Carnivorous Nights (42 page)

Of all the tiger hunters in Tasmania, only one had gone on to become a high government official. Bob Brown, James Malley's partner in crime from the Thylacine Expedition Research Team of 1972, was now serving his second term in the Australian Senate. We had arranged with the sena-tor's press aide to interview him at his office on Franklin Wharf. And as we dashed down Hobart's steep streets, we wondered if, after all these years, he would still be interested in talking about the tiger.

Half a block from the senator's office, Alexis stopped short.

“What
is
it?” we asked.

He pulled his pot pipe from his pocket. It was fully loaded for his next hit. “I should leave this someplace,” he said, looking around on the street.

We started to get nervous. There would probably be a security check outside the senator's office—a metal detector at the very least. But where could Alexis hide his stash? We were on a public street. Suddenly, Alexis— who had been scanning the surroundings—executed a startling layup. He loped toward a small street tree, jumped in the air, and deposited the pipe in a crook between two branches with a graceful finger roll. “Let's hope the magpies don't snatch it,” he said as he came down.

As it turned out, there were no bag checks or security guards inside the building—just cheerful, helpful people eager to direct us to the senator's office. When we got off the elevator on the senator's floor, we saw a woman with a furry animal in her coat pocket. It was a brushtail possum joey. Just as this was starting to remind us of a scene from Dr. Dolittle, a harried aide informed us, “We can't let him give you more than half an hour,” and we were whisked into the senator's private office.

The senator met us at the door and greeted us warmly. He was tall and thin, wearing a gray sports jacket and blue button-down shirt. His gaunt handsomeness suggested a fifty-something Jimmy Stewart. His office was decorated with a map of Tasmania, botanical drawings of endemic flowers such as Milligan's mountain heath, and a photograph of him with his partner standing beside a lichen-covered rock. In the window, a triangular yellow sticker read, “NO WAR—THE GREENS.” Bob was one of only three Green Party members in the entire Australian Parliament. He
was also the party's unofficial leader. Over the years, he had become an environmental crusader and an outspoken advocate for human rights.

If we had imagined the senator would no longer be interested in the tiger—that he would find the subject trivial or dated—we were widely off the mark. He was still compelled by it, and his memories of his thylacine search, which had taken place more than thirty years before, were crystalclear. Something about that time period, he said, had galvanized him— made him what he is today.

Bob had originally come to Tasmania to see Lake Pedder before it was flooded. (Lake Pedder was the world's largest glacial lake, a two-square-mile shallow body of water in southwestern Tasmania bordered by a pink quartzite beach. When Bob arrived, it was slated to be inundated by a series of dams that would generate hydroelectric power. Intense opposition to the dam had led to the formation of Tasmania's Green Party.)

Trained as a doctor on the mainland, Bob had taken a job practicing medicine in Launceston in 1972, and it wasn't long before he bumped into James Malley and Jeremy Griffith. James and Jeremy were already searching for the tiger and Bob was intrigued.

“Those two guys were bright-eyed. They had talked to a lot of people who had seen it, and they
knew
the tiger was there. It was just a matter of tracking it down. As a kid I had read about the Tasmanian tiger and I was always fascinated by it and the sightings. And yet, I was the skeptic. When I first came to Tasmania, I thought the animal was most likely extinct. But you couldn't yet make that decision.”

At that point, the tiger had not been officially declared extinct—and the possibility that it survived had not been fully explored. Bob cited the example of the takahe, a flightless bird from New Zealand that had been presumed extinct for fifty years and then was rediscovered in 1949. “The takahe's as big as a turkey,” he said. The rediscovery of such a large creature raised the possibility that the thylacine, despite its large size, might also have survived undetected in a remote area. Considering how significant the tiger was—so much a part of Tasmania's history and sense of place—it was not an animal to be given up on lightly. At least Bob felt it was important to have a systematic look—and that was what he, James, and Jeremy set out to do.

With his own money—what he had left after taking out ads in every
newspaper condemning the flooding of Lake Pedder—Bob set up an office and telephone hotline for the thylacine expedition team. When they received a report of a tiger sighting, they would proceed to the area, look for tracks, and interview witnesses.

