Paper Tiger : A Visual History of the Thylacine [1 ed.] 9789004186729, 9789004181656

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Paper Tiger

Human-Animal Studies Editor

Kenneth Shapiro Animals & Society Institute

Editorial Board

Ralph Acampora Hofstra University

Clifton Flynn University of South Carolina

Hilda Kean Ruskin College, Oxford

Randy Malamud Georgia State University

Gail Melson Purdue University

VOLUME 9

Paper Tiger A Visual History of the Thylacine

By

Carol Freeman

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2010

Publication was assisted by grants from the Bookend Trust and from the School of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Tasmania. Cover illustrations: Top: Photographic print of the last thylacine in Hobart Zoo by Norman Laird, from an image by an unknown photographer c.1933. Private collection. Bottom right: Lithograph by unknown artist(s) in L. A. J. Burgersdijk, De Dieren, Afgebeeld, Beschreven en in Hunne Levenswijze Geschetst, Leiden, 1864. Print held by Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office. Bottom left/spine: Engraving by William Home Lizars after a drawing by William Dickes, in G. R. Waterhouse, Marsupialia or Pouched Animals, Edinburgh, 1841. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Freeman, Carol. Paper tiger : a visual history of the thylacine / by Carol Freeman. p. cm. — (Human-animal studies ; v. 9) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-18165-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Thylacine. 2. Extinct animals—Australia—History. 3. Zoological illustration—History. I. Title. II. Series. QL737.M336F74 2010 599.2’7—dc22 2010022612

ISSN 1573-4226 ISBN 978 90 04 18165 6 Copyright 2010 by Carol Freeman. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change.

contents

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CONTENTS Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Timeline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

Extinction of the Thylacine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cultures of Natural History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Animals in Print . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Zoological Illustration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

5 7 10 13

1. “In Every Respect New” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

18

An Injured ‘Opossum’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Ambivalence of George Prideaux Harris . . . . . . . . . . . . Imagining the Monster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . French Copies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Mystery of Bilderbuch für Kinder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . British Copies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Imperial Pressures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

19 23 25 28 31 33 35

Transformations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

40

Continental Impressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . British Images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

40 48

2. Vermin! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

56

The Naturalist’s Library . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lizars’ Engraving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Constructing a Sheep-Killer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Copies and Reproductions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adaptations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Economic Zoology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

57 59 65 68 72 79

3. “Mr. Gould’s Very Beautiful Work” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

83

The Thylacine Comes to Britain. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Mammals of Australia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

84 89

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contents Colonial Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joseph Wolf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Copies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Louisa Meredith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Broinowski’s Folly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . More Copies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

95 96 103 106 109 110

4. A Tasmanian Wolf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 Wolf Mythology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Crying Wolf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . More Continental Versions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Newspaper Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reading Darwin’s Theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

120 123 133 137 142

Variations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150 The Images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 Colour Plates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . following 166 5. The Impact of Photography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 The Open Door . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 In London Zoo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174 Tasmanian Captives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 6. The Thylacine Refigured . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 Posing the Animal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cropping the Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Backgrounds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Removing the Backdrop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fabricating the Scene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

200 206 207 212 218

7. Forgetting and Remembering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Moves toward Conservation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Emblems and Brands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Idols, Fetishes and Totems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sealed with a Thylacine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

225 230 236 238

List of Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277

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FOREWORD This title in the Brill series provides a case study of the sometimes tragic consequences that the way we represent individual animals or species can have on those animals. For the image of the thylacine, beginning with its popular name, the Tasmanian tiger, eventually spelled its destruction. One significant aspect of this disturbing history is that the construction of these wonderful animals percolated down to the level of illustrations of them, a focus of Freeman’s study. These literal representations were themselves based on inaccurate taxidermy and complemented by pseudo-natural histories reminiscent of those Teddy Roosevelt famously discredited as “nature fakers.” Kenneth Shapiro, Series Editor Animals & Society Institute, Inc., Washington Grove MD

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acknowledgements

ix

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book is the result of a project that benefited from the assistance and support of many individuals and institutions over a number of years, a few of whom I mention here. The University of Tasmania School of Geography and Environmental Studies facilitated initial research, with occasional assistance from staff in the Schools of History and Zoology. Colleagues at the Morris Miller Library, especially in Document Delivery and the Royal Society, Archives and Rare Collections, provided protracted access to a range of essential reference materials. Early meetings with academics such as Robert Paddle from the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, and Mike Archer at the University of New South Wales greatly aided the direction my work would take while, in Tasmania, Barbara Hamilton– Arnold provided valuable insights into the character of G. P. Harris— the first known European illustrator of a thylacine. My participation in a Visiting Scholars Program at Australian National University in 2001, where Sylvia Kleinert and the late Greg Dening in particular offered guidance and advice, inspired me to take innovative approaches in my research and writing. I am also most grateful to anthropologist and archaeologist the late Patricia Vinnicombe and Ken Mulvaney, Kingsley Palmer and the staff at Ngarluma/Injibarndi Native Title Service in the Dampier region of Western Australia, who helped me begin to understand the significance of rock engravings for Aboriginal culture. And I owe particular thanks to John Lally who enabled the trip to Angel Island in his ‘banana boat’ to experience firsthand these impressive art works. Searching for literature that contains the images I discuss also took me to libraries and museums in many parts of Australia and to Britain. Staff at the Queen Victoria Museum in Launceston and the State Library of Tasmania, Museum Victoria and the State Library of Victoria, the Mitchell Library and the Australian Museum in Sydney, the National Museum, Canberra, and the Queensland Museum library all gave me generous access to their collections of nineteenth and early twentieth century zoological works. In the United Kingdom I benefited from the expertise of staff at the Zoological Society of London library, the British Museum (Natural History) library, the

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National Library and Museum of Scotland and warm hospitality from Emma Tate, curator of the Earl of Derby’s natural history collection at Knowsley Hall, Merseyside. Stephen Sleightholme in Britain and Chris Smeenk from the Natural History Museum in Leiden supplied invaluable expert knowledge about European museum collections via email. Individuals closer to home to whom I owe particular thanks include my ‘team’ of translators: Dagmar Nordberg, Inga Hofling, Liz Koolhof, Nicole Johnson, J. G. van Moort-Kapteijn, Patricia Bessell and Cathi Greve. I am most grateful to Rod Ewins, retired Head of the Tasmanian School of Art at the University of Tasmania, for pointing the way in the often difficult task of identifying the techniques used to produce the images I discuss. Over a number of years, colleagues and friends Helen MacDonald, Elizabeth Leane, Helen Tiffin, Yvette Watt and Merryl Parker have provided advice and a sounding board for ideas, as well as reminding me that a sense of humour is an essential element when undertaking an extended research project. I am particularly grateful to my family—Tony, Jess, Jules and Di—for encouragement and forbearance, as well as their assistance with photographic, technical, and academic issues at various stages of the project. Since 2005 my involvement with the Australian Animal Studies Group has provided an interchange of information, collegiate support, and a series of crucial conferences that exposed me to people and ideas from the international human-animal studies movement. The development of this field has been vital in persuading me to continue to take a critical view of the complex relations humans have with animals—an approach that was rare and radical when representations of nonhuman animals became the subject of my research in 1999. Finally, I am indebted to Ken Shapiro and Brill for the opportunity to publish this work and contribute practically to the long overdue ‘animal turn’ taking place in the humanities at present. *** A version of chapter 1 was previously published in reCollections: The Journal of the National Museum of Australia 2, no. 1 (2007) as “‘In Every Respect New’: European Impressions of the Thylacine, 1808– 1855”. The chapters about photographs were summarised in Society and Animals: Journal of Human-Animal Studies 15, no. 3 (2007).

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Details regarding the images discussed in this book are contained in the List of Illustrations at the end of the volume. This list cites artists, engravers and photographers (where known) and other information of specific interest to collectors, historians, zoologists and librarians. Where an institution has supplied reproductions, or it has been necessary to obtain permission to use images, this source is acknowledged both in the List and in the captions. Full citations for each publication are also found in the bibliography. The long quote from George Prideaux Harris’s diary is used courtesy of the British Library; the quotations from letters written by William Home Lizars, Edward Lear and G. R. Waterhouse to William Jardine are published with permission of the Trustees of the National Museums Scotland. Every effort has been made to identify and contact anyone who may hold copyright for an image or text. If there have been inadvertent omissions, please contact the author or publishers who will be pleased to correct them at the earliest opportunity.

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timeline

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TIMELINE 1642 1803 1805 1808

1817 1820 1827 1830

1839 1841 1851

1859 1865

1866 1870 1871 1884

Dutch explorer Abel Tasman records seeing the footprints of a large predator on the East coast of Van Diemen’s Land. British settlement established in Van Diemen’s Land. Thirty sheep are introduced. Lieutenant-Governor Paterson describes a striped wolf/dog/ hyena in the north of the island. First description and classification of Didelphis cynocephalus by Surveyor George Prideaux Harris published in the Transactions of Linnean Society of London 9. Two reports of thylacine attacks on sheep. Only four thylacines sighted since settlement. Georges Cuvier’s Animal Kingdom includes a description of the “Zebra or Dog-faced Dasyurus”. First bounty on the thylacine by the Van Diemen’s Land Company offers 10 shillings a head and is in operation till 1839. Invention of photography. Second VDL Company bounty scheme pays 6 shillings per thylacine scalp and runs till 1914. William Dickes’ illustration of Thylacinus cynocephalus is published in The Naturalist’s Library. H. C. Richter’s illustration of a pair of thylacines appears in John Gould’s The Mammals of Australia. J. West and John Gould report that the species is extremely rare and will be extinct “within a very few years”. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species published. Brehms Thierleben includes a wolf-like illustration of the Beutelwolf. J. G. Wood’s Illustrated Natural History and Routledge’s Popular Natural History replicate this illustration. Illustration of a “Tasmanian Tiger” is published in the Illustrated Sydney News. Thylacine appears on a poster for Cascade Brewery, Hobart. Gerard Krefft’s The Mammals of Australia published. Australian Graphic Newspaper publishes an image of a “Tasmanian Zebra Wolf”.

xiv 1885 1888 1899 1904

1909 1912 1913

1914 1918 1919 1921 1924 1925 1927 1930 1931 1936

timeline Illustrated Australian News publishes an illustration of “Marsupial Wolves”. Tasmanian government thylacine bounty scheme introduced. Town and Country Journal publishes illustration of a “Tasmanian Wolf”. First published photographs of a thylacine appear in Nature, Annual Report of Smithsonian Institution and Guide to the Gardens of Zoological Society of London. Government bounty scheme terminated due to lack of catches. Brehms Thierleben includes photograph of a “Beutelwolf ”. Constance Pocock bemoans conditions in London Zoo. Sabre-tooth added to photograph of Tasmanian Wolf in The Living Animals of the World by C. J. Cornish. William Hornaday, Wildlife Conservation in Theory and Practice published. Isabel Busby remarks on the “timidity” of thylacines in Beaumaris Zoo, Hobart. Tasmanian coat of arms proclaimed—it includes two thylacines as supporters. Harry Burrell’s fabricated photograph of a Tasmanian Tiger or Wolf published in The Australian Museum Magazine. C. Lord and H. H. Scott, A Synopsis of the Vertebrate Animals of Tasmania published. James Barrett, Save Australia: A Plea for the Right Use of Our Flora and Fauna is published. Royal Society of Tasmania medal established, with thylacine at centre. The last thylacine shot in the wild. The last thylacine in London Zoo dies. Thylacines are added to the Tasmanian list of wholly protected animals. The last captive thylacine dies in Hobart Zoo.

introduction

1

INTRODUCTION I am standing on Angel Island, a tiny scrap of land on the western rim of the Australian continent. Engraved on large rocks above me, life-size images of a now-extinct animal appear to float in the dry winter air. The thylacine was a striped, dog-like marsupial with a coughing bark and a backward-facing pouch. The species disappeared from the mainland of Australia more than 3000 years ago.1 A remnant population that survived on the island of Tasmania, adjacent to the southern coast of the continent, were more or less exterminated by 1936. The Yaburara people who incised these engravings were also described as “extinct” in a survey of Aboriginal groups in 1974. This is a place of profound absences. On a peninsula called Murujuga not far from Angel Island it is possible to spend hours roaming engraving sites looking for thylacine images. Many engravings face east and the morning sun bleaches out the shallow etchings. Sometimes the uneven surface of a rock tricks the mind into imagining shapes, or weathering and chipping seems to suggest the body of an animal or a human figure that is not even there. As the day moves on and the temperature gets hotter, images seem to appear and disappear. They give the engravings an elusive quality and the landscape an uncanny atmosphere. Most engraving sites are located along dozens of creek beds that furrow the small stony hills. In the cyclone season they are filled with deep pools, cascades and tall reeds. In dry periods the streams are reduced to muddy pools around which countless animal prints, trails and droppings are visible on the ground. A euro hops silently over a pile of rocks that clink occasionally where they are unstable and circling osprey testify to the fertility of this place where the Yaburara people once gathered to eat shellfish and turtle, to sing songs and tell stories. 1 When using the term ‘species’ I am always aware that it encompasses individual animals. In the context of extinction, the use of this collective noun is significant. The word ‘extinction’ originally referred to a human family or race that had come to an end having no living representative or “without progressive succession”. Eventually the word was applied to species of animal or plant. The first example of this use given by the Oxford English Dictionary is a quotation from A. R. Wallace’s Island Life: “the most effective agent in the extinction of species is the pressure of other species”.

