AustLit

Within the Climate Change in Australian Narratives research project, this exhibition explores the intersection of extinction and ecological themes in Australian literature through the figure of the thylacine, more commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger. Transformation—of landscapes, beings, and stories—is a central theme of this project.

Wherever possible, this exhibition follows dual naming conventions for geographic sites in lutruwita / Tasmania, in recognition of palawa and pakana's unbroken connection to Country.

This exhibition was researched and written on Turrbal and Jagera Country. Its author acknowledges Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the traditional owners and custodians of Country throughout Australia, and pays their respects to Elders past, present, and emerging. 

Please note that this exhibition includes references to deceased persons, including their names and images. 

This exhibition has been developed with an associated Thylacines and the Anthropocene AustLit dataset, tracking themes through selected novels, short stories, poetry, and drama, as well as children's and young adult texts. 

View all works in the 'Thylacines and the Anthropocene' dataset, or explore specific categories of works from the table below.

For more general literary engagements with the thylacine figure, view all works with the subject concept 'Thylacines' (this search will include works listed under the 'Thylacines', 'Tasmanian Tiger', and 'Tassie Tiger' concepts).

'Now the whole world has exploded; startled birds sound the death knell ... The thylacine is lying with her back toward him, curled like a sleeping dog. She's not dead yet.' (163) Julia Leigh, The Hunter.

The dataset's logo draws inspiration from a photograph held in the Libraries Tasmania collection, dated from the 1920s. By this time, sightings of thylacines in the wild were extremely rare. 

In the haunting image, a thylacine is shown curling back on itself with its iconic striped coat foremost in the frame. It is unclear if the thylacine is alive—sleeping, or cowering—or if it has been posed after death. This uncertainty reflects the exhibition's interest in the ambiguity of the thylacine figure, both extinct and representationally alive in the Australian imagination. 

The thylacine's extinction in lutruwita / Tasmania, and its haunting presence in literature, is bound up in the entangled contexts of colonisation and ecological transformation in what is now known as Australia.

The thylacine was the world's largest carnivorous marsupial, and it is more commonly described as the Tasmanian tiger, tyger, or wolf. Its scientific name Thylacinus cynocephalus translates rather redundantly as 'dog-headed pouched-dog' (Paddle 7), but it nevertheless reflects early colonial science's fascination with the animal's wolf-like appearance and rear-facing pouch. 

Thylacines were once distributed across the Australian continent and Papua New Guinea (Owen 23), and their presence is memorialised in First Nations story and art. Recent carbon dating of fossilised thylacine remains point to their presence on the mainland as recently as 3100 years ago, at Murray Cave in Western Australia (Australian Government).

The thylacine was extinct throughout mainland Australia by around 2000 years ago, and this can be traced to a number of confluent factors, including shifts in climate and habitat, predation by early humans, and the introduction of the dingo as another top-tier predator.  However, First Nations peoples and European settlers across Australia continued to record its presence as late as the 1840s (Paddle 24). 

The thylacine population in lutruwita / Tasmania was able to withstand these changes, partly because of the island's geography. Historian David Owen explains that the flooding of the Bassian Canyon some 12,000 years ago cut across the south-east corner of Australia's continental shelf —at what is now the Bass Strait—isolating Tasmanian thylacines from 'the circumstances that lead to [their] mainland extinction'. The island's temperate rainforest, mountain and tundra environments, and its relatively large size, meant that the Tasmanian thylacine's prey was diverse and bountiful even in cooler seasons (Owen 58).

By the time of European settlement in lutruwita / Tasmania in the early 1800s, it is estimated that there were around 5000 thylacines across the island ('Defining Moments'). Early encounters between thylacines and settler-colonists coincide with the dawn of what geologists describe as the Anthropocene, our current epoch where human activity has had a substantial impact on ecologies at a planetary scale. The edges of this period are fuzzy, but most agree that the Anthropocene begins with the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 

Along with their livestock and pets, settler-colonists brought with them European understandings of human-nonhuman difference and industries to rapidly transform their environments. The thylacine was a scientific oddity, a strange animal Other, and demonised as a threat to agricultural interests in the new colony (Freeman 53-54). 

In the space of just over a century, the thylacine—which had withstood millennia of habitat change —was all but extinct in the wild, and only a few survived in captivity.

This too would not last. 

'And now awhile the shepherd ate / The rations from his store, / His enemy, the tiger, too, / Was eating something more. / A stripe back'd brute for many weeks / Had feasted on the sheep / It was the shepherd's duty there / From tigers safe to keep.' E. Richall Richardson, 'To the Death' in the Weekly Examiner, 1878.