One of Bob's jobs was to help set the camera traps that Jeremy had designed to capture a photo of the thylacine. This involved placing live chickens in treehouse pens and coming back periodically to feed them. “For the time, it was a sophisticated little system. If an animal tried to get at the chook, a line would be tripped and the camera would go off.” Like other camera traps before and after, these produced snapshots of possums, wombats, and quolls—but no tigers.

Some of their investigations sent them on far-flung, life-threatening journeys into the bush. “Jeremy was totally driven,” said Bob. “But mind you, so was James. I went into the Tarkine with James looking for tigers, and we crossed the Little Rapid River, and when we came back it was in flood. The river was fifty meters wide and flowing very fast. James couldn't swim. I said, ‘We have to camp here for a few days.’ But James was going to cross and that was it. I got a rope to the other side and he walked across. James was a big man. If he had fallen in, he would have drowned.”

They also drove thousands of miles back and forth across the island, interviewing eyewitnesses. This was where the work became discouraging. So many of the reports turned out to be cases of mistaken identity. One of the most promising dispatches came from a remote west coast beach. A young man had reported seeing a tiger while duck hunting. “He said it was getting dark, and suddenly there was a tiger standing on a dune looking at him from just twenty paces away. He had a gun with him and was against shooting it. We got there three days later, and there was great excitement. Men were fishing there for flounder, and James talked to the men. One of them had been to the museum in Hobart and was the most reliable witness among the lot. He said it was a tiger. There was a halfraised print on the dune. Then a couple of hours later, a guy came up the beach on a tractor. Loping up behind him was an Irish wolfhound. Everybody went quiet. I said, ‘Did you have that wolfhound tied up two nights ago?’ With quite a lot of embarrassment, he said, ‘I—I—I, yes, I did.’ I didn't believe him at all.… It was extraordinary. That dog was the last
thing you would expect to see on the west coast of Tasmania. But there it was in front of all of us.”

Ultimately, however, it was a sighting Bob made himself that permanently altered his perception—and Jeremy's as well. Bob was driving home one night through a wooded area and saw a startling vision in the headlights. “Here was this
animal.
I immediately went back to get Jeremy, and I said, ‘You've
got
to see this.’ We went right to the spot, and the animal was still there. I got it in the headlights, and it was extraordinary. It had pointy ears and a long snout. It had a thick rump and a kangaroo-like tail and four chocolate-colored stripes across its fawncolored back.” Bob paused as we leaned in expectantly.

“And this is the thing. It was a greyhound dog that had the pattern and coloring of a thylacine.”

Eyewitness sightings, it seemed, were not very reliable. “We looked at 250 sightings and at the end of the day only four of those could not be explained by something else: a wombat, a dog, a feral cat.”

Upon investigation, even some historical sightings came under question. The tiger team interviewed veteran tiger hunters, including Arthur Fleming, the retired police inspector who, while working for the Tasmanian Animals and Birds Protection Board, had found tiger tracks in the southwest wilderness during the late 1930s. As a result, he continued to search for the tiger over many years. Bob visited Fleming to ask him about a series of sheep mutilations that were blamed on tigers in a farming community in 1957. Sheep had been found with their throats slashed, their bodies intact but cleaned of blood as if the blood had been slurped up. These vampirelike attacks were believed to be the work of a tiger and were long used as evidence that the tiger survived at least into the 1950s.

“Inspector Fleming gave us the full story,” said Bob. “Yes, there were a number of tiger sightings. So they put out a big steel box cage and baited it with liver. One morning they approached the box and there was a big animal in it. When they got to it, it was an Alsatian dog. They dispatched the Alsatian, and the sheep killing stopped. It was so typical. That component of the story was never conveyed by the media. It's always the excitement of the chase, never the evidence.”

The noose seemed to be closing around the thylacine's neck. At the time of the thylacine expedition search, plenty of trappers and others who
had killed tigers for the bounty were still alive. While Bob, Jeremy, James, and others like them were finding it impossible to get even a whiff of a tiger, the older hunters described the tiger as easy to catch.

