In Tasmania (38 page)

Mooney is unrepentant about his response to fox sightings. He calculates that 70 species in Tasmania would come under pressure if a fox population established itself, including the eastern quoll, the bettong, the barred bandicoot and the small native kangaroo known as the pademelon. He is concerned that not enough people are taking his alarm-call seriously and that many in authority, including the Premier, do not even believe that such a threat exists. ‘Once we've got proof of foxes breeding, we're screwed.'

He walks me through an area of bush where 60 baits impregnated with ‘1080' poison were buried recently, stopping occasionally to check footprints.

Of 25,000 baits laid in a $2.4 million programme (compared to a budget of $200 allocated to investigate thylacine sightings), ten have showed signs of being dug up by foxes.

‘Have you caught one yet?'

‘No,' Mooney says, with frustration. ‘They'd have to be in my office for me to catch one.'

His twelve-man team have found fox scat with grooming hair in it as well as a set of pug-marks on a clay pan, and at least 20 fox baits have been taken in a style characteristic of foxes. But despite 600 sightings, they have yet to produce a body. To date [June, 2004], only two corpses have presented themselves: a 14-month fox with a partly digested endemic mouse in its stomach shot by a pensioner near Longford, and one road-killed near Burnie.

Mooney says: ‘Once foxes get below a certain density it's very difficult to find them.'

I am still puzzling it out. ‘Here you are, trying to get rid of an introduced animal which you are convinced exists – even though you can't find it. And yet you don't believe in the existence of a native animal, which you dearly would love to find?'

Mooney stoops to check a footprint. He admits: ‘The difficulty of finding foxes has made me re-question the thylacine a bit. It reminds me that we could have overlooked finding a thylacine.'

 

The closest relative of the Tasmanian tiger is the Tasmanian devil, known by the Aborigines as Taraba, the Nasty One. In a legend recorded by Jackson Cotton: ‘He would skulk around on very dark nights, silent as a ghost, attacking the very small, the very young and the very old.'

When I first lived in Tasmania, I sometimes startled a pair of devils in my garden after dusk. They would pelt off in a black blur, leaving behind a hole chewed in the wire. In 2003, the wire remained unbitten. It turned out that the devil was suffering from an epidemic known as Devil Facial Tumour Disease, possibly related to the distemper that reduced the thylacine population in the first years of the twentieth century. Mooney's latest information was that about one-third of devils had succumbed to the epidemic across eastern Tasmania, but it had not yet reached the south or west of the state. Only adults developed the disease and they died within five months of showing symptoms. Diseased animals could breed, but one huge risk was foxes. ‘It's the best opportunity foxes will ever get for establishment.'

I drive to the west coast where there is a friend of Mooney's who knows about devils.

On a farm south of Cape Grim, Geoff King ties a road-killed possum to the back of his pick-up and drags it through a scrub of boobyalla to leave a scent trail. It is 7.30 p.m. and in the evening light a young male wedge-tail eagle glides over the ti-trees on the hunt for a pademelon. ‘They can crush a skull, like that.' King stiffens his hand into a talon.

He turns off the engine and we watch the eagle settle in the fork of a peppermint gum. The light in the sky is brilliant and intense. There is no haze or humidity and it produces in me a feeling I frequently experience in Tasmania, an absurd illusion that I can see an enormous distance, back almost to when this landscape was looked upon for the first time with human eyes.

I confess this to King. I am glad I do. He tells me that on his own property the last surviving Tasmanian Aborigines in the bush surrendered themselves to sealers in December 1842. They were a family of middle-aged parents and five sons, one of them the young William Lanne. King says laconically: ‘There's been a quiet noise in the landscape since 1842.'

He restarts the engine and we drive on, dragging the dead possum behind us in the hope of enticing our prey.

King is surely the world's most enthusiastic ‘devil watcher'. His fisherman's shack near the Arthur River is one of the few places where it is possible to observe Tasmanian devils feeding in the wild.

The Tasmanian devil or
Sarcophilus harrisii
is a nocturnal marsupial the size of a small bulldog and so elusive, says King, that the animal rarely appears in early records and journals. ‘It's unlikely the first settlers would have seen them. Devils would have announced themselves only by damage and noise.' He reconstructs the scene: the glow of a campfire, the cooked wallaby remains thrown to the side, the black flash through the bush. At York Town, Colonel Paterson lamented the loss of 76 of his ducks to quolls and other animals. ‘Some say they have seen the
Devil
, but none as yet have been caught.'