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After hours of searching I find an undocumented engraving of a thylacine climbing the rocks. He is standing with his hind legs in a small saucer-shaped depression while leaning his front paws against a crack in the rock. His sexual organs are included in the picture and, typical of a thylacine, they protrude to the rear. A long straight tail is etched as if it were an extension of the animal’s back, precisely as it appears in some early twentieth century films and photographs of thylacines in zoos. On the highest and largest rocks in the landscape one of a pair of engraved thylacines has a human-like hand on his front leg, with five fingers fully extended, and his tail is turned up. Reports of thylacines in similar positions in the wild suggest both these animals are in a state of arousal or excitement. To the right of this image there is a tiny human figure of the type that often signifies an Aboriginal ancestral being. In terms of their vitality, size and antiquity the engravings are awe-inspiring. Why do humans draw pictures of nonhuman animals in the way that they do? How did these images impact on the lives of the particular species they depict? These questions motivated the research for this book. For instance, although relatively little is known about the meaning of individual Aboriginal rock engravings, it seems that, as a whole, they carry multiple cultural references for Australia’s Aboriginal people.2 They may commemorate an event such as a successful hunt or catch, or be visual aids to assist in the recognition of species. Other images were designed to perpetuate and nourish the environment. Archaeologists believe that the existence or function of some figures in rock engravings was to conserve particular species, while other images may have been designed to ensure the fertility of country and of all living creatures. These special engravings were probably associated with thalu or ‘increase’ sites, totemic centres where ceremonies and songs were performed to maintain and regulate the environment.3 Anthropologist Paul Tacon points out that art objects not only reflect the aesthetic preferences of the people who produce them “but also express aspects of economics, philosophy, social relations, cosmology, and world-view”.4 This statement holds true for European 2

Mulvaney, “Which Way You Look,” 110. Berndt et al., Aboriginal Australian Art, 28–50; Vinnicombe, Dampier Archaeological Project, 6. 4 Tacon, “Art and the Essence of Being,” 246. In Marvelous Possessions, 4, Stephen Greenblatt proposes that “representational strategies are ideologically 3

introduction

3

images as well as for the Aboriginal art of which he speaks and draws attention to the dramatically different cultures and beliefs of indigenous people and European societies. These differences are exemplified by the present state of the engravings on Murujuga (or Burrup Peninsula as it has previously been called), which are now surrounded and dispersed by Australia’s largest industrial development—Woodside Offshore Petroleum’s natural gas plant, Dampier Salt works and a massive port that exports 70 million tonnes of iron ore annually from Hammersley Mines to the world. The impact of European preferences is apparent where chemical emissions from these industries threaten the integrity and survival of Aboriginal engravings.5 The divergence in world-views that resulted in this collision of cultural and environmental values is also very obvious when we look at representations of the thylacine in printed literature produced by European culture. While the exact meaning and significance of ancient engravings of the thylacine is difficult to ascertain, the nature and function of images on paper in European natural history books is easier to determine. In the twenty-first century, the rapid changes taking place in our natural environment are constant topics of discussion. The effects of climate change, the escalating rate of plant extinctions and sudden unexpected diseases in animal species, such as the Tasmanian devil, encourage us to look back to see exactly when this process began and why and how species have recently disappeared. The crucial role of language and images in the process of extinction is increasingly recognised. The study of animal representations in the relatively new field of Human-Animal Studies6 has become as common as earlier research on images of oppressed human populations such as the Australian Aborigines and other peoples of colour, European Jews, significant”, but cautions against the notion that “particular modes of representation are inherently and necessarily bound to a given culture or class or belief system, and that their effects are unidirectional”. This is particularly important to remember, for example, where western forms of representation are adopted by other cultures over time. 5 See Bednarik, “Survival of Murujuga (Burrup) Petroglyphs,” 29–40. The website of the Australian Rock Art Research Foundation includes detailed information relating to the conservation of rock art in the Dampier region: http://mc2.vicnet.net. au/home/dampier/web/index.html. 6 See for example: Rothfels, Representing Animals; Baker, Picturing the Beast and “Representation and Reality”; Ritvo, The Animal Estate and “The Power of the Word”; The Animal Studies Group, Killing Animals; Malamud, Reading Zoos; Philo and Wilbert, Animal Spaces, Beastly Places; Birke, Feminism, Animals, Science.

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indigenous races, women, and socially or intellectually disadvantaged groups—studies that revealed how representations influence the way these groups are perceived and subsequently treated.7 It is beginning to be understood that images of animals often encode human fears and prejudices that then gain credence as images circulate in new spaces, and that visual objects are a key component in the structuring of human responses towards animals generally.8 But images cannot be understood in isolation, rather, they have to be seen in the context of the particular cultural structures they are part of and that enable and inform them. As Louis Althusser suggests, “the image can be seen as an inscription of those values and beliefs … which hierarchise, differentiate and exclude”9 and the reader is an active participant in making meanings for an image or text and also in adapting and exploiting a sign or discourse. It follows, then, that representations of animals have a role in both expressing and producing attitudes toward the species they figure. As part of the practices and ideologies that determine difference they have a constitutive role in what is perceived as ‘truth’.10 Today, visual images are disseminated much more widely than they have ever been before through new media such as digital film, websites, and video games. Animals have become mass spectacle and entertainment on a global level and representations of threatened species in film and television have a decisive role in shaping public opinion about particular species.11 The role of visual culture in embodying perceptions of animals and then reinforcing or producing attitudes and actions is a concept that is central to this book. Where animal extinctions are concerned, the thylacine is something of an icon. Like so many other animals native to islands in the New World, the species disappeared a relatively short time after European settlement. The picturing of the thylacine, often referred to as the Tasmanian ‘tiger’, over the first hundred and thirty years of European settlement in Tasmania offers a supreme example of how 7 Just a few of these pertinent to the colonial era are: Mason, Deconstructing America; Boon, Other Tribes, Other Scribes; Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions; Said, Orientalism. 8 Burt, Animals in Film, 7–15. 9 Quoted in Thomas, Reading Images, 7. 10 Thomas, Reading Images, 6; Wolff, “Excess and Inhibition,” 710. 11 See particularly: Mitman, Reel Nature; Davis, Spectacular Nature; Burt, Animals in Film; McHugh, Video Dog Star; Daston and Mitman, Thinking with Animals, chap. 7 and 8.

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5

Western culture perceived an animal and how forms of representation dramatically impacted on the survival of the species. This volume analyses eighty illustrations of the thylacine in influential printed literature—scientific journals, zoological and natural history publications, popular books about animals, zoo guides and newspapers and magazines—that were executed between 1803, when the first British settlers arrived on the island of Tasmania, and 1936 when the last captive thylacine died in a Hobart zoo. It isolates six major figures, with images grouped in terms of their similarity of form, intertextual references, symbolic function and/or medium. Through examining the ways in which this unique marsupial was represented in pictures and text and by deciphering the messages they contain, this book uncovers “layers of ideological and linguistic biases,” reveals the complexity of cultural constructions, and shows how these representations are prejudiced and anthropocentric. It contributes toward deconstructing and dismantling lingering misconceptions about the species, encourages further critical readings of zoological literature, and urges a general re-evaluation of relations between human and nonhuman animals.12 Extinction of the Thylacine Thylacines disappeared from the mainland of Australia about 3500 years ago, although some fossil evidence seems to be more recent. Their extinction is currently thought to be the result of competition with the introduced dingo and some research suggests that habitat modification by Aboriginal people may also have affected their survival. When the first Europeans settled Australia in 1788, the only members of the species that survived were on the island of Van Diemen’s Land (later called Tasmania), which had been detached from the mainland after the waning of the Ice Age and where no 12 See Shapiro, “Human-Animal Studies,” 1, 10–12 and Tiffin, “Shadow of the Shark,” 117–20. Writing about representations of the shark, Tiffin maintains that what is needed is an understanding of the history of the ways in which we have projected, and still project, our fears of death, the unknown, and the malign onto the shark, even in scientific discourse, and that this is a step towards “dismantling misconceptions” about them. Paper Tiger also addresses Philip Armstrong’s call for “politicized, culturally sensitive … local histories of the roles that animals and their representations have played or been made to play, in colonial and postcolonial transactions” (“Postcolonial Animal,” 417).

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dingoes had ever existed. Thylacine numbers were small—probably about 2000 to 4000 when British settlers arrived in 1803. A similar number of indigenous people also lived on the island but there are few indications of their interactions with the thylacine. No stories, songs, rock engravings or paintings relating to the thylacine, called corrinna, lagunta, kannenner and laoonana by different language groups, appear to have survived. However, it seems that Van Diemen’s Land had afforded the remnant population a discrete, protected environment in which they continued as the dominant predator with little competition from human activities or any other species.13 Early European anecdotal and scientific literature records that early settlers rarely saw thylacines and later, when the animal was held in captivity, no systematic physical and behavioural analysis ever took place. Contemporary evidence agrees, however, that the thylacine was a relatively shy carnivorous marsupial with the shape and appearance of a medium to large dog, except for a stiff tail and a pouch like a kangaroo. The animal’s coat was short, coarse and sandy-coloured, with thirteen to twenty dark, transverse stripes across the back. They moved relatively slowly, hunting wallaby, pademelon, smaller marsupials and birds. They existed over most of the small island, but preferred open forest or mixed eucalypt-rainforest and were unlikely to have lived exclusively in the mountains or dense rainforest. Despite, or perhaps because of, a lack of human familiarity with members of the species, they became the ideal scapegoat for sheep farmers to explain failures in the pastoral industry, resulting in bounties imposed by the Van Diemens’ Land Company in 1830 and 1839 and a government bounty in 1888.14 In his book The Last Tasmanian Tiger, psychologist and historian Robert Paddle has examined in detail the political shift that occurred between 1884 and 1888 resulting in the application of the government bounty. He points out that this move came at about the same time as naturalists and collectors were complaining of the rarity of the species. Paddle provides evidence that most claims of sheep attacks and killings cannot be verified, that official and individual reports were often contradictory, and that figures quoted in the 13 Archer, “New Information,” 47; Plomley, Word List, 311–12; Merrilees, “Man the Destroyer,” 18–20; Guiler and Godard, Tasmanian Tiger, 138. 14 Guiler and Godard, Tasmanian Tiger, 71; Paddle, Last Tasmanian Tiger, 139– 67.

