What makes the tiger live forever?

The thylacine’s celebrity status remains undimmed, partly because it may just still be around, says Leigh Swinbourne

IN Tasmania, in Hobart, as in the other states and their capitals, there are particular news stories, almost urban myths, that like bubbles in those old lava lamps, periodically rise to the surface, cool off a bit, then sink, and are forgotten until they rise again. Like those bubbles, these stories are basically unchanged, everything about them is as you remember, and their reappearance, more often than not, is unconnected to anything at all.

For example, in Tasmania we have the forestry debate, or how cloud-seeding is stealing rain from the southwest, the Battery Point walkway, NorthSouth rivalry, the height of buildings, Hobart traffic, light rail, pokies; from these and others you could probably compile an entire newspaper with no news, really, at all.

But the absolute chestnut has to be the Tassie tiger, long vanished but proudly visible everywhere. When I moved to Hobart from Sydney a little under two decades ago, I was under a delusion that the thylacine was extinct. Far from it. The tiger is ubiquitous, from the state’s coat of arms to beer and water bottles, car licenceplates, wilderness logos, various businesses … It seemed that every time I turned my head, there was that pointed face with its neck of stripes, winking at me from some unlikely spot.

Long vanished? What about the steady flow of sightings, all unfortunately lacking any convincing photographic or forensic backup. But just as an atheist cannot conclusively disprove the existence of God, likewise we can never say with absolute finality that there is not a nuclear tiger family somewhere out there in the vast Southwest Wilderness.

So, like those other unkillable stories, the tiger bubbles up in the media periodically, along with his mates, the tiger “tragics”, slowly facing extinction themselves as the years slip away, but still true believers.

I don’t want to be the one to say it, but it seems the tiger is gone. Nothing credible has emerged for far too long. Interestingly, it did seem to survive a little beyond the last specimen which perished at the Beaumaris Zoo in 1936, always cited as the last of its kind. Deny King in his memoir King of the Wilderness mentions the presence of tigers while prospecting down south in the 1940s and there are plenty of verbal reports of tigers been shot by farmers around the Derwent Bridge area in the 1950s. Of course this is still a long time ago, but presumably if the governments of the day had been motivated and organised we might still have the tiger with us. No matter. Extant species are disappearing before our eyes at a rate of knots. We are currently in the fourth Great Extinction, and we are the cause of it. Since the 1970s the earth has lost 60 per cent of its animal population. Quite possibly, all wildlife may be wiped out in our lifetime; rhinos, elephants, gorillas, the lot, only surviving in zoos and refuges.

Back to the tiger. What is interesting about the tiger is its undimmed celebrity status, despite the beast itself not being around to enjoy it. There is even a plan to genetically engineer, clone, a tiger from an old preserved foetus — bring it back from the dead — even though this has been debunked by most scientists as not feasible, and anyway we’re struggling to keep the Tassie devil and the wombats going at the moment. New Zealanders don’t seem to go on like this about the Moa.

The tiger reigns supreme in our popular imagination. Why?

There are some obvious reasons. Australia does well on the unusual and interesting wildlife front, but we do lack a big glamorous carnivore, an apex predator. Maybe in time one of the many feral cats out there decimating our wildlife even more successfully than we are will eventually evolve into a mini lion or tiger. But in the meantime there is that gap that the tiger mythically fills.

Or perhaps it is that

Aussies, for complex reasons, love great tragic might-havebeens, from Gallipoli to Phar Lap to Les Darcy to the tiger. But most of all there is the elusive possibility that the cynics just might be wrong. After all, the night parrot has finally come in from the cold, and there’s the Wollomi pine (which is, strictly speaking, not an animal). So why not the tiger?

But there is something especially “Tassie” about the Tassie tiger, and this is what intrigues me most of all. A little while back, when David Bartlett was premier, he and his wife travelled to New York to encourage investment in Tasmania (this is a true story). The New Yorker magazine, in their “Talk of the Town”,

We can never say with absolute finality that there is not a nuclear tiger family somewhere out there in the vast Southwest Wilderness.

noted the couple and their mission, describing Tasmania, for those unsure, as “the Australia of Australia”. Ouch! That hurts, partly, because it’s true. We’re pretty much off the radar, but we do have a few things. We have the

Tasmanian tiger. No one else in the world has it, certainly not the big island, although there are plenty of “sightings” there too, as it happens. Still, all these sightings here and there don’t tell us anything more about the tiger. Maybe, however, they tell us something about ourselves. Let’s not think too much about it.

The tiger is special, it’s unique, it’s Tasmanian, it’s ours. Sure, it’s gone, in fact we killed it off, but still, quite obviously, we can never let it go and never will. The tiger extinct? Forget it.