Tasmanian devils, once found on the mainland, are now restricted to Tasmania. King estimates that a population of circa 50 roams in a 12-mile radius of his property.

The shack lies a few hundred yards from the ocean. A south-westerly has blown up and the waves crash into an inlet of lethal-looking rocks. The biggest of them by far is Church Rock. It was named by Clement Lorymer who camped here with Jorgen Jorgenson in 1827. Another surveyor, Charles Sprent, left this description. ‘This is a wild, desolate looking coast. The sea has a hungry rattle about it as it roars on the beach. Savage rocks stick up in all directions and the surf goes flying over them. The vegetation is stunted and low …'

In the dying sun, King pegs out the possum carcass. A baby monitor and a lamp are attached to his pick-up's battery, and he switches them on. The light will not frighten the devils.

‘Why are they called “devils”?'

‘Because of their scream.'

Half an hour after sunset, I hear it on the baby monitor: a low-intensity growl growing to a banshee screech. To King, it sounds like an exhaust pipe dragging on bitumen.

‘Here she comes.'

If Tasmania has gained an image as a sort of Lost World/Jurassic Park, then part of the credit must be given to the artist Robert McKimson of Warner Brothers who adopted the Tasmanian devil for a character in one of his cartoons: a stylised dog on hind legs whose signature is to spin in a whirlwind and scamper here and there, devouring all in its path.

A whiskered face emerges from the tussock grass, attached to a large boxy head and a compact black body with a white streak across the chest. It belongs to a hungry female, who tears into the possum's intestine. Now and then she glances up, her nose glistening with blood.

‘Let her get committed to the carcass,' whispers King.

A 10-kilogram Tasmanian devil has the jaw strength of a dog four times its size, which explains why this scavenger approaches all it meets with an open mouth. According to King, devils can eat 40% of their body weight at one sitting. ‘They fill up like you've never felt on Christmas Day.'

I ask what is apparently the most commonly asked question. ‘Do they eat everything?'

‘Everything,' nods King. ‘Big bones, offal, fur.'

Just occasionally the lower jaw of a pademelon is left intact. Otherwise devil scat has been found to contain echidna quills, bottle tops, cigarette ends. Strong acids in their stomach as well as a bone-dissolving enzyme help to break down this hotchpotch.

Another screech. Suddenly, the animal freezes. We have not made a sound, but she can hear up to distance of a mile and smell up to five. Her ears give a nervous twitch.

The Tasmanian devil has no natural predator. And yet within the cast of living memory it competed for protein with its larger marsupial cousin. I read in the
Mercury
of June 21, 2002, that a Tasmanian tiger was spotted north of King's shack, not far from where William Lanne grew up. ‘The tiger was no further than five metres away,' reported the witness who saw it for ten seconds. ‘It just stopped and stared.'

I ask King: ‘Do
you
think Tasmanian tigers still exist?'

He considers the black shape still frozen in the lamplight and says carefully: ‘If the Tasmanian tiger exists, it's in the mind of the Tasmanian devil who doesn't know that the thylacine is extinct.'

 

The potter moves slowly through his small bright drawing room overlooking Hobart. Yes, he saw Benjamin alive. Edward Carr Shaw, a cousin of George Bernard Shaw and great-grandson of the magistrate at Swansea, was a pupil at Hutchins School in 1930. ‘We used to walk down to Beaumaris Zoo at weekends,' he says. ‘The tiger was in a little cage half the size of this room. It used to wander backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. It was the last one.'

 

It was in the quixotic hope of finding a thylacine in the wild that the state's best-known public figure came to Tasmania. In 1972, Bob Brown, a policeman's son from New South Wales, accepted a six-month locum post as a GP in Launceston. On the ferry, as he arrived, he looked out and saw the Western Tiers and headed straight for them. His reaction to the crags and lakes and the pencil-pine forests is typical of the attachment felt by most of the 8,700 bush-walkers who hike the Overland Trail each year.