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Tasmanian parliament were wildly exaggerated and impossible to sustain. Claims of the thylacine’s threat to sheep are interspersed with reports that mention rabbits, disease, feral dogs, drought and other causes for the floundering sheep industry. Recent scientific research based on jaw measurements and computer simulations of bite force suggest that the species was adapted to kill smaller native prey and that its predatory behaviour did not resemble any of the animals with which it was compared.15 Records of bounty payments made by the Tasmanian government from 1880 to 1908, a most poignant set of statistics, are a testament to the efficiency of European killing methods—snaring and trapping. Meanwhile, museums and zoos, particularly outside Australia, were desperate for the last examples of a species about to become extinct. So they also contributed to the extinction of the thylacine through the capture, killing, confinement and exportation of animals. Cultures of Natural History European attitudes toward thylacines began to be formed long before Tasmania was settled and the animal was fleetingly sighted in the eucalypt forests and button grass plains of the island. Ideas with ancient derivations influenced how thylacines were perceived and how ideas about the species were constructed. After British colonisation, one of the major ways in which these notions were shaped, modified, and disseminated was through illustrations and their texts in zoological and natural history literature published first in Europe, and later in America and Australia. These representations were framed by contemporary discourses of science, imperialism, and economics—“the vast control mechanism of colonialism, designed to justify and perpetuate European dominance” over land, people and animals.16 But even the basis of what constituted a scientific fact was debated. Science was distinguished from other kinds of knowledge because it was based on “what we can see, hear and touch rather than on personal opinions or speculative imaginings”. It was believed, and often still is, that facts established in this way constitute a secure, objective basis for science. In 1890, evolutionary biologist Ray 15 Jones and Stoddart, “Reconstruction of Predatory Behaviour,” 243–44; University of New South Wales, “Thylacine.” 16 Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” 119.

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Lankester, who was later Director of the British Museum, brought another perspective to this assumption: All true science deals with speculation and hypothesis, and acknowledges as its most valued servant—its indispensable ally and helpmeet— that which our German friends call ‘Phantasie’ and we ‘the Imagination’. Our science, biology, is not less exact—our conclusions are no less accurate because they are only probably true.

Meanwhile in Australia in 1922 the new president of the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales, J. H. Campbell, wrote: “underlaying all science are certain general ideas, the absolute truth of which we can never hope to prove, but without which we cannot establish any relation between observed facts”. Looking back on the colonial period, art historian Bernard Smith comments that the emphasis on empirical observation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century meant that it was therefore “much more difficult for the European imagination to fantasise about monsters at the ends of the earth”. This book will show, however, how readily a ‘monster’ was constructed in the case of the thylacine.17 There was immense interest in zoological subjects in the period before and during that covered in this volume. The Australian colonies generated an enormous quantity of raw zoological data to be processed and classified—that is, to have meaning and order imposed on it. New systems of classification developed by Cuvier and Buffon in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century sought to define the relations between species. Linnaeus’ Systema Natura published in 1758 “stimulated questions concerning the relationships between life and environment”.18 The animals of the Antipodes were sketched, painted, captured, killed, packed in spirits and had their skins dried and stretched. Every week hundreds of specimens were unloaded on the docks in London from sailing ships returning from abroad. Dealers, taxidermists and collectors bought these specimens to fuel the craze for natural history sweeping Europe. Dead and living animals arrived for documentation, dissection, discussion and naming by scientists working at the new museums, zoological societies and zoos that had recently been established in Paris, London, Leiden, Berlin and that later appeared in Sydney, Melbourne, New York and 17 Chalmers, What Is Science? 4; Lankester, Advancement of Science, 4; Campbell, “Presidential Address,” 6; Smith, Imagining South Pacific, 28. 18 Smith, ibid.

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Washington. Throughout the nineteenth century, faunal material was interpreted within the framework of European theoretical debates, largely because British scientists doubted the competence of colonial observers and were likely to “reject any empirical evidence that violated European expectations”.19 The ‘type specimen’—the first of a species found by Europeans and deemed to typify the group—was of particular interest to zoologists. Marsupials like the thylacine were often considered perversions of nature because they could not be easily accommodated by classification systems that had been developed in response to familiar animals. Attitudes of this kind are exemplified in the words above a tiny drawing of a platypus on the cover of the first minutes of The Tasmanian Society in 1841 that reads, “all things are queer and opposite”.20 Classification became a particularly contentious issue and the reputation and authority of individual scientists often shifted as a result of new findings. Later in the nineteenth century Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, his emphasis on natural selection and the effects of the isolation of islands had a radical impact on colonial investigations and attitudes toward the thylacine and other animals. But while scientific ideas developed the novelist Marcus Clarke showed how, by the 1880s, lived experience in Tasmania also contributed towards shaping the imaginations of writers and readers. He wrote, “in Australia alone is to be found the Grotesque, the Weird, the strange scribblings of nature learning how to write”.21 In the late nineteenth century theories of ecology, the word coined by Haeckel for the study of animals in relation to their environment, were developed by Davenport and Semper and the influence of environmental factors were explored. By the early twentieth century, microscopy, photography and cinematography were transforming the new biological sciences. The animal body could now be more closely examined and represented than it had ever been. Against this background of examination and definition, the interest in colonial animals became explicitly economic. By the early 19

Dugan, “Zoological Exploration,” 81. Tasmanian Society, Minutes 1841. For a discussion of classification see Fudge, “Viewing Animals”; and particularly for the problems that Australian animals presented for eighteenth and nineteenth century scientists: Ritvo, Platypus and Mermaid; Moyal, Platypus; Eco, Kant and the Platypus. 21 Cited in Gibson, Diminishing Paradise, 13. 20

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twentieth century there was a proliferation of books on Economic Zoology, one of which notes “it is only right that the vast material resources of the animal kingdom should be fully exploited in the interests of mankind”. The author of this statement links this enterprise to the need for those who “control the purse strings of the nation” to justify their expenditure on zoological science.22 While the theories, methodologies and practical systems developed to deal with exotic animals and plants took their tenor directly from those used in early imperial expansion, the discourses of zoo keeping and hunting later “justified and celebrated Britain’s imperial enterprise”.23 Thus, as the century progressed, science, zoology and economics became ever more politically linked. Animals in Print In this volume, the term ‘zoological literature’ refers to a book or journal that describes animals alone and a ‘natural history’ book indicates one that includes a wider range of subjects. The latter was usually a popular publication. In the nineteenth century ‘natural history’ was the term used for the study of zoology, botany and geology. After 1860, the title ‘naturalist’ often referred to someone who studied animals only, as ‘botanist’ and ‘geologist’ were then in use. Later, the word ‘biology’ was used to embrace botany, zoology, comparative anatomy and physiology, but there is no consistency in the use of these terms. The literature covered by this terminology constitutes the major generic sites in which ideas about the thylacine were constructed, particularly in the nineteenth century before improvements in production processes resulted in the use of photographs in newspapers and popular magazines. Ideas about animals espoused in scientific and popular books interacted with each other, as well as being affected by many other sources of information. In 1805 the first European illustrator of a thylacine, surveyor George Harris, asked to be sent the current literature from England: Shaw’s General Zoology (1800–12), Bingley’s Animal Biography (1805) and Pinkerton’s Modern Geography (1802).24 22 23 24

Dendy, Animal Life, vi. Ritvo, Animal Estate, 5. Hamilton-Arnold, Letters of G. P. Harris, 82.

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Scientific literature implicitly carried claims of authority, and the location of printed material of this type in the library of the Royal Society of Tasmania and in museums in other Australian States, such as Victoria and New South Wales, indicate it was regarded as a primary reference source about animals. Members of scientific institutions, zoologists and amateur naturalists in the nineteenth century read journals such as the Transactions of the Linnean Society, in which the first engraved print of the thylacine appeared, and the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Tasmania and the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London that published articles on the cutting-edge of scientific discovery. Many publications were associated with scientific institutions, zoos and museums, or stemmed from the ideas disseminated by these bodies. As interest in the colonies and natural history increased and printing techniques and production improved there was a proliferation of zoological and natural history books for the general public, particularly in Britain. Later, information in scientific sources was re-presented for wider consumption in popular literature, magazines, and newspapers. Images and texts in all these sites constitute the most detailed, varied and accessible information about the thylacine available in the nineteenth century. Some zoological works that show images of the thylacine were comprehensive and described the whole animal kingdom, others just one class of fauna, such as marsupials, or the specimens in a collection or museum. In the first half of the nineteenth century species were arranged under the headings of various classification systems but, later, systematic arrangement disappeared as popular science and natural history books often emphasised the savagery or other behaviour of animals. Some arrangements were consistent with developments in the study of zoology. New visual media and visual perceptions of animals were also explored and exploited to amaze as well as educate growing middle and lower middle class audiences. For instance, one of the many ways ideas about animals were inseminated was through children’s books, a popular and influential genre in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Throughout the eighteenth century, the appetite for this kind of literature in Continental Europe was difficult to satisfy and later British counterparts, such as Oliver Goldsmith’s An History of the Earth and Animated Nature, state the merits and aims of such books: for the purposes of “instruction and delight”, “executed with scientific accuracy”, “adapted for

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the gratification of a rational desire for knowledge, and for advancing the best objects of … domestic education”.25 Only a few zoological and natural history books were produced in Australia before 1900, as there was a very small colonial market for illustrated literature on natural history. For those who owned European publications, especially the sumptuous productions of John Gould and multi-volume series such as Jardine’s The Naturalist’s Library, they were a mark of prestige. Books illustrated with large, detailed, hand-coloured engravings, were expensive and private libraries were showplaces for displaying books that were “splendidly bound, spaciously printed and lavishly illustrated”.26 Those who owned volumes like this were in possession of an aesthetically desirable commodity as well as knowledge about plant and animal species. By the late nineteenth century, as the production and consumption of books increased and concerns about the conservation of animals were voiced, Australia and America began to produce more titles. However, as late as 1918 the president of the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales bemoaned the absence of Australian zoological handbooks, attributing this shortage to the limited market in Australia compared to Britain, the cost of printing locally and publishing properly illustrated literature, and the number of species in each branch of zoology being very much larger in Australia than in Great Britain.27 Lack of accuracy in images of the thylacine could be related to a lack of Australian publications, but when illustrations of animals do appear in colonial books and newspapers they are often copies of British illustrations. By the early twentieth century worldwide production, dissemination and circulation of natural history and zoological literature was immense. Some publications were associated with the role of American institutions in fostering environmental consciousness, but the images in several influential Australian publications may have had a more profound effect on perceptions of the thylacine in Tasmania.

25 26 27

Hurlimann, Three Centuries Children's Books, forepage. Dance, Art of Natural History, 68. Bassett Hull, “Presidential Address,” 140–41.

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The Zoological Illustration The role of an illustration in a publication was not only controlled by its location in a particular literary genre, but also by ideas about science, animals, and concepts about a ‘zoological illustration’. In the nineteenth century, a drawing or engraving in a zoological work supplied what was perceived as a definitive representation for the classification of new species, the identification of dead animals sent to museum collections, and the recognition of live ones in the exploration of newly acquired countries, or for sporting purposes. In 1840, Murray’s Encyclopædia of Geography defined the usefulness of illustrations in general as providing “the greatest utility in conveying an infinitely better idea of the objects than could be derived from the most laboured description”. In 1936 these ideas are repeated in a book about illustrating zoological papers: Now children learn readily from pictures—and so do zoologists. A good picture is worth pages of writing, for zoologists on the whole are busy people, and do not have time to wade through pages of description without explanatory illustrations.

Bernard Smith notes that in the early days of colonial discoveries, drawing from life with some degree of plein air derivation was preferred to drawing from stuffed skins because, as Thomas Pennant recorded in his book British Zoology published 1768–70, if artists did not know an animal’s “different connections, manner of living, and places of abode” they would “fall into manifest absurdities”. But only one engraving of a thylacine in a zoological work produced during the existence of the species was made from a living animal in the wilds of Van Diemen’s Land, and this by an enterprising colonial official. Subsequent images of this animal in a variety of genres were made by artists in Europe from specimens in museums, or the artificial location of a zoo, or were copies of existing images; while illustrations executed in Australia were made by artists working from museum specimens or photographs.28 How to represent a particular species was also a problem. Natural history artist, George Edwards, whose books were taken by Joseph Banks on HMS Endeavour, advised to draw the type rather than the “individual specimen with all its imperfections”, so there was always 28

Murray et al., Encyclopædia of Geography, vii; Cannon, Illustration for Zoological Papers, ix. Pennant quoted in Smith, Imagining South Pacific, 37.