The thylacine was unlike any animal European settlers in lutruwita / Tasmania had seen before. With a striped coat like a tiger, a rear-facing abdominal pouch, and a snout like a wolf, it eluded understanding in ways that emulated its spectral presence at the fringes of settlement. 

Two interrelated assumptions informed settler attitudes towards the thylacine: first, its nocturnal feeding habits gave rise to rumours of vampirism and lycanthropy, and second, that the thylacine could be best understood as a kind of antipodean wolf (Owen, Paddle).

Such Gothic associations were rooted, perhaps, in the existential dread and abjection settler-colonists felt in the strange, southern wilderness of lutruwita / Tasmania (Paddle 29-30). Academic Carol Freeman explains that colonial constructions of the thylacine drew largely from European folk traditions and were marked by 'signifiers of violence and danger' (53-54). As colonial agriculture moved inland, so too was the thylacine made more monstrous and more predatory. These assumptions and constructions were lingering, even as colonists learned more about the animal, and it is perhaps unsurprising that they continue to inform representations of the thylacine in Australian literature today. 

'Van Diemen's Land was not a place of sentiment, less still a place where an animal of little economic value might be judged on its merits. Instead, the thylacine came to be branded with a reputation from which it was never to recover ... The thylacine represented one element of the wildness to be tamed, and its turn would come.' (72-73) David Owen, Thylacine: The Tragic Tale of the Tasmanian Tiger.
 

'"You can't force wildness out of an animal, or train it out either ... You can try, but it'll end up escaping."' (260) Sarah Kanake, Sing Fox to Me.

Perceived as an uncanny double to the European wolf with which settler-colonists were more familiar, the thylacine inherited many of its beastly associations. The wolf is often cast in European fairy and folk tales as a traditional antagonist to human interests (Marvin 67).

In this famous portrait from the period, the thylacine is quite literally inverted, strung up by it paws by an armed settler-hunter. 

If European folk knowledge understood the wolf as a threat to livestock and human safety in the Northern hemisphere, so too then must the thylacine—as a southern wolf—threaten agricultural life in the colony. It was scapegoated for stock losses and branded a sheep-thief when in reality, early agricultural failings in lutruwita / Tasmania could largely be attributed to error, weather, and roving bands of European settlers and their dogs (Freeman). 

A bounty system was established by the Tasmanian colonial government in the 1830s, paying for thylacine skins as well as live specimens. This gave rise to an enthusiastic trapping industry in lutruwita / Tasmania, with more than 3500 thylacines killed between 1830 and the 1920s ('Defining Moments'). Settling the thylacine, by destroying it, became an act of settling the land and maintaining the colony.

From the Thylacines and the Anthropocene dataset, read I Saw Nothing: The Extinction of the Thylacine as an example of trapping themes in Australian literature.

Pictured here is a mother thylacine sleeping with her litter of pups, or joeys, in an enclosure typical of the period. There is some disagreement around whether it depicts the Elias Churchill or the Walter Mullins group of thylacines, both captured in the 1920s. A similar photo was recently discovered by Rose Lewis in her grandmother's collection, that appears to show the same family from another angle. 

While uncertainty is common when dealing with local history artefacts, it also suggests something of the inscrutability of the trapping trade, particularly in its dying days. Similarly, the cropping, re-colouring and watermarking of thylacine images by amateur historians—as well as their trade between volunteer groups and websites—could be understood as a kind of modern evocation of the tiger-fervour of days past. 

For an extended discussion around the thylacine's image, see Freeman's Paper Tiger: A Visual History of the Thylacine.

The last confirmed sighting of the thylacine in wild was in 1933, and the last captive thylacine, Benjamin, died in the Beaumaris Zoo in nipaluna / Hobart, on September 7, 1936. The thylacine's extinction was not declared by the International Union for Conservation of Nature until 1982. 
 

'Species finally depart the biota, not with a bang but a whimper. The thylacine ... is one of a handful species where that whimper has a precise date.' (1) Robert Paddle, The Last Tasmanian Tiger: The History and Extinction of the Thylacine

The Tasmanian government formally acknowledged the loss of the species in 1986, fifty years after Benjamin's death. 

Original zoo footage from the 1930s of a thylacine at the Beaumaris Zoo in nipaluna / Hobart. Includes stills and illustrations from collections held by the Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office. Courtesy Tasmanian Archives.

The National Museum of Australia's educational resources include similar black-and-white footage from the 1934 documentary Native Animals of Australia, courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA).  Recently, the NFSA worked with Samuel François-Steininger and Composite Films to produce colourised images of the thylacine, from footage shot by naturalist David Fleay in December 1933.

Colonial policies towards the thylacine were informed by European understandings of human-nonhuman difference. Ecofeminist critic Val Plumood explains that Australia's colonisation was driven by two 'inseparable' ideologies (53); that of anthropocentrism, which centered the human, and Eurocentrism, which presupposed Western dominance.

