Tasmanian Devil (28 page)

11 Gill, Edmund D., ‘The Australian Aborigines and the Tasmanian Devil',
Mankind
, 8 (1971), p. 59.

12 Noetling, Fritz, ‘The Food of the Tasmanian Aborigines',
Papers &
Proceedings of the Royal Society of Tasmania,
1910, p. 281.

13 Flood, Josephine,
Archaeology of the Dreamtime
, Sydney, Collins, 1983, p. 62.

Chapter 3

1 Jones, Menna, ‘Convergence in Ecomorphology and Guild Structure among Marsupial and Placental Carnivores', in Jones, Menna, Dickman, Chris and Archer, Mike (eds),
Predators with Pouches
:
The
Biology of Carnivorous Marsupials
, Collingwood, Vic, CSIRO, 2003, p. 290. She cautions, however, that the success rate of such attacks is unknown.

2 ibid.

3 ibid.

4 Ewer, R. F.,
The Carnivores
, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973, p. 76.

5 Lord, Clive, ‘Existing Tasmanian Marsupials', op. cit., 1927, p. 22.

6
www.wolverinefoundation.org
, accessed 30 January 2005.

7 ibid.

8 ibid.

9 ibid.

10
www.napak.com/honey_badger
, accessed 31 January 2005.

11
www.awf.org/wildlives/183
, accessed 30 January 2005.

12 ibid.

13 ibid.

14 ibid.

15 Eisenberg, J.F.,
The Mammalian Radiations
, Chicago, Ill., University of Chicago Press, 1981.

16 Menna Jones interview with David Owen, 1 October 2004.

17 ibid.

18 Strahan, Ronald (ed.),
The Mammals of Australia
, rev. edn, Chats-wood, Reed Books, 1995, p. 60.

Chapter 4

1
www.abc.net.au/science/scribblygum
, accessed 30 December 2003.

2 Fleay, David, ‘The Tasmanian or Marsupial Devil—Its Habits and Family Life', op. cit., pp. 279–80.

3 Gilbert, Bill,
In God's Countries
, Omaha, University of Nebraska Press, 1984, p. 8. Gilbert earned considerable respect as a popular conservation and natural history writer and he travelled to Tasmania specifically to write the eighteen-page chapter on devils which appears in this book. He spoke to a number of people who could readily claim to know much about the devil.

4 Pemberton, David, ‘Social Organisation and Behaviour of the Tasmanian Devil,
Sarcophilus harrisii
', thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Science Faculty, Zoology Department, Hobart, University of Tasmania, July 1990, p. 123. A total of 3788 traps were set in ten sessions for individual devil identification, trapping 328 males and 353 females, 554 and 515 times respectively. Most devils became trap-shy but a few were caught many times. In respect of feeding, wallaby and wombat carcasses ‘were placed in a paddock approximately fifteen metres from the edge of the tea-tree scrub running along a creek in the south of the study area. A hide was positioned fifteen metres from the carcass. The carcasses were always c. twenty kilograms in weight and were tied with thin wire to a stake embedded in the ground to prevent animals dragging them away. Lights were set up on the left and right hand side of the carcass to reduce the amount of light shining directly at the observer or the animals which usually approached the carcass from the bush edge . . . No animals left the carcass site when lights were switched on, and soon after intense interactions began there were animals moving within the white light, around the hide, and through the hide under the observer's chair' (p. 111).

5 ibid., p. 117. The ‘yip' was identified subsequent to the completion of the thesis. Thylacines also had a ‘yip' call.

6 ibid., p. 164.

Chapter 5

1 Harris, George Prideaux, ‘Description of two new Species of Didelphis from Van Diemen's Land. By G. P. Harris, Esq. Communicated by the Right Honourable Sir Joseph Banks, Bart. K. B. Pres. R. S., H. M. L. S. Read April 21, 1807', in Linnean Society of London,
Transactions
, vol 9, 1808. X1, reproduced in
Letters of GP Harris 1803–1812
, edited by Barbara Hamilton-Arnold, London, Arden Press, 1994, p. 90.

2 Gould, John,
Mammals of Australia
, 1863, quoted in Joan M. Dixon (ed.),
The Best of Gould's Mammals
, Sydney, Macmillan, (rev. edn) 1984, p. 44.

3 Meredith, Louisa Anne,
Tasmanian Friends and Foes: Feathered, Furred
and Finned; A Family Chronicle of Country Life, Natural History, and
Veritable Adventure
, Hobart, J. Walch & Sons, 1880, pp. 63–5.