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a tension between the evidence before the artist and the desire to meet the requirements of the scientific community.29 Many illustrations of the thylacine were modelled on remnants of dead animals in recently established museums, such as the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris and the British Museum of Natural History in London. In these museums the skins, stuffed mounts, or dried specimens were themselves constructions, incorporating the desires of the zoologist, the ideas and skills (or lack of them) of the taxidermist, and distortions resulting from the process of tanning the skins. Having only the remnants of animal bodies to work with, a taxidermist often produced a distorted impression, while ignorance of the behaviour of certain species resulted in animals often being mounted in poses more appropriate for European animals. Storage constraints meant that many dried specimens had their bodies folded to fit into drawers and their eyes stopped with wool or fabric, producing a bizarre and incomplete version of an animal. Illustrations improved when zoos provided living models for thylacine imaging. They were displayed in zoos in London, Berlin, Paris, New York, Washington, Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney and Hobart and the backgrounds of illustrations based on these animals often reflect the unnatural or contrived situation of the models, rather than their native habitat. In the latter half of the nineteenth century illustrations in zoological literature tended to focus on the interaction of animals with their environment. The imperatives of this approach demanded an observation of living specimens and often show dramatic examples of animals in the wild. The ultimate development of this style occurs in a set of images by German artists after 1880, but also in occasional examples from earlier in the century. The artist who pioneered this type of work was Joseph Wolf, a lithographer who illustrated many scientific and popular natural history and zoological works. Wolf trained at the Natural History Museum in Leiden and at art academies in Darmstadt and Antwerp, where studying human and animal anatomy, copying landscape art, and drawing from nature in the open air was part of the curriculum. One of his mentors, Johann Kaup, stated: It is expected of a natural history artist that he is himself a zoologist, that he makes rigorous studies from life and from freshly dead animals so that he can contentiously and precisely capture in rapid inspired 29

Smith, Imagining South Pacific, 36–38.

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strokes the posture of the living or dead creature and, using callipers, all the body proportions.

This statement captures the modes of operation that produced the type of illustration that German artists aspired to. Generally, by the second half of the century, zoological images were no longer trapped within the rigid schematic rules exemplified in the former stiff, profile illustrations of animal specimens.30 While the artist’s role was seen as recording the ‘truth’, the conventions governing illustrations were nothing like as elaborate or systematic as those that, theoretically, were applied to a scientific text. In an essay on the politics of animals picturing, art historian Alex Potts writes “no images, even scientific illustrations, can be purely neutral records”. What was considered the aesthetic dimension of an image, what made it “vivid”, was seen as integral to its scientific function as a clear and coherent display of knowledge. Potts discovers (as I do) that the acceptability of illustrations in scientific literature was often determined by the conventions of pictorial aesthetics.31 Perhaps this is why many illustrations of the thylacine do not conform to any notion of accuracy—that is, they do not resemble photographed images of members of the species taken from any angle or in any position. Often they illustrate behaviour inconsistent with evidence about the animal available at the time. Indeed, the idea of ‘accuracy’ in relation to zoological images is problematic, especially when the subject or model is an individual and no other specimens are available. It posits the question: can any illustration truly represent a group of individuals in all their variations? And offers answers, such as the idea that visual culture historian W. J. T. Mitchell notes in his book about images of dinosaurs—that they were and continue to be “key elements in the process of scientific thinking and discovery as such, not just as a descriptive afterthought or afterimage, but as a constitutive element, a speculative, theoretic construction”.32 *** From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it is obvious that the ideals natural history artists strove for at various times were rarely accomplished in the case of the thylacine. Figures of the species 30 31 32

Quoted in Schulze-Hagen and Geus, Joseph Wolf, 94; 69–104. Potts, “Natural Order and the Wild,” 12–13. Mitchell, Last Dinosaur Book, 55.

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in zoological literature published between 1808 and 1936 show most clearly the mediated nature of what was re-presented. Occasionally, however, in a few of the preparatory drawings that have survived, we see the individual response of an artist to a particular animal. By the end of the nineteenth century new and improved techniques for printing illustrations made the mass production of visual information about a nonhuman animal species commonplace. Finally, in the early twentieth century, photography transformed the significance and function of the zoological illustration. Historian Tom Griffiths has written that the invention of the camera was the “culmination of this western quest for visibility and lifelike representation”. But in the last chapter of this volume you will see that, as Donna Haraway points out, “there is no unmediated photograph or passive camera obscura in scientific accounts of bodies … there are only highly specific visual possibilities, each with wonderfully detailed, active, partial ways of organising worlds [my italics]”.33 This history of animal images, then, differs from most accounts of zoological illustrations. It is a critical analysis. As Erica Fudge has recommended, it reads against the status of the human and opens up a new way of imagining the past. It takes a journey behind the surface brush strokes and incisions of what are often described as ‘beautiful’ engravings and lithographs or ‘fascinating’ early photographs, into the world of science, printing processes, publishing entrepreneurs, circulating libraries, economic strategies, bounties and most importantly in some cases closer to the individual living animals who were depicted, including the few who served as models for illustrations. However, in terms of influence Stephen Greenblatt suggests, “the images that matter, that merit the term capital, are those that achieve reproductive power, maintaining and multiplying themselves”.34 Today, many of the pictures discussed in this book are still circulating. They have been separated from their original sites in natural history books and often their old meanings have been submerged or forgotten. They are “orphaned texts”35 that have another life outside their original site and have generated different understandings of the thylacine. But as described in chapter 7, in all the temporal and spatial sites in which these illustrations now operate, old associations 33

Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, 25; Haraway, “The Persistence of Vision,”

193. 34 35

Fudge, “Left-Handed Blow,” 15; Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 6. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 316.

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and assumptions continue to echo. They are present in the strange forms and ominous signifiers many images contain—a slanted eye, a dark expression, a wayward stripe or an uncharacteristically shaggy coat—and in vestiges of former material frames. This book focuses on the power relations that operated in regard to visual images of the thylacine in their original printed sites. It explores in detail the contention of post-colonial and human-animal studies writer, Helen Tiffin, that “representation has … proved crucial in the destruction of animal species and is focal in the contemporary preservation of others”. She then refers to the thylacine whose “representation as a dangerous carnivore signalled its extinction”.36 This close look at images produced in the species’ lifetime reveals how these destructive ideas evolved and how notions embedded in visual images and their texts, readily available in popular culture as well as scientific literature, circulated with devastating effect.

36

Tiffin, “Unjust Relations,” 36.

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CHAPTER ONE

“IN EVERY RESPECT NEW” Long before Europeans sighted the island of Tasmania, explorers and writers had suggested ideas about the landscape, human inhabitants and animals of unknown lands. The Antipodes were often constructed as hell on earth, inhabited by mythical monsters and transgressive human-animal hybrids: a conceptual as well as geographical space that helped to consolidate the idea of countries in the southern hemisphere as the antithesis of Europe, its other side.1 The first image of a thylacine presented to the European scientific community in 1808 was derived from an animal close to death. But rather than being a clinically objective representation of a ‘new’ species in its native habitat, the creature was perceived through a veil of expectation and awe. As such, the first published illustration and description of a thylacine presents a collection of ancient narratives and mythologies. The original drawing was made by George Prideaux Harris, Deputy Surveyor-General of New South Wales.2 He was one of a number of British government employees in the colonies who were expected, encouraged, or simply grasped the opportunity to record or send back evidence of what they termed “nondescript” animals and birds in the hope of forging a new career. But rather than shipping his specimen to Europe, Harris sketched and classified the strange animal he observed, even though he did not have formal training in drawing or science, as did many of the artists who accompanied voyages of exploration. The engraving derived from his drawing is the only illustration of the species published in the nineteenth century that was modelled on a live animal in Tasmania and his description challenged classificatory systems, as did reports of the echidna and platypus. Artists and artisans who copied Harris’s image in the decades immediately following its publication invented new posi1

Arthur, “Fantasies of the Antipodes,” 37–40. The island of Van Diemen’s Land, called Tasmania from the middle of the nineteenth century, was initially an outpost of the colony of New South Wales and administered from there until 1825. 2

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tions for the creature. But generally all project the idea of an abject or restrained thylacine: the injured animal Harris sketched as it crouched, shocked and injured, in a trap. Elements taken from his written description constitute the beginning of a particularly destructive discourse that had an indelible impact on other individuals of the species. Ultimately, the first illustration of a thylacine in a scientific work anticipates the species’ fateful association with European culture and its processes of representation. An Injured ‘Opossum’ The first engraving appeared in volume 9 of the prestigious Transactions of the Linnean Society of London in 1808 (Figure 1). Harris had sent a drawing of a thylacine and a Tasmanian devil to London two years earlier, with a letter to naturalist and science patron, Sir Joseph Banks, that speaks of “descriptions from the life” of two species that were “in every respect new”.3 Harris classified them in the same genus as opossums, naming the thylacine Didelphis cynocephala (dog-headed opossum) and the Tasmanian devil Didelphis ursina (bear opossum). In his written notes about the thylacine he explains that the animal from which the drawing and description were taken was a male “caught in a trap baited with kangaroo flesh” and notes that the creature “remained alive but a few hours, having received some internal hurt in securing it”. Zoologists have largely disregarded the engraving in the Transactions because they consider it inaccurate. For instance, Eric Guiler writes, “nothing in this [image] reflects reality”.4 But some elements in the engraving suggest the reality that Harris may have perceived when he sketched the injured thylacine. The head of the animal is disproportionably large, and the rump particularly slender. The observations of Temminck (1827) and Renshaw (1905) offer a reason for the unusual dimensions of the figure’s body: they state that the specimen Harris described was immature or small. This would explain the pup-like proportions of the figure.5 There appears to have been little for the engraver to go on apart from Harris’s description, 3

Hamilton-Arnold, Letters of G. P. Harris, 89. Guiler and Godard, Tasmanian Tiger, 13. 5 Temminck, Monographies De Mammologie, 63–65, pl. vii; Renshaw, More Natural History Essays, 219. 4

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Figure 1. Didelphis cynocephala and Didelphis ursina in Transactions of the Linnean Society of London 9, 1808. Engraving. By permission of the Linnean Society of London.