Colonists homogenised all that was non-human and non-European in Australia as Other (Plumwood 56, Calarco 3). European settlers situated themselves outside the sphere of nature, and so all other beings —including First Nations peoples—were framed as inferior, justifying their subjugation or, in the case of the thylacine, their destruction.

As well as displacing and destroying native species, colonists made a marked effort to 'Anglicize' the Australian landscape with flora and fauna from their European homes (Harley 44). Not only did this add to the challenges of colonial agriculture—introduced rabbits, for instance, dominated the landscape without a natural predator—but it had lasting ecological impacts throughout Country, tipping the balance of ecosystems and degrading soil and waterway health (Harley 54).  

Unsurprisingly, authors and critics alike have drawn parallels here between the treatment of thylacines by settler-colonists and the frontier violence experienced by First Nations peoples across Australia.

Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood goes so far as to name a genetically-resurrected thylacine in her short story 'Thylacine Ragout' after Truganini, a Nuenonne woman mythologised as a 'last of her race' in lutruwita / Tasmania. View Truganini's AustLit / BlackWords record for links to more biographical information. 

Literary critic Philip Mead explains in his AustLit monograph Literature of Tasmania that there is an 'associational resonance' in Australian literature between the thylacine's extinction and the colonial treatment of First Nations peoples. 

See Cassandra Pybus's Truganini: Journey through the Apocalypse for an extended discussion of how Truganini's history (1812-1876) has been leveraged and negotiated in Australian culture.

One example of how Australian authors have engaged with these intersecting histories is Sarah Kanake's novel Sing Fox to Me. Kanake situates and aligns the novel's First Nations characters with its forest spaces, where thylacines once roamed. Dreaming cosmology furthers the bildungsroman of the outsider protagonist and deepens the world of the novel, with Kanake acknowledging her own limitations as author here. Nevertheless, the presence of First Nations voices and histories in the novel offers some counterpoint to claims of belonging assumed by the white settler family on the mountain property. Similarly in Krissy Kneen's Wintering, the spectre of frontier violence—in particular, the Black Line plan to disperse First Nations peoples throughout the island (see Reynolds and Ryan)—is evoked to build the novel's Gothic atmosphere. 

Yet, it is important to not perpetuate the colonial marginalisation Plumwood speaks of by aligning thylacine representation and First Nations experiences too closely in literature, or in our study of it. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith warns in Decolonizing Methodologies, artists and critics may 'reinscrib[e] and reauthoriz[e] the privileges of non-indigenous academics' (56) when writing around Indigenous perspectives, without their inclusion. 

Though the thylacine is now extinct throughout mainland Australia and lutruwita / Tasmania, enduring oral and artistic presences of the animal challenge ontological understandings of what that extinction means culturally. 

Pictured above, for instance, is an image of thylacine in the main gallery at Ubirr on Mirarr Country in Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory. Much of the rock art in this area is from the 'freshwater period, within the last 1,500 years', and similar rock art exists in the Kimberley and Pilbara in Western Australia, written into and transforming the landscapes around them.

'The features in this landscape were given form by the activity of Akngwleye fighting off the intruders ... All along this range, you can read that story, see that story, smell where the dog marked his territory.' Aunty Doris Stuart Kngwarreye. 

In this video produced by the ABC for their Back Roads program, Aunty Doris Stuart Kngwarreye shares a Dreaming story of the Mparntwe Arrernte people about Akngwelye, a thylacine guarding the Ntaripe pass near Alice Springs in the Northern Territory.

A fierce battle raged between Akngwelye— the 'big boss of the area'—and an intruding dog, turning up the landscape. Victorious, Akngwelye metamorphosed into the rocky outcrop, with his nose still sniffing the air at the peak of Mt. Gillen. 

Also known as Heavitree Gap, Ntaripe served as natural and traditional barrier to movement, and it remains a significant cultural site for the Mparntwe Arrernte people. It is now bisected by the Stuart Highway, and Aunty Doris explains that visitors passing through now 'innocently breach a cultural boundary as much as a physical boundary'. Akngwelye and his pups remain in the rocky landscape, but are similarly disconnected from each other by buildings and infrastructure of Alice Springs.

Another provocative example of the thylacine's residual mainland presence is the stringybark painting Thylacine (1995) by John Mawurndjul, a contemporary Kuninjku artist from Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. Its traditional rarrk cross-hatching style is characteristic of Mawurndjul's work, and here reveals the thylacine's interior as a hunter might butcher its carcass. The painting, both ancient and modern, reflects the thylacine's own unsettled place in contemporary Australian culture. 