Next day, he sent a postcard to his parents in Coffs Harbour. ‘I am home,' he wrote.

With two others, Brown started the Tasmanian Tiger Research Centre and for eight months spent his weekends in ‘chook sheds' in north-east Tasmania, monitoring a network of wired boxes. Each box was fitted with a live chicken and a camera bought from an RAAF disposal store, a little Kodak flash camera with a fishing-line trip. ‘We had stacks of pictures: devils, wombats, wallabies, everything you could think of – except the tiger.' He also checked out 200 tiger sightings dating back to 1936. ‘I accounted for all but four.' Most were dogs.

Brown had hoped to emulate the medical doctor in New Zealand who in 1948 went walking in the Murchison Mountains and heard calls and rediscovered a family of takahe, a bird similar to a turkey. But with each passing weekend he grew more sceptical. He had spent his formative years in Bathurst, where he had come across the Black Panther of Emmaville, presumed to be a giant marsupial cat. Sir Edward Hallstrom had offered £1,000 for anyone who caught it. A man claiming to have observed it some weeks earlier led Brown to a patch of grass where the panther lay partially concealed. ‘I went slowly along the fence with a pair of small binoculars, and it got up, grunted a number of times and ran off. I got the shock of my life.' The panther was a wild pig.

He says: ‘I wanted to believe – though the pig had planted doubts. There is nothing in life I wanted to be more wrong about than the thylacine.'

One summer night Brown was driving home when, a mile from his house in Launceston, at the end of Vermont Street, he saw – five yards away – a large animal trotting: a kangaroo tail, buff-coloured and with four large stripes across its backside. ‘And guess what? It was a greyhound. A mutant greyhound. But it brought home to me that a thylacine was even less likely to find than a mutant greyhound.'

Brown never has found the tiger, but on a two-week rafting trip down the Franklin River he discovered his vocation. He saw platypus, marvellous gorges, astonishing side caverns, rapids thundering, Huon pine – some of them thousands of years old – the occasional eagle floating overhead, ‘and nobody'.

And then as he came round the bend into the majestic Gordon, there they were: jackhammers, helicopters, barges. In 1972, Tasmania's Hydro-Electric Commission had submerged Lake Pedder and its halo of pinkish sand. Now the Commission was preparing covertly to flood the Franklin, one of the last wild rivers in the world but regarded by the Liberal Premier Robin Gray as ‘a ditch, leech-ridden, unattractive to the majority of people'. Early convicts like Robert Greenhill and Alexander Pearce had a similar perception of the rainforest, and it had reduced them to cannibals: to Brown, the Franklin was an invigorating paradise, and he felt that he had been placed on earth to protect it from the fate suffered by the thylacine.

Brown translated his love affair with the Franklin into a campaign of public awareness that gathered up behind him the passions of other people wedded to the place. For the novelist James McQueen, the Franklin was not just a river. ‘For me it is the epitome of all the lost forests, all the submerged lakes, all the tamed rivers, all the extinguished species. It is threatened by the same mindless beast that has eaten our past, is eating our present, and threatens to eat our future: that civil beast of mean ambitions and broken promises and hedged bets and tawdry profits.' Brown's success in saving the river led to many people hearing of Tasmania and made tangible the word ‘wilderness'. Today, 39% of the island (1.74 million hectares) is a World Heritage Area, and Brown is a federal senator for the Greens, a party that in Tasmania in the 2002 general election polled 18% – the largest Green vote, according to Brown, recorded in any general election anywhere in the world.

In his office, which overlooks the Derwent River, Brown describes Tasmania as ‘this special little crucible'. But his crucible is not as protected as he would like. He shows me a photograph of himself standing at the base of a huge charred eucalyptus, dubbed El Grande by the press. He tells the tree's story. At 439 cubic metres, this 300-year-old
Eucalypt regnans
in the Styx Forest, 50 miles west of Hobart, was the largest tree in Australia. And yet not long ago Forestry Tasmania accidentally burned it in a regeneration programme.

Brown takes the scorched eucalyptus as the symbol of a culture that risks devouring itself. Thirty years on, he has shifted his ire from Hydro-Electric to Forestry Tasmania, whose logging of old growth forests he sees as the sure destruction of Tasmania's habitat, just as Nick Mooney sees the fox.