the possibilities of a more empathetic engagement with our past and those around us. 

Thyla leverages many of the tropes typical of thylacine narratives in Australian literature. The most obvious comparisons are the were-thylacines in Krissy Kneen's Wintering and Frank Woodley's Kizmet and the Case of the Tassie Tiger, for younger readers. Julia Leigh's The Hunter foregrounds the reproductive possibilities of a female thylacine survivor, and in Thyla, Tessa's were-thylacine transformation is juxtaposed by her first menses, entangling her animality with her changing teenage body. Louis Nowra's Into That Forest features colonial 'feral children' returning to human society, and Sarah Kanake's Sing Fox to Me considers the trope of the lost child. 

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