'It is a painting of a thylacine, a Tasmanian tiger, thousands of miles and years from where the beast last roamed, itself a testament to the enduring legacies and stories of Mawurndjul's people and culture.' AGSA's Nici Cumpston told the Adelaide Review, as co-curator of the John Mawurndjul: I am the old and the new exhibition. 

View Thylacine (1995) here, courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and the Art Gallery of South Australia.

From the Thylacines and the Anthropocene dataset, read How the Tasmanian Tiger Got Its Stripes as an example of First Nations representations of the thylacine in literature.

Across lutruwita / Tasmania, settler colonists recorded a number of Indigenous names for the thylacine—including lagunta, corinna, and ka-nunnah (Owen 59)—and while it was as an important food source for some groups, it was sacred to others (Paddle 20). 

First Nations storyteller and author Leigh Maynard recounts a Dreaming story from the Nuenonne nation of Bruny Island about a young pup who rescues the boy-god Palana from Tarna, the Great Kangaroo. In recognition of his courage, Palana marks the pup with healing stripes made from his blood and spiritual power mixed with campfire ash. This transforms the pup into a thylacine, and aligns him with the great spirit and constellation Wurrawana-Corinna. 

Maynard's retelling shares key details with another Dreaming story, 'Corinna, The Brave One' as told by Timler and attributed to Mannalargenna, the leader of the Pairrebeenne clan in lutruwita / Tasmania's north-east. This story was first recorded in the Cotton family's collection of palawa and pakana narratives from the 1830s—later published as Touch the Morning: Tasmanian Native Legends (1979)—and includes terms like 'baptism' and 'Tiger', which may suggest some narrative intervention by the settler family (Owen). The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, and others, question the folkloric license taken by settler-ethnographers like Cotton, overwriting First Nations voices and knowledges with European perspectives.

These Dreaming stories, from the mainland and lutruwita / Tasmania both, demonstrate how despite the thylacine's extinction, there was and remains a diversity of relationships between the thylacine and First Nations peoples in Australia. 

Aboriginal Nations Australia produced 'Kannenner the Brave (The Tasmanian Tiger)', an animated retelling of a thylacine Dreaming story from the Nuenonne nation of Bruny Island off the Southeast coast of lutruwita / Tasmania, as told by Leigh Maynard. This predates the publication of Maynard's picture book How the Tasmanian Tiger Got Its Stripes (2004), which is illustrated with still images from the animation. 

'The first extinction / the regretful regretted.' Les Murray, 'The Newly Tragic Dodo' in Conscious and Verbal.

'Feeling sorry was in every Tasmanian's blood. It was built beneath the skin of the country like plates beneath the earth.' Sarah Kanake, Sing Fox to Me.

Despite its ecological absence, the thylacine continues to be reanimated in the Australian imagination as an icon of ecological loss. As well as in literature, the thylacine's image haunts us in reported sightings and is emblazoned in 'kitsch' art, logos and branding, and tourist ephemera (Bullock 73-4).

The thylacine's image was conjured in 1996, when the Threatened Species Network—founded by WWF Australia and the Australian Government's Natural Heritage Trust— established National Threatened Species Day (NTSD), exactly sixty years after the death of Benjamin.

As well as memorialising the thylacine, NTSD draws attention the continued ecological threats faced by other native species in Australia, flora and fauna alike. Indeed, as Rosylynn Haynes explains, the thylacine as an extinct Tasmanian oddity stands in as a broader 'symbol of its own wilderness habitat' in lutruwita / Tasmania, similarly '... hunted, exploited, destroyed, extinguished' (306). 

The thylacine has emerged as an icon of the Anthropocene, representing the disastrous consequences of human hubris. Postcolonial critics like Dipesh Chakrabarty and Amitav Ghosh have discussed how the scale and scope of our ecological impact escapes Western understanding, and is 'unrepresentable' in the customary frames of realism (Ghosh 32). The thylacine figure, as an ecological oddity and martyr, embodies humans' inability to comprehend our new and urgent climate contexts, that 'strangeness...around us' (Ghosh 30). 

Similar evocations have occurred with other marsupial species in Australia, in the wake of recent anthropogenic climate disasters. For an extended discussion of these themes, see AustLit's Black Summer research project. 

From the Thylacines and the Anthropocene dataset, read Michelle Kadarusman's Music for Tigers as an example of how authors engage conservation themes in thylacine narratives.

From the Thylacines and the Anthropocene dataset, read Michelle Kadarusman's Music for Tigers as an example of how authors engage with conservation themes in thylacine narratives.

There has been some recent scientific interest into what other factors contributed to the thylacine's extinction, beyond habitat disruption and government hunting bounties, and there is argument that thylacine populations were already in decline by the arrival of European settlers in lutruwita / Tasmania. 