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the drawing, and his brief letter to Joseph Banks, so it is also possible that the drawing Harris made, which now seems lost, was changed slightly in the engraving process as it does not match exactly with the text in the Transactions. It is precisely because the figure in the engraving is not exactly as Harris described, and because of its status as the only zoological image of the thylacine that was made from a drawing of a living specimen more or less in the wild, that the illustration in the Linnean Society journal deserves sustained attention. The circumstances in which the drawing was made and Harris’s response to the animal are clearly discernible in the descriptive text. Judging by his comment that the trap was baited with kangaroo flesh, it was probably similar to the “tyger trap” pictured by another surveyor of Van Diemen’s Land, Thomas Scott, in 1823 and generally used when the capture of live animals was desired. It is also the only trap that used bait as an inducement. Scott was appointed Assistant Surveyor of the colony in 1821 and made the trap for use on Mount Morriston, a property he owned near Ross in the Midlands district of Tasmania. His drawing shows a wooden cage with a suspended door that dropped in reaction to pressure on the bait that was attached to a central pivot inside the cage (Figure 2). As the bottom of the pivot was pulled forward to retrieve the bait, the top moved backward disengaging the ridgepole, which sat in a notch on the bait stick. Thus dislodged the gate dropped, trapping the animal. The “internal hurt in securing it” that Harris describes may have been caused by the gate falling on the thylacine, or efforts to get the animal out of the cage. The gate in Scott’s picture looks heavy. It could be conjectured that it fell with some force on the thylacine’s hindquarters as the animal attempted to back out of the cage with the bait in its mouth. This may account for the seated position of the figure in Harris’s drawing—his spine may have been damaged and he could not move. Harris’s drawing was probably made while the animal was still alive. That is, in the “few hours” that the thylacine lived after capture while still confined in the trap, where he appeared “stupid and inactive” and had constantly fluttering nictitating membranes (the third eyelids often present in mammals and birds, that are drawn across the eyes to provide extra protection). The effect of the injury and/or the confined space of the trap is discernible in the awkward, hunched posture of the figure in the engraving. The muscled shoulders and neck seem to hint at the extent to which the animal struggled and the foreshortened body and large head suggest that the angle of Harris’s

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gaze may have been determined by the dimensions and position of the cage, as well as the animal’s age. Harris’s image of the thylacine is the only illustration in nineteenth century zoological literature in which a member of the species’ situation and original habitat is tangible. Harris follows in the tradition of artists such as Charles-Alexander Lesueur and Ferdinand Bauer, who accompanied voyages of exploration and captured animals on paper for scientific classification and study. Lesueur’s images often show animal species in a particular environment, or in the circumstances in which they were found, or actively engaged in foraging or eating. Like other drawings such as this, the seated thylacine in the Transactions of the Linnean Society could be aligned with “the cult of the overtly natural” and “nature in the raw” in botanical and landscape illustration in the late eighteenth century.6 It does not conform with most figures in published illustrations early in the nineteenth century, that were often based on badly stuffed taxidermy specimens. For instance, the image differs significantly from illustrations of other species in two standard multi-volume contemporary works, Buffon’s Natural History (1749–78) and Shaw’s General Zoology (1809–26). The pictures in these works conform to what French naturalist Georges Cuvier required of his illustrators in 1820—images that “avoided foreshortening that distorts the actual form” and show a standardization and detachment from fine art.7 The conventional pose was a standing profile position to effectively show the entire physiognomy of an animal for identification or classification. So the unusual position of the thylacine indicates that the drawing came directly from a colonial site, but the lack of background with only a faint shadow of the animal’s body, seen also in Bauer’s drawings, is typical of more conventional illustrations. And it is apparent that Harris lays out for inspection his skills in illustrating animals in the hope of acquiring a prestigious position in the colony or in Britain. Indeed, when the engraving is viewed in the context of Harris’s description, it almost seems as if the thylacine and the segment of earth it sits on has been removed and transported, like many dead specimens, for investigation by a European scientific institution.

6 7

Kemp, “Implanted in Our Natures,” 216. Schulze-Hagen and Geus, Joseph Wolf, 82–83.

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The Ambivalence of George Prideaux Harris Harris was a lawyer with no training as a surveyor or an artist, but he had an intense interest in natural history and sketching the animals and birds he saw in Van Diemen’s Land.8 His description of the thylacine has the flavour of ambition and opportunism, evident in his letter to Sir Joseph Banks, where Harris mentions a work he is preparing on the zoology of Van Diemen’s Land and offers his assistance in identifying any “particular curiosities”. Colonial officials sometimes classified and described material themselves and then petitioned the British government for grants to produce illustrated publications. Many such officials were recognised as ‘experts’ in a particular field on their return to England9 and from Harris’s letters it seems as if he aspired to such an outcome. Drawings of these two ‘new’ animals from Van Diemen’s Land would have been particularly interesting to scientists in England. Harris’s anxiety and his desire to succeed, as well as ambivalent feelings toward the animal in the trap, are evident in his descriptive text. It moves between enunciative modes: from the careful recitation of body measurements at the beginning of the entry, to the paragraph near the end of the description where sympathy toward the creature seems to intrude. There, in a short unpunctuated sentence, he writes of the “internal hurt” that is the result of the thylacine’s capture. Immediately after this, he tersely comments that “from time to time [the thylacine] uttered a short guttural cry, and appeared exceedingly inactive and stupid; having, like the owl, an almost continual motion with the nictitant membrane of the eye”. Harris’s use of “internal hurt” and “but a few hours” suggest a fleeting tone of distress. Elsewhere, in a letter to his mother, he mentions that large kangaroos resisted the dogs so desperately when hunted that they often killed or “wound[ed] them sadly”. Even though he was referring to domestic animals rather than native ones, Harris’s concern is unusual for a male in the colony at this time. Barbara Hamilton-Arnold calls Harris, in his early thirties when in Hobart Town, “a high-principled Quaker” whose objections to the flogging of a convict woman by act8 Harris left a law practice in Exeter to take up the post of surveyor in New South Wales, but Hamilton-Arnold comments that his copy of a plan of Knightsbridge published in the Gentlemen’s Magazine in 1799 “demonstrates a neat and methodical turn of mind and possibly some training in draughtsmanship” (7–16). 9 Browne, “Biogeography and Empire,” 310–11.

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ing Lieutenant-Governor Edward Lord threatened his position as surveyor, magistrate and commissary and had “disastrous consequences” for his family in Van Diemen’s Land.10 If Harris was prepared to sacrifice his position to protest about the treatment of a convict woman, perhaps he was also sensitive to the capture, injury and death of a young thylacine.11 The movement between writing styles in his description is similar to that exhibited in Thomas Watling’s Letters from an Exile at Botany Bay, which Ross Gibson suggests articulates an “alternating current” between expressionist subjectivity on the one hand and scientific objectivity on the other.12 A mixture of scientific and popular rhetoric is also a consistent feature of nineteenth century natural history works. Harris’s passage begins in detached, objective manner with a detailed description of the thylacine’s body and continues with the comment that it bears “a near resemblance to the wolf or hyæna”, despite the drawing of a thickset animal that looks more like a bulldog. At the very end of the entry, he also notes that the species “is vulgarly [commonly] called the Zebra Opossum, Zebra Wolf, &c”. By the 1820s Lieutenant Jeffreys and settler George Evans were referring to the thylacine as “hyena” in published works, an association that was particularly detrimental as the hyena was linked with cowardly behaviour, greed and grave-robbing.13 Harris develops the rhetorical image of the wolf/hyena when he mentions the thylacine’s eyes—“large and full, black, with a nictitant 10

Hamilton-Arnold, Letters of G. P. Harris, 106. Concern about cruelty toward animals had been articulated in Britain in the late eighteenth century by Jeremy Bentham and John Lawrence (Bentham, “Limits of Jurisprudence” and Lawrence, “Rights of Beasts”). One of few expressions of such concern in Van Diemen’s Land appears in the journal of Quaker, James Backhouse, who travelled through the island in 1832. Backhouse protested against a practice “that involved running a stick through the breathing apparatus of fish that took bait intended to attract cod and eels”. Backhouse felt that the soldiers who employed these methods should either kill the sharks involved “by the most speedy means”, or to liberate them “as they had as much right to take the baits, as the soldiers had to take the fish” (Backhouse, Narrative, 42). Positioning the rights of humans and animals on the same plane in this way was unusual. Quakers, however, also initiated the whaling industry in Nantucket that slaughtered marine animals in a particularly violent manner (National Park Service,“Historic Nantucket”). 12 Gibson, “This Prison This Language,” 27. 13 Evans, Description of Van Diemen's Land, 56; Lieut. Jeffreys, Van Diemen's Land, 108. The hyena was said to have a glandular pouch that led to the belief that it was alternately male and female (Goldsmith, History of the Earth, 1855: 396)—a potent reason for mistrust. 11

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membrane, which gives the animal a savage and malicious appearance”. This value-laden observation and the dramatic sentence “it inhabits amongst caverns and rocks in the deep and almost impenetrable glens in the neighbourhood of the highest mountainous parts of Van Diemen’s Land” sit uneasily with the dispassionate and measured language of the first paragraph. The words and their syntax place the thylacine in a romantic or even gothic landscape. The popular appeal of these sentences is demonstrated by the fact that they were selected and repeated verbatim, or embellished, in many publications into the next century, while other aspects of this first text were ignored. Imagining the Monster The representation of the thylacine that Harris offered to nineteenth century European culture, then, was an amalgam of influences and responses, discourses and messages. But the impression that predominates is one for which Europeans had long been prepared. It filled the space created by the fears and imaginings of European explorers, as well as colonists. On the way to the new settlement at Risdon Cove, Van Diemen’s Land in February 1804, while at anchor in Frederick Henry Bay waiting for “a fair wind” to take the vessel up the Derwent, Harris had written to his brother: [I]f accounts from Port Jackson and some persons who have been here can be credited, a quadruped not quite so pleasant [as the kangaroo] to live in the neighbourhood of, is also an inhabitant of Van Diemen’s Land—Traces of a Carnivorous Beast have been found in many parts, like a leopard or Panther, but I do not hear that any person belonging to the Settlement has seen the animal itself—Labillardiere in his Voyage in search of Perouse in 1792 speaks of being ashore here & being disturbed by the Howlings of a Beast, that came pretty near them—That at another time a quadruped the size of a large dog sprung from some bushes—it was whitish Spotted with black—and in the woods they found a large upper Jaw and Vertebrae of an animal certainly carnivorous. I suspect however that it may be only a variety of the wild Dog, or rather wolf of this Country … .14

Only two thylacines are known to have been caught when Harris sent his drawings to Joseph Banks, so imaginative impressions were able 14

Cited in Hamilton-Arnold, Letters of G. P. Harris, 59.

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to accumulate—a rare, possibly nocturnal, carnivorous, wolf-like animal, existing in the confined space of an island was waiting to be closely observed and described. Harris was armed with recent ‘pretexts’, but in his selection of the species’ name cynocephala there are connotations with an exceptionally long ancestry relating to undiscovered lands. The Cynocephali, or dog-headed race, was one of the five major Plinian or monstrous races that as long ago as Egyptian times were believed to inhabit the East. There were also heated discussions in the Middle Ages about the existence of the Antipodes and, on the well-known thirteenth century Hereford map, references to human/animal hybrids such as the Cynocephali were accompanied by illustrations. Cortez and Columbus looked for the Plinian races in America, while Gesner’s Historia Animalum and Topsell’s popular seventeenth-century zoological work includes references to them and, although Muster’s Cosmographia—a standard encyclopedia until the eighteenth century—questioned the existence of such beings, they were inserted as illustrations in the text, thereby “favour[ing] belief in what is left open to doubt”.15 The website of the medieval cathedral in Exeter, where Harris grew up, shows that images of many of these mythical figures adorn the misericords or tip-up seats in the back row of stalls in the quire. Images of the monstrous races turn up in the most unexpected places and have a tendency to leap across textual boundaries. Their continued presence in texts gives the impression that the myths of the monstrous races, “though geographically obsolete, were too vital to discard. They provided a ready and familiar way of looking at … the New World [my italics]”.16 So, in regard to his scientific classification, as well as his description of the thylacine, there is evidence that Harris was influenced by long-held preconceptions that strange or menacing creatures existed in the wilds of Van Diemen’s Land. As Roderick Nash comments about representations of America: “legends and folktales from first contact to well into the national period linked the New World wilderness with a host of monsters, witches and similar supernatural beings”. Nash cites a 1707 text that warned of “the Evening Wolves, the rabid and howling Wolves of the Wilderness [which] would make

15 16

Wittkower, Allegory and Symbols, 46–74. Friedman, Monstrous Races, 207.