4 The island's Indigenous people were subject to near-genocide. Within 30 years of white settlement the nine tribes had been decimated through armed conflict, introduced diseases and dispersion. Billy was William Lanne, the last full-blood Aboriginal male, whose body was mutilated after death as part of a grisly conflict for possession between Tasmania's Royal Society and the Royal College of Surgeons in England. Truganini became celebrated as the last full-blood Tasmanian Aborigine. She died in 1876 and her skeleton was displayed in the Tasmanian Museum for many years, then kept hidden there. The Museum returned it to the Aboriginal community in 1976 and she was finally laid to rest in a ceremony on the waters of the D'Entrecasteaux Channel. Enlightened though she was in her time, Mary Roberts' casual use of these names is a sure indicator that notions of romantic savages still beat strongly in the Empire's bosom.

5 Roberts, Mary G., ‘The Keeping and Breeding of Tasmanian Devils (
Sarcophilus harrisii
)',
Proceedings of the Zoological Society of
London
, 1915, pp. 1–7.

6 ibid.

7 ibid.

8 Flynn, T. T., ‘Contributions to a Knowledge of the Anatomy and Development of the Marsupiala [:] No. I. The Genitalia of
Sarcophilus satanicus
',
Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South
Wales,
vol. xxxv, Part 4, 30 November 1910. [Issued 1 March 1911], p. 873.

9 ibid.

10 ibid., p. 874.

11 Guiler, Eric, ‘The Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart',
Tasmanian Historical
Research Association Papers and Proceedings
, vol. 33, no. 4, December 1986, p. 128.

12 Lord, Clive, ‘Existing Tasmanian Marsupials',
Royal Society of
Tasmania Papers & Proceedings
, Hobart, 1927, p. 22.

13 ibid., p. 24.

Chapter 6

1 Brogden, Stanley,
Tasmanian Journey
, Melbourne, Morris & Walker for Pioneer Tours, 1948, p. 79.

2 Guiler, Eric,
The Enthusiastic Amateurs: The Animals and Birds
Protection Board 1929–1971
, Sandy Bay, E. R. Guiler, 1999, p. 73.

3 The published results are in Guiler, E. R., ‘Observations on the Tasmanian Devil,
Sarcophilus harrisii
(Dasyuridae: Marsupiala) at Granville Harbour, 1966–75',
Papers and Proceedings of the Royal
Society of Tasmania
, vol. 112, 1978, Hobart, The Society, 1978, pp. 161–88. See also Guiler, E. R. and Heddle, R. W. L., ‘Observations on the Tasmanian Devil,
Sarcophilus harrisii
(Dasyuridae: Marsupiala). 1. Numbers, home range, movements and food in two populations',
Australian Journal of Zoology
, 18(1), 1970, pp. 49–62.

4
Australian Wild Life: Journal of the Wild Life Preservation Society
, vol. 3, no. 3, March 1958, Sydney, The Society, 1958, p. 14.

5 ibid.

6
Australian Wild Life
, op. cit., vol. 4, no. 2, 1962, pp. 30–2.

7
Australian Outdoors
, November 1961, Sydney, The Society, p. 36.

8 ibid., p. 37.

9 Bauer, Jack, ‘Protection That Doesn't Protect',
Australian Outdoors
, November 1961, Sydney, The Society, pp. 36–41.

Chapter 7

1 Guiler, E. R., ‘Observations on the Tasmanian Devil', p. 169.

2 ibid., p. 177.

3 ibid., p. 183.

4
The Mercury
, 9 August 1966, p. 6. The area covered a ‘fifty-mile radius' from Tooms Lake in the east to Interlaken across the Western Tiers, and south to Swansea.

5
The Mercury
, 15 January 1972, p. 4.

6
The Mercury
, 1 July 1972, p. 3.

7 Guiler, Eric, ‘Tasmanian Devils and Agriculture',
Tasmanian
Journal of Agriculture
, May 1970, p. 137.

8
Launceston Examiner
, 28 January 1987, p. 3.

9
Tasmanian Country
, 26 June 1987, p. 2.

10
The Mercury
, 6 August 1975, p. 14.

11 ‘Tasmania. Ministerial News Release No. 1521, October 27, 1984.'

12
The Mercury
, 2 February 1988, p. 1.

13
The Mercury
, 16 October 1985, p. 1. Pam Clarke went on to become a leading world campaigner against the practice of battery hen egg production, for which she has an impressively long record of arrests and court appearances. In the leadup to the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games she gained considerable publicity for her campaign by saying that its official logo looked like ‘a sad chook'.