It is clear, however, that colonial treatment of the animal, as well as deforestation and food chain disruption, nevertheless accelerated its extinction.  As historian Robert Paddle notes, modern attempts to lay blame elsewhere may be read as a reluctance to accept human culpability in the thylacine's disappearance: a 'cultural construction of collective cowardice' (232). Les Murray articulates this sentiment in 1999 poem 'The Newly Tragic Dodo', pointing to the cruel irony that it takes an animal's extinction for humans to reckon with their impact. 

Of note here is the University of Melbourne's de-extinction research and TIGRR project, which may atone genetically for the thylacine's loss. 

'The animal scared the hell out of the settlers. My idea was to make an island out of thylacines and killed sheep—they're not on an island; they are the island.

... a blame-the-victim picture, a sort of fever dream of the Tasmanian settler alone in the bush with these animals, although there was never any evidence of one killing a human being, and very little evidence of their eating sheep.' Walton Ford in 'Man and Beast' for The New Yorker

View The Island by American artist Walton Ford, a painting of an island of predatory thylacines and dead sheep.

Ford's painting recalls the style of early colonial illustrations, as well as the piles of slaughtered thylacine carcasses collected for government bounty.

Ford's construction of the thylacine as a 'beast' against innocent lambs is evocative of colonists' biblical framework, and gestures towards the island of lutruwita / Tasmania as a container of violent histories. Neither the native thylacine nor the introduced sheep can escape the rising waters around them. 

'He remembered the photographs he had seen of the last captive tiger imprisoned in the barren cell of a zoo. It had stayed close to the wire and it had died there alone. That was not the way for a survivor to live.' (189) Sonya Hartnett, Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf. 

It is these intersecting contexts that make the thylacine such a provocative figure for engaging with colonial and ecological issues in Australian literature. Most contemporary Australian novels depicting the thylacine have emphasised the animal's historicity and extinction, and its representation is rooted largely its colonial associations. 

Louis Nowra's young adult novel Into That Forest, for example, represents the thylacine in a nineteenth-century frontier setting. An almost biblical flood delivers two children to the den of the thylacines, who raise them as their own. Sonya Hartnett's Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf and Julia Leigh's The Hunter both imagine thylacines in present-day lutruwita / Tasmania as the last survivors of their species.

These characterisations of the thylacine have gone on to inform subsequent representations in later novels. Sarah Kanake, for instance, names all three in her research for her own thylacine novel.

The influence of Leigh's novel is inescapable, and it functions as an important touchstone for thylacine scholarship in Australia. Alex Philp and others have read Leigh's hunter M as a hypermasculine figure, engaging with the colonial trope of the hunt. The thylacine as female recalls the gendered confusion around Benjamin—it was unclear if the last captive thylacine was male or female—and cements the animal as liminal figure in the text (Philp 88). Ecological themes abound in the novel, such as the conflict between technologised urban interests and the wild, nonhuman forests and plateaus of lutruwita / Tasmania. 

Tony Hughes-d'Aeth, as another example, considers how M plays the role of a 'natural man' by masking his true purpose along with his (hu)manliness (25), smeared in animal scat. Colonial thylacine hunters, or tiger men, used similar techniques to capture the animal. M as hunter represents a violent human encroachment in the Tasmanian landscape.  

Other novels gesture towards the thylacine more obliquely: Tim Winton's In the Winter Dark suggests that an unseen predator may be a thylacine. Donna Mazza is interested in representations of kangaroos and predators like thylacines in her scholarship, and includes it briefly in her novel Fauna.

James Bradley, in Ghost Species, and Mazza both imagine a future when the animal is recovered through genetic engineering.

Kathleen Jennings's novel Flyaway includes illustrations of the thylacine, drawing out its colonial fairy tale associations and overlaying its history on the mysterious canine in the text. View Jennings's thylacine art at TOR's blog here. 

Watch the trailer for the 2011 film adaptation of Julia Leigh's novel The Hunter. For more details about this adaptation, view the AustLit record here. 

Several authors have made colonial and ecological entanglements explicit in their novels, transforming the thylacine's animal figure along with its literary representation. Rather than restricting the thylacine to a historical past as an extinct animal, or imagine a future where it might survive or be recovered, these authors lean into an unsettling uncanny. 

Kanake's novel Sing Fox to Me is set on a Tasmanian mountain property in 1986, the same year the thylacine was officially declared extinct (Owen 34). It follows twin teenage boys, Jonah and the enigmatic Samson, who lives with Down syndrome, and their grandfather Clancy, a recluse unable to resolve the loss of his daughter River. 

The spectre of the lost thylacine haunts the novel, in Clancy's memory and grief for River, in poetry and newspaper reports, and in its aching absence. Similarly haunting are issues of settler belonging and the encroaching wilderness around the property. The tension between the thylacine's absence and its residual presence is symbolised in the text by a pelt which, when worn by Kanake's human protagonists, acts as a transformative object. 