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… Havock among you”.17 Other commentators have discussed the evocation of a strange, savage world that accompanies European colonisation of remote areas and how it seems to express repressed and irrational social and psychological fears and forebodings. An indication of how the colony continued to be perceived as a “savage world” is apparent in The Melbourne Monthly Magazine in 1855 where ‘Cambrian’ refers to mythical constructions of the thylacine: “the Native Wolf is an animal which, at one time, was supposed to be found only in the explorer’s or rather settler’s imagination, but it is now acknowledged that such an animal does really exist”.18 The development of ideas about the thylacine has been specifically related to what has been called “Tasmanian gothic”: a way of looking at the island that is “as old as Marcus Clarke”, a reference to the author of the epic nineteenth century convict novel For the Term of his Natural Life. In this discourse the landscape contains presences, or rather, absences—among them the “gothically named Tasmanian Tiger”.19 Indeed, descriptions of the thylacine in both scientific and popular works in the nineteenth century often include references to wild landscapes, dark forests, wolves, darkness and violence: elements in a well-known gothic metanarrative that always concludes with doom. As suggested above, meanings such as these for animals in colonial environments had been developed long before the exploration and settlement of Van Diemen’s Land and the thylacine was the repository of justifiable responses to a remote and unknown island. The members of the small group of Europeans that arrived on the island in 1803 and others that followed experienced all the fears and deprivations that such an isolated colony was capable of producing. So the strange animal Harris found continued to be invested with the qualities of European animals that were considered the epitome of evil, appetite and cruelty. By mid-century, any suggestion that the thylacine resembled a dog—an animal that was more commonly aligned with the ‘civilised’ world and displayed devotion to humans— was rarely mentioned and the comparison disappeared almost completely over the following thirty years. The stereotype of a dangerous, wolf-like thylacine had by then become firmly entrenched, and too convenient, to be easily displaced. The image of a relatively innocu17 18 19

Nash, Wilderness and the Mind, 29. ‘Cambrian,’ “Natural History of Australasia,” 362. Davidson, “Tasmanian Gothic,” 310.

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ous, dog-like animal did not appear again in natural history works until the extinction of the thylacine was imminent. French Copies Illustrators of animals in both popular natural history and scientific works in the nineteenth century regularly used previous illustrations as sources for their drawings and engravings. This, of course, was necessarily the case when species were not available to sketch in zoos in Europe, but also when they were accessible there. Copies of Harris’s image suggest that engravers and editors were selective in their use of empirical material and frequently show little regard for accuracy or detail. Some copies may have encouraged concern about the thylacine, but soon aspects of Harris’s description that hinted at mystery, inferiority and threat were reinforced, then new signifiers were added, until by the end of the nineteenth century many images bore little resemblance to the living thylacines that were regularly arriving at some European zoos. It is significant that all copies of Harris’s images are engravings on wood, steel or copper plates—the most common form of printmaking in the nineteenth century. This method produces images that are distinct and definite, have an impression of fixity, and tend to be unambiguous. Wood engravings are made up of smooth lines and often exhibit very fine detail, particularly in the suggestion of fur, textured skin or feathers. On the other hand, the finely clustered lines of steel engravings (referred to simply as “engravings”) are complex, often tangled and appear as jagged scratches under a magnifying glass. The incised quality of images such as those produced by elliptical tool marks was considered ideally suited to scientific works. Engraving in general, of all the arts, was considered incapable of deception. Emphasising this notion, most wood engravings such as the French illustrations described below are black and white, although some printed images were hand-coloured later. The first copy of Harris’s image in Transactions of the Linnean Society appeared in a French work. According to its signatures in the supplement to A. G. Desmarest’s Encyclopedia Méthodique, Mammologie circa 1820, the image was drawn by ‘Deseve’ and engraved by ‘Pierron’ (Figure 3). This new engraving of Harris’s image shows an animal with a lengthened neck, bristles on its neck and its back

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Figure 3. Dasyure Cynocephale in A. G. Desmarest, Mammalogie ou Description des Espèces de Mammifères, 1820. Wood engraving.

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hunched more emphatically. It is labelled Dasyurus cynocephale, in the genus for carnivorous marsupials under which Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire placed the species in 1810. The images of the thylacine and Tasmanian devil are placed on a page with others in their Class in layered environments, rather than being portrayed as isolated, unconnected figures. This naturalistic background, often included in French natural history illustrations at the turn of the nineteenth century, reflected the interests of French scientists in the modification of species by climate and environment. Only the thylacine, however, sits on its haunches and faces away from the others on the page; and while the other animals have vital, alert attitudes, teeth showing and wide eyes, the thylacine has a brooding appearance. The very brief text in this book states that the thylacine lives on the seashore and preys on echidnas. The misleading reference to marine predation seems to have arisen from confusion between Harris’s descriptions of the thylacine and the Tasmanian devil in the Transactions. While Harris does report the remains of an echidna in the stomach of the dissected thylacine, only the latter states that the devil “prey[s] on dead fish, blubber, &c. as their tracks are frequently found on the sands of the sea shore”. Robert Paddle shows how the error was continued in Murray’s Encyclopædia of Geography through successive reprinting from 1834 to 1846 at least. Then, a trickle of publications up to 1967 persisted in mentioning some form of marine activity for the thylacine despite its denial by Robert Gunn in Annals and Magazine of Natural History in 1838 and in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 1850.20 The mistake did not favour the thylacine in the long term, as will be seen in the way the reference is used in subsequent French works. In 1827 a wood engraving signed ‘Basire’ in volume 3 of The Animal Kingdom, an English translation of the standard French zoological work by Georges Cuvier published 1827–35, showed a taller version of Harris’s seated image with round bear-like ears and a smooth dense coat (Figure 4). This figure looks like a large dog and is compared with one in the text and on its label. It is also called “zebra dasyurus”, a reference to an African animal (or more precisely, its stripes) that was once considered dangerous and “imperfect”, but then in Buffon’s eighteenth-century zoological work, Natural History, was regarded as “elegant”. The stripes on the figure 20

Paddle, Last Tasmanian Tiger, 26.

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of the thylacine are faint and it looks warily over its right shoulder. Despite the teeth visible in the barely-open mouth, the image reinforces the comparison that is made in the text with species considered inoffensive. The remainder of the description is not complimentary. The thylacine is reported to be “a singular looking animal, by no means pretty” and Cuvier also states that they inhabit coastal areas, that they eat the “half-corrupted bodies of Seals” and “remain concealed in cavities in rocks, or in hollow trees” on the coast, rather than in fissures in the mountains. But the image and text considered together generate ambiguous connotations and tend to create the impression of an undesirable animal, rather than a dangerous one, because the visual image is relatively appealing. Later British texts that mention marine predation do so in combination with less engaging images so that more unpleasant impressions are suggested. In two works emanating from France, then, notions of nobility in illustrations are undercut in the text by associating the animal with the sea, rather than mountains and with scavenging, rather than hunting. The Mystery of Bilderbuch für Kinder An intriguing variation on the engraving in Transactions appears in Bilderbuch für Kinder by F. J. Bertuch, a lavish children’s encyclopedia of animals, plants, flowers, fruit and other aspects of the sciences and arts with a French and German text and 1186 hand-coloured engravings, published in Germany in 237 parts between 1798 and 1830 (Figure 5). The illustration of the thylacine appears in volume 10, 1821. It is on a page with other Australian marsupials—several are copies of images by Ferdinand Bauer—and it is interesting for the way in which it differs from the engraving that appears in the Transactions because, in some respects, the figure corresponds more accurately to the details in Harris’s text. For instance, the hind foot does not have the long dark claws that appear in the engraving. Indeed the image in Bilderbuch agrees precisely with the text in Transactions: “hind feet 4-toed, claws short, covered by tufts of hair extending 1 inch beyond them”. But the most obvious disparity between the Bilderbuch illustration and the first engraving is in the definition of the animal’s eye. In Bilderbuch a nictitating membrane is clearly visible, but in the Transactions the animal’s eye is outlined

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with a clean black line, and the nictitating membrane dissolves in the inky black interior of the organ. That is, the image in the Transactions emphasises one element of the text—“eyes large and full, black … which gives the animal a savage and malicious appearance”—over others. The image in the children’s book, however, projects a quite different impression with the eye barely outlined and pale shading in the area of the mouth. The very brief text opposite the image in Bilderbuch notes only that the “dog-headed Dasyure” is a carnivore that “lives in the most mountainous parts of Van Diemen’s Land”; it is a lot like a dog, especially around the head; it is close to a marsupial in its internal structure; and it “looks very wild and vicious [my italics]”. The text adds that it is very little known “because only two individuals have been taken up until now, which were both males”. This succinct description, then, reflects the ambivalence in Harris’s text: the thylacine is dog-like as well as looking “wild and vicious” and the mystery associated with animals in foreign locations is sustained in the admission that little is known about the species. Other similarities between the image and text in Transactions and this one—for instance, the fact that both figures are facing the same direction (indicating that they were both copied from a figure facing the opposite way) and all other engraved copies are facing to the right (indicating that they were copied from the illustration in Transactions)—raises the possibility that the German image may also be derived from Harris’s original drawing. The preface to Bertuch’s work stresses the importance of figures that are “accurately defined”, a “true representation of objects”, not “composed according to the whim of a draughtsman” and modelled on the “most perfect of its type”. Harris’s drawing was the only image of a thylacine available in Europe that was made from a live animal and it is not entirely unlikely that his drawing may have made its way to Germany. Research into the classification and illustration of the platypus in Bertuch’s work reveals that eminent German naturalist Johan Blumenbach, who also contributed to Bilderbuch für Kinder, received a specimen of the platypus from Joseph Banks in 1796 that was probably used as a reference for the platypus illustration.21 As Harris’s drawing, originally sent to Banks, is missing from the Linnean Society Archives it is possible that he also sent Harris’s 21

Horky, “Platypus Paradoxes.”

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drawing of the thylacine to Blumenbach and that it was eventually used as a model for the illustration in Bilderbuch für Kinder. Without the original drawing, these observations remain speculative. If the German image were a more precise translation of Harris’s drawing it would be consistent with findings in relation to other figures I have examined. That is, while French and German works tend to represent the species in a way that encourages a positive response, images and texts in British works generally construct the thylacine as a dangerous creature. British Copies The development of negative or biased representations in British works can be traced in the texts accompanying two almost identical copies of the engraving from Harris’s drawing that appear in History of the Mammalia in 1849 and the more popular The Pictorial Museum of Animated Nature circa 1850, as well as Charles Knight’s The English Cyclopædia published in 1855 (Figure 6). Like other entries discussed in this chapter, the first two appearances of this copy use the term “dog-headed” that Harris applied to the thylacine in his classification and stress the species’ resemblance to a dog, but then the identical texts comment that the thylacine is “much rarer than the ursine opossum [Tasmanian devil]” and paraphrase Harris’s words, stating “in stature it nearly equals a wolf”. It also notes that their habits are nocturnal and then their habitat is exaggerated in these terms: “the caverns and fissures of the rocks, in the deep and almost impenetrable glens among the highest mountains of Van Diemen’s Land”. With the addition of the word “fissure” and the removal of “in the neighbourhood” from Harris’s sentence, the thylacine’s environment is now more precise and secluded. The illustration emphasises the point: a miniature background of mountains, a palm tree and exotic foliage has been added to a copy of the engraving after Harris, the figure has been reversed by the copying process, and the claws on all feet have been extended and sharpened. The idea of a savage animal is conveyed by the observation that the thylacine “prowls, hyæna-like, in quest of prey”. The story of Harris’s thylacine caught in the trap is repeated, but the word “ferocious” is added to “stupid and inactive”, and later in the paragraph a crucial and muchrepeated statement is made—the thylacine “usually” attacks sheep.

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Figure 6. Dog-head Thylacinus in The Pictorial Museum of Animated Nature, c.1850. Wood engraving.

The English Cyclopædia includes a text based on Harris’s description with the addition of the sentence “two of these animals are now alive in the Gardens of the Zoological Society of London” and quotes the relatively long entry in the Zoo’s 1852 guidebook. The image is now labelled “Tasmanian Wolf”, repeating the comparison Harris makes at the beginning of his text, and the entry states that the thylacine plays the role of the “larger quadrupeds of Africa and Asia”— that is, of dominant predator. Then it states “their favourite prey is mutton”. The problem with the text in these works is not that the thylacine was said to resemble a dog, wolf or hyæna, for the unknown was often interpreted in terms of the known.22 Rather, it is that the animals to which the thylacine is compared for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth century have particularly violent or unpleasant associations in European mythology, that these elements have been 22

Smith, Imagining South Pacific, 10.