14
The Mercury
, 17 October 1985, pp. 1–2. The B.Sc. (Hons) thesis in question: ‘The Cranial Anatomy and Thermoregulatory Physiology of the Tasmanian Devil,
Sarcophilus harrisii
(Marsupiala: Dasyuridae)', 1984, by Syed K. H. Shah, University of Tasmania, Hobart.

15
The Mercury
, 7 July 1988, p. 1.

16
The Sunday Tasmanian
, 23 July 1988, p. 5.

17 Mooney, Nick, ‘The Devil you know',
Leatherwood: Tasmania's
Journal of Discovery
, vol. 1, no. 3, Winter 1992, Hobart, Allan Moult, 1992, pp. 54–61.

Chapter 8

1 Virgis, Toren, interview with David Owen, 6 September 2004.

2 ibid.

3 ibid.

4 ibid.

5 Anderson, Angela, interview with David Owen, 24 January 2004.

6
www.kidszoo.com
, accessed 10 April 2004.

7 The interview was conducted between 7 and 9 April in 2004.

8 Email dated 19 May 2004.

Chapter 9

1 Flynn, Errol,
My Wicked, Wicked Ways
, Cutchogue, New York, Buccaneer Books, 1976. Typical of the larrikin style of the book, Errol also refers to his father as ‘just a tall hunk of scholarship' (p. 19).

2 Flynn, T. T., ‘Contributions to a Knowledge of the Anatomy and Development of the Marsupiala [:] No. I. The Genitalia of
Sarcophilus Satanicus
',
Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South
Wales,
vol. xxxv, Part 4, 30 November 1910. [Issued 1 March 1911], p. 873
.

3 Norman, Don,
Errol Flynn: The Tasmanian Story
, Hobart, W. N. Hurst & E. L. Metcalf, 1981, p. 4.

4 Flynn, Errol, op. cit., p. 24.

5 ibid., p. 104.

6 Jack Warner, quoted in
Hollywood Be Thy Name
:
The Warner
Brothers Story
, by Cass Warner Sperling, Rocklin, CA, Prima, 1994, p. 195.

7 Flynn, Errol, op. cit., p. 168.

8 Warner, op. cit., p. xi.

9 ibid., p. 7 and p. 343.

10 Jones' inspiration for the coyote—a scavenging carnivore—came from an earlier creative interpretation: ‘I first became interested in the Coyote while devouring Mark Twain's
Roughing It
at the age of seven. I had heard of the coyote only in passing references from passing adults and thought of it—if I thought of it at all—as a sort of dissolute collie. As it turned out, that's just about what a coyote is, and no one saw it more clearly than Mark Twain[:] “The coyote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth. He has a general slinking expression all over. The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is
always
hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless . . . He does not mind going a hundred miles to breakfast, and a hundred and fifty to dinner, because he is sure to have three or four days between meals . . .”' Jones, Chuck,
Chuck Amuck: the Life and Times
of an Animated Cartoonist
, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989, pp. 34–5. (Twain visited the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in 1897. He seemed to have difficulty identifying a Tasmanian devil and oddly referred to a highly predatory Tasmanian sheep-killing parrot that feasted only on its victims' kidney fat. He presumably meant the Kea, a scavenging carniverous parrot found only in New Zealand.)

11 Sandler, Kevin S. (ed.),
Reading the Rabbit: Explorations in Warner
Bros. Animation
, New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 1998, p. 7.

12 Jones, op. cit., p. 109.

13 Beck, Jerry and Friedwald, Will,
Warner Bros. Animation Art: the
Characters, the Creators, the Limited Editions
, Westport, CT, Hugh Lauter Levin Associates Inc/WB Worldwide Publishing, 1997, pp. 74–5.

14 ibid., pp. 129–30.

15
www.errolflynn.net/Filmography
, accessed 30 December 2003.

16 Bevilacqua, Simon,
Sunday Tasmanian
, 10 May 1998, p. 7.

17 Taz looks not unlike a very young devil, which has a disproportionately big head and tucked-in, obscure limbs.

18 Lenburg, Jeff,
The Encyclopedia of Animated Cartoons
, 2nd edn, New York, Facts on File, 1999, p. 142.

19 Grant, John,
Masters of Animation
, London, BT Batsford, p. 154.

20 Jones, op. cit., pp. 92, 93.

Chapter 10

1 McCorry, Kevin,
http://looney.toonzone.net/articles/tazarticle.html
, accessed 14 June 2004.

2 Sandler, Kevin S. (ed.),
Reading the Rabbit: Explorations in Warner

Bros. Animation
, New Brunswick NJ, Rutgers University Press, 1998, p. 177.

3 Bevilacqua, Simon,
Sunday Tasmanian
, 28 September 1997.