Krissy Kneen's novel Wintering is set in the coastal villages, forests, and glow-worm caves of a more contemporary lutruwita / Tasmania. Here, men descended from colonists shapeshift into predatory werewolf-thylacine creatures. Kneen is ambiguous about whether this is a hereditary curse for ancestral frontier violence, or an affliction more like lyncathropy. What is clear is the novel's generic playfulness, drawing from detective and Gothic traditions, and its acclimation of European fairy tales to the Australian landscape, similar to Jennings, and Alexis Wright in Swan Book.

Wintering follows scientist Jessica as she wrestles with the disappearance of her partner Matthew. As in Sing Fox to Me, natural environments in Wintering function as sites of transformation but where Kanake's novel elegises the thylacine, Kneen's conjures a horrifying monstrosity.  Interestingly, both Kanake and Kneen are outsider authors with outsider protagonists, looking into lutruwita / Tasmania as a haunted site in which to explore these entanglements.

Other unsettling examples include the beastly thylacines and roving band of cannibals in the film Dying Breed, and the were-thylacine figures in Kate Gordon's paranormal young adult series Thyla. 

'There had been cuts made, the ears and paws were removed and I thought it was an unfortunate beast; its thirteen stripes had proved unlucky indeed ... I willed it to live again. I knew this tiger was gone forever—but I wanted to see it come alive, to right the wrong which had been done it.' (16-17) Tony Black, The Last Tiger.

The thylacine's loss cannot be divorced from the colonial and ecological contexts of its extinction. Its uncanny invocation in contemporary Australian literature moves these histories into the present. 

Gelder and Jacobs explain in Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation that Australia is disrupted by the foundational fallacy of terra nullis, the legal assertion by European colonists that settlement was justified because Australia belonged to no one. Yet, Indigenous sovereignty in Australia was never ceded, nor was it widely recognised, and so claims of settler belonging here are rendered unstable. This means that there is now a tension in Australia, between enduring First Nations sacredness and rights to Country—as gestured towards in the thylacine Dreaming stories above— and administrative colonial modernity. Gelder and Jacobs helpfully call this tension 'unsettled settledness' (25). 

They suggest that ghost narratives are useful sites for negotiating how these issues continue to haunt Australian culture (Gelder and Jacobs 30, 42). Ghosts as liminal unsettled figures themselves can express both the dispossession experienced by First Nations peoples, and the anxieties of belonging felt by settler-Australians. 

Critics like Nicholas Smith and Hannah Stark have argued that the thylacine fuctions as a similarly transgressive figure, haunting the margins of Australia's imagination (Smith 270). Indeed, the thylacine can be understood as both extinct and resiliently, representationally alive. It lives on in First Nations knowledges, in colonial story, in kitsch, and in material artefacts like pelts and specimens, and is reanimated in the ghostly footage held in archives across Australia.

What better figure might there be for exorcising both our pasts and our ecological futures in Australian literature? 

Compilation of archival footage of the thylacine in zoos across lutruwita / Tasmania. 

'It was as if the world had restarted in the middle of the night and this was the first day. She was still learning how to live in this brand-new and desolate world.' (32) Krissy Kneen, Wintering

It is also worth considering at the exhibition's close what representative possibilities might lie ahead for thylacines, if they were resurrected outside of these contexts. What might a thylacine novel look like if it is not overburdened by settler violence and anthropogenic extinction? How might we read thylacine literature, if de-extinction projects prove successful and it is reintroduced into the Australian wilderness?

Critic Anne Le Guellec-Minel observes that, 'the repeated loss of the emblematic [thylacine in literature] points to the failure of the white Australian imagination to enter into a meaningful and … loving relationship with the land' (82). What opportunities does literature offer for imagining more empathetic relationships between humans and nonhuman others in Australia?

In some small way, this exhibition hopes to contribute to these conversations by offering the thylacine figure as a provocative narrative objective. Its author encourages students, readers, and researchers to be inspired to negotiate the entangled contexts of thylacine extinction, and to consider what more work needs to be done in these spaces. The thylacine figure might just be haunted and haunting enough to unsettle us all.  

Below is a selection of themes that recur across the Thylacines and the Anthropocene dataset, acting as useful entry points. 

Creators have used archival artefacts to inspire illustrations, peritextual art, and characterisations in their thylacine narratives. The reworking of images can be read as another way of recovering or reconstructing the thylacine from what remains, building a collage of grief and hope for a different future. 

Example texts include Margaret Wild and Ron Brooks's The Dream of the Thylacine and Christina Booth's One Careless Night. Sarah Kanake's characters engage with these records in Sing Fox to Me.