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selected from previous reports, and that a distinctly menacing tone is produced as they interact with each other and with the image. This linguistic patterning plays a dominant role in the demonization of the thylacine over the following decades. Imperial Pressures The nature of the ideas developing about the thylacine in the colony is clearly suggested by the names reported in settlers’ accounts and guidebooks relating to Tasmania that were published in Britain and other countries in Europe during this period. As Dale Spender points out in her book Man Made Language: naming constructs reality. It is an attempt to give order and structure to objects in the world and control the flux of existence. Spender points out that naming imposes meanings and then allows certain groups to manipulate the world or the things in it. Visualisations of the ‘new’ continents and islands encountered by European settlers, explorers and scientists were shaped by the different names employed to classify the physical evidence they found. But Spender goes on to state, “names which cannot draw on the past are meaningless. New names, then, have their origins in the perspective of those doing the naming rather than in the object that is being named … new names systematically subscribe to old beliefs, they are locked into principals that already exist, and there seems no way out of this even if those principals are inadequate or false”.23 Similarly, Erica Fudge perceives the way animals were classified as “a human imposition on the natural world” that is central to our understanding of it. She maintains that when there was difficulty in placing a colonial animal in the existing system it was either dealt with through the assertion of likeness, by creating a new category, or by traversing the line between animal and monster.24 Many of the images mentioned in this chapter were labelled with scientific or common names that referenced the dog, or opossum, or refer to a new classification Thylacinus cynocephalus, supplied by a Dutch zoologist at Leiden Museum, Coenraad Temminck. The latter taxonomy was eventually accepted and is still in use today. Considered 23 Dale Spender, Man Made Language, 164. For other useful discussions of colonial linguistic strategies see Ritvo, “Power of the Word” and Birke, Feminism, Animals, Science. 24 Fudge, “Viewing Animals,” 155–59.

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sequentially, scientific labels show how different classifications were suggested, accepted or ignored. The first of these, conferred by Harris, placed the thylacine in the genus Didelphis with American opossums; the next put it in Dasyurus with marsupial carnivores and was proposed by Geoffroy St.-Hilaire in 1810; Gray named it Paracyon or Peracyon cynocephalus in 1825; and finally, a Family Thylacinadae, referring to the animal’s pouch (from the Greek thylakos, meaning leather pouch) was assigned to the thylacine by Temminck in 1824. This latter designation gave the thylacine a unique status in the classification hierarchy; it implies that members of the species had few associations or characteristics in common with any animals other than the marsupials in the Order to which they were assigned. But not all works published after 1824 apply this scientific name to the image. Two books by H. R. Schinz label their thylacine illustrations Thylacinus harrisii and gives “Harisicher Beutelhund” (pouchdog) as a common name, while Murray’s Encyclopædia of Geography stresses both the dog and opossum connections, indicating that associations with dogs in very early texts were still current and that the distinctive place of the thylacine in the perceived order of beings was not necessarily recognised.25 Names with canine associations were mostly applied to relatively bland images. The word ‘wolf’ in the caption to the image in Bicknell’s Scripture Natural History gives a foretaste of attitudes that take precedence in the following years and it was common names such as this that tended to override scientific nomenclature, even in zoological and natural history works, and usually persisted once applied. The very first detailed description of the species came from the north of Tasmania in 1805. Lieutenant Governor Paterson notes, “the form of the animal is that of the hyæna”. In 1820 Lieutenant Jeffreys referred to them as “a species of hyena” and in 1822 Evans, in his Description of Van Diemen’s Land, called them “opossum-hyena”. In 1829 Henry Widowson also referred to the species as “hyena”. Several other reports and accounts of the colony in the 1830s refer to a “hyena-opossum”, implying that it was the most common name applied to the animal there at the time.26 Some of the associations 25 Schinz, Naturgeschichte der Säugethiere, pl. 66 and Naturgeschichte der Menschen, pl. 36; Murray et al., Encyclopædia of Geography, 1489. 26 Paterson, Sydney Gazette, 3; Jeffreys, Van Diemen’s Land, 108; Evans, Description of Van Diemen’s Land, 56; Widowson, Present State of Van Diemen’s Land, 179–80.

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connected with this name have already been mentioned, but the most damaging implication as far as the thylacine was concerned was that the species attacked sheep in packs. This behaviour, however, was not displayed by the thylacine.27 An animal that did have an established reputation as a sheep-killer was the wolf, and its name was also associated with the thylacine from the earliest days of settlement. Both Harris and Paterson compare the thylacine with the wolf, while in the History of Austral-Asia R. Montgomery Martin mentions the species in relation to their jaws. An illustration in Bicknell’s Scripture Natural History, labelled “New South Wales Wolf”, takes the comparison a step further. The wolf is often mentioned in similar terms to the hyena, as an early work about the colony by George Barrington, The History of New South Wales including Botany Bay, Port Jackson, Parramatta, Sydney and all its Dependencies published in 1810, demonstrates. This book includes a comment from Paterson’s account of “a species of hyena lately seen at Port Dalrymple” northern Tasmania, but calls it “extremely fierce” and adds a line that does not occur in Paterson’s description: “this creature does not attack human beings, but confines its ravages to sheep and poultry”. The wider significance of naming is that both the hyena and the wolf had a long history of denigration and persecution.28 The common names given to the thylacine both reflected animosity towards the species and had the capacity to produce and reinforce destructive attitudes, as ideas and people moved between Europe and Australia and because the majority of the population knew the animal only by these names. The term ‘thylacine’ was rarely used until very late in the twentieth century and the name ‘tiger’ only intermittently before 1850. Martin offers the latter as one of a number of names common in 1839; in the 1830s Widowson also mentions it being used: traveller and Tasmanian farmer William Breton calls the species the “native tiger”, Mrs. Prinsep refers to a wild cat “called the tiger” and, in his description of the colonies in 1829, R. Mudie includes “tiger” among a number of names given to the species.29 27 Jones and Stoddart, “Predatory Behaviour,” 243; Guiler, Thylacine, 14–20; Paddle, Last Tasmanian Tiger, 98–110. 28 Martin, History of Austral-Asia, 327; Bicknell, Scripture Natural History; Barrington, History of New South Wales, 433. 29 Breton, Excursions in New South Wales, 407–8; Prinsep, Journal of a Voyage, 89; Mudie, Picture of Australia, 175–76.

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The representation of the thylacine was informed and dominated by economic interests throughout the nineteenth century, particularly concerns in both Britain and the colony regarding the sheep industry. Sheep were introduced to Van Diemen’s Land at the time of the first British settlement in 1803. By 1819, their numbers had grown to 172,000, a quantity that, together with oxen, Lieutenant Jeffreys felt was “amply sufficient for the supply of the inhabitants”. The thylacine was soon accused of killing sheep, although Jeffreys maintained that only four thylacines had been sighted in 17 years of settlement and thylacine historian Robert Paddle has identified only two records of verified attacks on sheep, both in 1817.30 However, dogs had been reported as a problem in the colony in 1819 and 1826 and recognised as a threat to stock when they were no longer needed for kangaroo-hunting. Guiler’s analysis of the Van Diemen’s Land Company diaries and records between 1832 and 1849 shows there were significant sheep losses on its holdings from predation by dogs.31 Paddle also provides evidence of the company’s mismanagement and other factors that resulted in excessive stock losses at various times during the nineteenth century. He maintains that the thylacine provided a convenient scapegoat for these losses and so during the course of the century the species was discursively and rhetorically constructed as a danger to livestock. However, Paddle finds few verified reports of sheep-killing, but twenty-five different warnings of the increasing scarcity or possible extinction of the thylacine by “scientists and naturalists” between 1820 and 1888 in Tasmania alone.32 In spite of these warnings, successive private and government bounties and trapping for zoos and export, along with changes to habitat, competition for prey and introduced disease continued to deplete thylacine numbers to unsustainable levels. *** Connections between images of the thylacine and the species’ extinction suggest that scientific and popular works were among the sources that, intentionally or otherwise, exerted subtle and consistent pressure to exterminate the species. The writers and readers of the books in which the images discussed above appeared were linked by imperial networks of power and influence with significant players in the 30 31 32

Jeffreys, Van Diemen’s Land, 101–9 and Paddle, Last Tasmanian Tiger, 102. Guiler, Thylacine, 96, 109. Paddle, Last Tasmanian Tiger, 110–13, 148–67, 222–23.

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government of the colony. As Van Diemen’s Land was administered from Britain until 1855, landowners, sheep farmers, British investors and stock agents, the administration of the colony and the Crown formed strong business, familial and private links. There was a bourgeoning market for fine wool in Europe, the Van Diemen’s Land Company was granted land by royal decree, its directors were resident in Britain and secretary of the Company, Edward Curr, held a seat on the Van Diemen’s Land legislative council in 1830 when the first bounty was placed on the thylacine.33 In following years, other persons in this extended network, such as property owner, politician and naturalist R. C. Gunn and ornithologist and publishing entrepreneur John Gould, sent reports and descriptions of Tasmania’s native animals back to Britain. They influenced transformations in visual and verbal constructions of the thylacine, which operated in a similar way to propaganda, supporting the interests of stakeholders in the wool industry. By 1820 a new group of images appeared in zoological and natural history works, but these images had models far removed from the drama and immediacy of the colonial site. The state of specimens received in Europe, the lack of access to a live animal, as well as the scientific and economic interests of the country in which they were produced, affected the way these images were shaped. Some illustrations are particularly appealing and appear sympathetic, but those produced and published in Britain provide a foretaste of the more prejudiced and damaging constructions that were to be widely circulated in scientific works, popular natural history books and, finally, in mass-produced newspapers later in the nineteenth century.

33 Meston, Van Diemen's Land Company; Paddle, Last Tasmanian Tiger, 116 (see also pages 112–23 for an outline of the Company’s early activities, how the thylacine came to be included in the first bounty scheme 1830–38, and figures for claims); Government of Tasmania, Constitution Act 1934 (Tas).

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TRANSFORMATIONS The disparate images of the thylacine that appear in zoological and natural history works produced in Britain and continental Europe between 1820 and 1850 show how perceptions of the animal altered as specimens and ideas slowly flowed back and forth between the colony of Van Diemen’s Land and Europe. Some illustrations show how artists and writers struggled to reconcile Harris’s classification of the thylacine in the family Didelphidae with illustrations and descriptions of the animal that appeared subsequently. French, Swiss and German illustrations appearing between 1820 and 1846 are unusual in the history of thylacine illustrations in the nineteenth century. They show a common form and attitude that can be traced to a mounted specimen in the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris and display a kind of representation that British artists and naturalists generally did not adopt. It is particularly significant that, with exception of Cuvier’s Le Règne Animal and Murray’s Encyclopædia of Geography, the works that are discussed in this chapter seem to have been uncommon in Tasmania. Illustrations that emanated from Britain show an increasingly ferocious, wolf-like animal, completely different from Harris’s image and the delicate illustrations in French and Swiss publications, and it is important to note that the first of these images appears in 1833, only a few years after the introduction of the first bounty on the thylacine at the Van Diemen’s Land Company holding at Woolnorth in the northwest of Tasmania. A hardening of attitudes toward the species in the colony paralleled changes in the appearance of representations. Continental Impressions One of the many reasons it was difficult to produce an accurate image of the thylacine in Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century was because a living animal was not available. Artists relied on bones, skins or taxidermy specimens—themselves inaccurate or misleading constructions—to develop a representation. All images of the thylacine produced in continental Europe that were not copies

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of the engraving in the Transactions of the Linnean Society are in the formal standing profile position with the legs on one side of the body slightly in front of those on the other. The first of these, a lithograph by J. K. Brodtmann in H. R. Schinz’s Naturgeschichte und Abbildungen der Säugetiere (The Illustrated Natural History of Mammals) published in Switzerland in 1827, demonstrates in visual form the confusion that arose from the classification of the thylacine in the possum family Didelphidae (Figure 7). It is labelled Thylacinus Harrisii and “Beutelhund” (marsupial-dog), but resembles the other marsupials on the page—possums and a quoll—rather than a dog. Like many of the continental illustrations discussed in this chapter, it shows an inoffensive animal, but has slightly shorter legs and a more substantial body than the French images and displays a prowling stance. A detailed delineation of the thylacine’s physical appearance, that includes the fur colour on various parts of the body and the size and configuration of stripes on pouch-young, as if skins were being examined, is included in a text-only volume of this work by Schinz, published in 1824. The evidence for the latter is particularly obvious in the remark that the thylacine has a “long and low stretching body” (more likely the result of the tanning process) while reference to the “dorsal vertebrae” implies a skeleton was also available. Records do not show specimens in Switzerland at this time, but two “perfectly preserved” mounted specimens and two skulls were in the Natural History Museum in Leiden, The Netherlands, in 1827 and there is a French specimen in the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle described by staff as “pre-1789” that is similar only in its general shape (Figure 8).1 This representation, then, derives from European specimens and barely references the colony or its concerns; it is an attempt to picture an animal of which little was actually known or experienced, from a few material remnants of its existence. French zoologists supply some of the most pleasing and sympathetic visual and verbal descriptions of the thylacine. Spurred on by a national revival under Bonaparte, the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle was re-established in 1793 and attracted many important names in natural history. It became the leading centre for taxonomic and anatomical studies in Europe and included a large menagerie. Georges Cuvier created the new science of comparative anatomy, 1

Temminck, Monographies de Mammologie, 65; Renshaw, More Essays, 220; International Thylacine Database, 2006.