“I interviewed a lovely old man in Buckland. He had a big tree stump [on his property] and there were iron spikes right around it. Each one of those spikes represented the skull of a tiger that was kept on it. At his back fence were two big holes dug in the ground. They put tabletops over the holes and the tabletops had a steel axis across the middle. A tiger coming down the fence line would tread on one side of the table and it would tip. The tiger would drop into the pit and the table would close over it. In the morning they would take the tigers out. He told me they got forty tigers from a fence line that was half a mile long. That tells you how prevalent tigers were and how rapidly they were destroyed.”

We were surprised that the senator had called the killer of forty thylacines a “lovely old man.” His anger was directed not at individuals, but at the misguided policies behind the state-sponsored persecution of the thylacine.

“Nobody wants to talk about the deliberate extirpation of the tiger,” he said. Had we known, he asked, how close the vote had been that created the government-sponsored thylacine bounty?

Local livestock organizations, such as the Van Diemen's Land Company, had been putting up their own bounties through much of the nineteenth century. But it wasn't until 1886 that the Tasmanian government put up an island-wide bounty—effectively turning the killing of tigers into a business.

Sheep farmers on the East Coast had lobbied Tasmania's legislature for three years in a row to pass a government bounty. A petition they submitted in 1885 read:

In the debate over this issue, sheep owners made outrageous, overblown claims that thylacines were ravaging their flocks. The bill's key supporter
was John Lyne, a British-born sheep owner from Swansea, who claimed as many as fifty thousand sheep were being killed a year in his district. (Critics have noted that there were not that many sheep in the entire east coast region.) Opponents of the bill suggested the sheep farmers do more to protect their own flocks. Far more frequently than thylacine attacks, sheep were lost to disease, poor care, bad weather, and rustlers. But in the final vote, the bill was narrowly passed, by twelve to eleven. The government of Tasmania would pay £1 for the skin of a dead adult tiger. Bounty hunters could keep the skins after they had been properly marked by government officials and then earn another few shillings from their sale to the fur trade.

“From then on, every area of Tasmania was under the hunt,” Bob said. “If you look at that bounty book, each entry is a hunted-down tiger, a dead set of pups.”

In 1888, the first year the bounty was in effect, 81 thylacines were presented for the £1 payment. In 1889, 118 tiger skins were turned in. For the next sixteen years, the numbers varied from a low of 90 in 1890 to a high of 153 in 1900. Then in 1906, the numbers began to drop: 58 in 1906, 42 in 1907, 17 in 1908, 2 in 1909, zero in 1910, zero in 1911, zero in 1912.

By this point the animal was rare and worth considerably more than £1 to zoos. In 1914, Professor T. Thomas Flynn, a prominent zoologist at the University of Tasmania and the father of screen idol Errol Flynn, wrote that the thylacine

Errol Flynn referred to his scientist father as a “tall hunk of scholarship.” Be that as it may, nothing was actually done to protect the thylacine. And thylacines continued to be exported to zoos, ultimately commanding prices as high as £150.

“I think it's one of the most frustrating stories of the twentieth century,” Bob said. Saving, or even just seeing, the thylacine seemed so close, so within reach. “Yet it was snatched by greed, £1 greed.”

We knew what Bob meant. It was hard to let go of the tiger, to let it just drift off into the Styx.

In the end, Bob never saw a living thylacine, though he did see the last of Lake Pedder before it disappeared beneath the floodwaters. And when the Tasmanian Hydro-Electric Commission decided in 1979 to dam the Franklin and Gordon rivers, two spectacularly wild waterways in Tasma-nia's Southwest, Bob got involved. He rafted the Franklin River, organized an enormous blockade of the dam site, and spent nineteen days in jail after six hundred protesters were arrested. Ultimately, the protests led to the area surrounding the rivers being named a Wilderness World Heritage Area by the United Nations. In 1983, Australia's federal government intervened and the dam was stopped by a narrow decision of the Australian Supreme Court. The Franklin and Gordon rivers were saved. That same year, Bob became the first Green candidate elected to Tasma-nia's state Parliament where he served as an MP for ten years. Then, after a three-year break, he was elected senator from Tasmania to the Australian Parliament. He remains one of the most vocal advocates for protecting Tasmania's natural heritage and environment.