A number of texts have taken up the idea of the last surviving thylacine, resisting the threats of cultural and ecological change around them. These works allude to the lonely story of Benjamin, the last captive thylacine, as well as the colonial treatment of First Nations Peoples in lutruwita / Tasmania. The survivor is often female, offering both a reproductive possibility and gendered critique of human-nonhuman relations. 

Examples texts include Tony Black's The Last Tiger, Aleesha Darlison's Stripes in the Forest, Sonya Harnett's Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf, and Michelle Kadarusman's Music for Tigers .

Another theme recurring in recent thylacine narratives is the role of scientists and conservationists in the protection of the species. Some authors have leveraged the speculative genre, imagining utopian futures where the thylacine can be recovered using genetic engineering. Others have considering the futility of trying to undo the past, or the insurmountable challenges of Anthropogenic climate change. 

Example texts include Rjurik Davidson's Benjamin 2073, Toni Jordan's Fall Girl, and Krissy Kneen's Wintering. The mystery of Frank Woodley's Kizmet and the Case of the Tassie Tiger revolves around a scientist who inadvertently splices his genetic information with the thylacine's. Ethical issues around genetic harvesting are explored in Julia Leigh's The Hunter, also with a female thylacine survivor. 

Huggan, Graham and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. Routledge, 2010.

Reynolds, Henry. A History of Tasmania. Cambridge UP, 2012.

Rose, Deborah Bird. Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction. U of Virginia P, 2011.

Ryan, Lyndall. Tasmanian Aborigines: A History Since 1803. Allen & Unwin, 2012.

Smith, Bernard. The Spectre of Truganini: 1980 Boyer Lectures. Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 1980.  

Conclusion....

Thanks...

Australian Government. Species Profile and Threats Database: Thylacinus cynocephalus - Thylacine, Tasmanian Tiger. Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment, 2020, www.environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/sprat/public/publicspecies.pl?taxon_id=342.

Bullock, Emily. 'Hunting the Tasmanian Thylacine: A Brilliant Shadow.' A Cultural Poetics of Contemporary Tasmanian Gothic, 2009, Macquarie University, PhD dissertation, pp. 73-116. 

Calarco, Matthew. 'Introduction: The Question of the Animal.' Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. Columbia UP, 2008, pp. 1-14. ProQuest Ebook Central, ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uql/detail.action?docID=908273.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 'The Climate of History: Four Theses.' Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, 2009, pp. 197–222. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/596640. 

D’Aeth, Tony Hughes. 'Australian Writing, Deep Ecology and Julia Leigh’s The Hunter.' Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, vol. 1, 2002, pp. 19-31. JASAL, openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/9652/9541.

'Defining Moments: The Extinction of Thylacine'. National Museum of Australia, 2022, www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/extinction-of-thylacine. Accessed 7 May 2022.  

Freeman, Carol. Paper Tiger: A Visual History of the Thylacine. Brill, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, ebookcentral-proquestcom.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/lib/uql/detail.action?docID=635009.

Gelder, Ken and Jane M. Jacobs. 'The Postcolonial Uncanny: On Reconciliation, (Dis)Possession and Ghost Stories.' Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, Melbourne UP, 1988, pp. 23-42.

Ghosh, Amitav. 'Stories.' The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. U of Chicago P, 2016, pp. 1-84. ProQuest Ebook Central, ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/lib/uql/reader.action?docID=4532285&ppg=10. 

Harley, Alexis. 'Rabbits and the Rise of Australian Nativism.' Victorian Environments. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, edited by Grace Moore and Michelle J. Smith, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 39-56. SpringerLink, doi-org.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/10.1057/978-1-137-57337-7_3

Haynes, Roslynn D. Tasmanian Visions: Landscapes in Writing, Art and Photography. Polymath Press, 2006. 

International Union for Conservation of Nature. 'Thylacine.' IUCN Endangered List, www.endangeredlist.org/animal/thylacine.

Le Guellec-Minel, Anne. 'The Tasmanian Tiger: From Extinction to Identity Myth in White Australian Society and Fiction.' Literary Location and Dislocation of Myth in the Post/Colonial Anglophone World, edited by André Dodeman and Élodie Raimbault, Brill, 2017, pp. 67-83. ProQuest Ebook Central, ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/lib/uql/detail.action?docID=5124232. 

Marvin, Garry. 'Wolves in Sheep’s (and Others’) Clothing.' Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, edited by Dorothee Brantz, U of Virginia P, 2010, pp. 59-78. Project MUSE, muse-jhu-edu.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/chapter/500458.

Mead, Philip. 'Literature of Tasmania: An Introduction to Tasmania in the Literary Imagination.' AustLit, 2004, www-austlit-edu-au.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/austlit/page/10980326.

Owen, David. Thylacine: The Tragic Tale of the Tasmanian Tiger. Allen & Unwin, 2003. 

Paddle, Robert. The Last Tasmanian Tiger: The History and Extinction of the Thylacine. Cambridge UP, 2000.

Philp, Alex. 'Hunted, Now Haunting: The Thylacine as a Gothic Symbol in Julia Leigh’s The Hunter.' Gothic Animals: Uncanny Otherness and the Animal With-Out, edited by Ruth Heholt and Melissa Edmundson, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 75-90. SpringerLink, doi-org.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/10.1007/978-3-030-34540-2_5.

Plumwood, Val. 'Decolonizing Relationships with Nature.' Decolonizing Nature : Strategies for Conservation in a Post-colonial Era, edited by William Adams and Martin Mulligan, Taylor & Francis Group, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/lib/uql/detail.action?docID=430027.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 'Imperialism, History, Writing and Theory.' Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Zed Books, 2012, pp. 57-90. ProQuest Ebook Central, ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/lib/uql/detail.action?docID=1426837.

Smith, Nicholas. 'The Return of the Living Dead: Unsettlement and the Tasmanian Tiger.' Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 36, 2012, no. 3, pp. 269-289. Taylor and Francis Online, doi-org.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/10.1080/14443058.2012.703219.

Stark, Hannah. 'The Cultural Politics of Mourning in the Era of Mass Extinction: Thylacine Specimen P762.' Australian Humanities Review, no. 63, 2018, pp. 65. ProQuest, www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/cultural-politics-mourning-era-mass-extinction/docview/2160345409/se-2.

Stuart Kngwarreye, Doris. 'Mparntwe'. Back Roads and Other Stories: Series 5, episode 4, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2021. Informit, search-informit-org.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/doi/10.3316/EDUTV.7244659.

Animated GIF extracted from the compilation thylacine footage. 2016. Wikipedia Commons. 

Cavendish, Henry Frederick Compton, et al. Illustration of 'The Last of the Aboriginals, (Lady) Tasmania' in The Cruise Round the World of the Flying Squadron 1869-1870, under the command of Rear Admiral G.T. Phipps-Horby. British Library. 1871. Wikipedia Commons.  

Film - Tasmanian Tiger - original zoo footage. 1930-1939. Tasmanian Archives (AB869/1/2934). YouTube. 

Jerrard, Megan. Photograph of Tasmania Tiger Skeletons on display at Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. 2018. Wikipedia Commons. 

Kretschmer, R. Illustration of a thylacine, bearing the title De Buidelwolf. State Library of Victoria. 1864. Wikipedia Commons.

Mützel, Gustav. Australische fauna, Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, State Library of Tasmania (FA999). 1885-1890. Libraries Tasmania.

Pape, Dave. Photograph of Ubirr rock art. 2013. Wikipedia Commons. 

Prout, Victor. Hunter poses with a dead thylacine, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. 1869. Wikipedia Commons. 

Photograph of Wilfred Batty and thylacine, shot in the wild. 1930. Wikipedia Commons.

Photograph of Pieman River, Tasmania. 2016. Wikipedia Commons. 

Photograph of thylacine mother and joeys, Natural Worlds. 1925. Wikipedia Commons. 

Scott, Harriett and Helena Forde. Illustration of a thylacine from The Mammals of Australia, National Library of Australia. 1871. Wikipedia Commons.

Scott, Thomas. Thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger) Trap from Sketches in Tasmania 1822-1847, State Library of New South Wales. 1823. Wikipedia Commons. 

Serras, George. Photograph of a Thylacine pelt, from 1930. National Museum of Australia. Wikipedia Commons. 

Note on the Use of palawa kani Terms

This exhibition follows the example set by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC), the Tasmanian Government, and the University of Tasmania, using 'palawa and pakana' to acknowledge the diversity of First Nations peoples in lutruwita / Tasmania today. Where appropriate, it follows the formatting conventions of the composite palawa kani language as recommended by the TAC.

It should be noted that a variety of languages continue to be spoken in lutruwita / Tasmania, and palawa kani is not universally accepted. Though this exhibition uses the palawa kani term 'lutruwita' for Tasmania's dual naming, alternative geographic names like Trowenna from the Nuenonne nation are also in use. Christopher D. Berk discusses the possibilities and limitations of palawa kani in 'Palawa Kani and the Value of Language in Aboriginal Tasmania.' Oceania, vol. 87, no. 1, 2017, pp. 2-20. 

From the Thylacines and the Anthropocene dataset, read Sonya Hartnett's Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf as an example of last survivor themes in thylacine narratives. 

Aunty Doris Stuart Kngwarreye share a Dreaming story from the Mparntwe Arrernte people about Akngwelye, a thylacine guarding the Ntaripe pass.

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