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Figure 8. Thylacine specimen in Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris. Specimen MNHN 2000–153 International Thylacine Specimen Database, 2006.

which “privileged function over form,”2 and based a new classification system on considerations of this aspect of zoological study. This change in emphasis resulted in the drawing of fossils, skeletons and teeth in many illustrations. Other French naturalists at the Muséum, such as Geoffroy St.-Hilaire, contributed to one of the great biological debates of the early nineteenth century, which E. R. Russell described as “Is function the mechanical result of form, or is form merely the manifestation of function or activity? What is the essence of life—organisation or activity?”. Geoffroy believed that all vertebrates were modifications of a single form, but Cuvier insisted that similarities between organisms could only result from similar functions.3 Geoffroy’s theories preceded the ideas of Charles Darwin and evolutionary biologists to a degree, and the way the debate developed is reflected in how the thylacine is represented in zoological works at later stages in the nineteenth century. The importance of anatomical study in French zoological circles is implicit in an illustration that appears in René Primevère Lesson’s Centurie Zoologique in 1830. The same image is used by Paul Gervais in Atlas de Zoologie ou Collection de 100 Planches in 1844. It shows a thylacine with upright head, long stripes curled around the abdomen and delicate legs, feet and tail (Figure 9). This finely built animal exemplifies Lesson’s note on the images in his book about humming birds: “elegant drawings … executed with care, full of graceful figures … ”, however, Peter Dance calls Lesson’s bird images “stiff, lifeless,

2 3

Outram, “New Spaces,” 251. Cited in Waggoner, “Étienne St. Hilaire.”

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Figure 9. Thylacine de Harris in R. P. Lesson, Centurie Zoologique, ou Choix d’Animaux Rares, 1830. Engraving. Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office.

unreal”.4 The explanation in Lesson’s text that the taxidermy mount in the Muséum in Paris was the model for this figure confirms that the prototype was indeed a “lifeless” animal, however, Lesson considered it a “bel” (Old French for ‘beautiful’) specimen. The existence of this mount explains the common elements in all French images discussed in this chapter and, indeed, the Swiss images—an elongated body, the result of the stretching process required for preserving the skin; the position of the figures, typical of those created by taxidermists; and the curious, but pleasing expression frozen on their faces. A comparison of thylacine images in Schinz, Lesson, and Cuvier’s Le Regne Animal reveals that the figures have very similar proportions and stripe patterns, suggesting they were all influenced by the same specimen. It also indicates how artists working in an area requiring ‘scientific objectivity’ could construct quite different representations from the same source material. Later taxidermy specimens of the thylacine in France and Switzerland were not so sympathetically con4

Dance, Art of Natural History, 119.

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structed: mounts in Lyon (1884) and Neuchatel (1869–75) have snarling mouths and aggressive stances.5 Sometimes the objects that were placed around a figure radically changed how the species might be understood. A copy of the illustration in Lesson’s book in a work by Schinz called Naturgeschichte und Abbildungen der Menschen und der Säugethiere, nach den neusten Entdeckungen und vorzüglichsten Originalien (Natural History and Illustrations of Humans and Mammals according to the latest Discoveries and excellent Originals) published in Switzerland in 1840, adds a foreground of flowers and grasses (Figure 10). This image is placed on a page with four other animals, including a particularly dangerous-looking Virginische Beutelratte (Virginian opossum), that project varying degrees of threat. The relatively small, delicate thylacine seems to fade into the background, while the flowers seem to muffle any danger it poses. The pictorial elements in this image and the absence of the bones indicate that the book was designed to appeal to a popular audience. The illustration of the thylacine in the Mammifères volume of the third edition of Cuvier’s Le Règne Animal, known as the Disciples edition, published in 1837, is the only picture of a thylacine in the first half of the nineteenth century to include sexual organs (Figure 11). As the aim of Cuvier’s work was to illustrate the key structural details of “readily accessible species” in every genus,6 it may explain the unusual inclusion of the organ. Most zoological images of the thylacine have no positive indications of the sex of the animal and do not include the pouch, although some German images later in the century show the penis “projecting behind” as Harris mentioned in his description in Transactions, and a few include the scrotum, although Harris stated it was “partly concealed in a small cavity or pouch in the abdomen”. The drawing of the thylacine in Le Règne Animal was made by naturalist François Roulin. It shows the same delicately built animal that is pictured in Lesson’s work, discussed earlier. The lumpy body indicates that the model was a stuffed animal, and a photograph of what is believed to be the earliest specimen in the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris shows that Roulin made a close copy of this mount (the one that Lesson considered “bel”) including the penis preserved 5 6

International Thylacine Database and pers. comm. August 30, 2005. Roux, “On Dating Regne Animal,’’ 33.

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Figure 10. Harisicher Beutelhund in H. R. Schinz, Naturgeschichte und Abbildungen der Menschen und der Säugethiere, 1840. Lithograph.

Figure 11. Thylacine Cynocéphale in Georges Cuvier, Le Règne Animal Distribué d’après son Organisation, pour Servir de Base a l’Histoire Naturelle des Animaux, 1837. Engraving. Rare Books Collection, State Library of Victoria.

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under the tail. This completely innocuous image and Harris’s drawing remain almost unique in zoological representations of the thylacine, until early photographs of the animal in zoos appeared in the twentieth century. The profound absence of a pouch in zoological images, and often in the texts that accompany them, is puzzling. It is the most distinctive part of the thylacine’s anatomy, but the omission persisted despite popular accounts of the species mentioning this feature; for example, early writers Mudie and Martin refer to the “abdominal pouch” and that “the female carries its young in a pouch”.7 This type of representation contrasts with illustrations of the kangaroo, which usually show a highly visible and occupied pouch. Images of the koala and Virginian opossum also show animals with young attached to their bodies, for instance, those in Carpenter’s Zoology in 1848; in an 1840 edition of Cuvier’s Animal Kingdom; and a picture of a Merian opossum on the same page as the thylacine in The Pictorial Museum of Animated Nature, mentioned in chapter 1. The image of a possum-like animal with babies clinging to her back did not necessarily invoke positive ideas. The Su of Patagonia in Topsell’s Historie of Foure-footed Beastes published in 1607 has a threatening appearance and was considered “of a very deformed shape, and monstrous presence, a great ravener and an untameable wild beast”,8 a description similar to thylacine entries in many nineteenth century popular science texts. A comparable illustration in F. E. Géurin-Méneville, Dictionnaire Pittoresque d'Histoire Naturelle et des Phénomènes de la Nature (Picture Dictionary of Natural History and Natural Phenomena) Paris, 1833–39 and drawn by Amédée Varin, shows an animal with the same form and position as Lesson’s image but with an even more elongated tail, body and neck (Figure 12). Guiler describes this figure as having an “angelic air”,9 but what is more interesting is the Chinese fan palm and the mis-drawn Australian grass tree that are behind the animal, suggesting its habitat. These exotic motifs, along with the botanical illustration of Thunbergie—a prolific vine native to northern India—above the figure, operate like a theatrical backdrop as did the Eastern-inspired bandstands, conservatories and palm-houses in Victorian municipal parks and botanical gardens that connoted a 7 8 9

Mudie, Picture of Australia, 174–76; Martin, History of Austral-Asia, 327. Dance, Art of Natural History, 31. Guiler and Godard, Tasmanian Tiger, 92–93.

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“generalised exotic Other, vaguely related to the East”.10 The relatively brief text in this book is attributed to “E. Desmarest” (A. G. Desmarest’s son, see Figure 3) and concentrates heavily on the thylacine’s dentition, but to confuse the issue repeats the idea that the species lives in caves in the mountains and pursues platypus, echidna and kangaroo and also on the seashore where it eats “certains Crabes”. Similar descriptions appear in A. G. Desmarest’s Mammologie in Encyclopedia Méthodique and Lesson’s Centurie Zoologique, discussed earlier. Another French image from an unknown source, perhaps a geographical work circa 1829, explicitly illustrates the colonial context in which ideas about the thylacine were developed—the miniaturised landscape just beneath the figure’s tail shows a sailing ship at anchor in a river.11 While the ship and lighthouses are invasive objects in an otherwise ‘natural’ landscape and suggest how the island would be transformed, the relatively large body of the animal implies the overwhelming significance of the unfamiliar environment to its human inhabitants. The ship acts as a synecdoche for the European occupation of the island and is part of the imperialist discourse that was woven into both popular and scientific works in the nineteenth century. But this picture also shows how the animals that inhabited the colonies often assumed giant proportions in the minds of the colonisers. The last image in this section references impressions of the colony taken back to Europe by a traveller. It appears in a German natural history atlas, Zonengemälde. Naturgeschichte und Völkerkunde vollständig in Wort und Bild, written by Traugott Bromme, who travelled widely in the 1830s and 1840s and subsequently published a series of guidebooks for intending German immigrants to Australia (Figure 13). The lithograph of Australasian animals and birds, indigenous people and several trees shows a thylacine with the same prowling stance, long tail and similar stripe pattern as the illustration in the 1827 edition of Schinz (see Figure 7). It is possible that this is a copy of that image, as the placing of the feet and attitude of the head is almost identical. The brief text for this “Beutelhund” states that it is “the size of a wolf but shorter legged” and that it is a strong predator. A note about what were often considered the native human counter10 11

MacKenzie, Orientalism, 77. This engraving is reproduced in Guiler and Godard, Tasmanian Tiger, 88–89.

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parts to the thylacine, the “poor Van Diemen’s Landers”, declares that they are “walking with gigantic steps toward their own extinction [trans. Dagmar Nordberg]”.12 British Images An unpublished watercolour and pencil drawing by British artist Edward Lear, chiefly known for his nonsense rhymes, heralds a significant development in natural history illustrations (Figure 14). Dated 1833, his drawing of the thylacine may have been one of four sent to William Jardine for the Felinae volume of The Naturalist’s Library13 where two plates of lions (the Senegal Lion and Barbary Lion, that Lear calls the “Emasculated” and “Persian” Lion) were engraved after his drawings and published in 1834 (Jardine, plate I & II). An invoice in a letter from Lear to Jardine dated January 1834 lists drawings of the two lions, as well as “a species of cat” and “a Marsupial animal”, among those enclosed. Lear also mentions how he “prefers to make each [drawing] a study from life, for which reason the Emasculated Lion and the Persian are the best”—inferring that the study of the “Marsupial animal” was not made from life.14 In later letters Lear mentions drawing the animals and birds in the menagerie at Surrey Gardens run by William Cross and those in Lord Stanley and Mr. Leadbetter’s collection;15 but, as the first live thylacines did not arrive in Europe until 1850, he had little alternative but to draw the thylacine from other sources. As Jardine notes in the preface to Felinae, “we have experienced considerable difficulty in procuring specimens, or good copies, from which to make the drawings for the accompanying illustrations”. The resource Lear used is not known and his drawing was not published in the Marsupalia volume that appeared in 1841, but the image that did appear in that book was based on the mount in the Zoological Society of London Museum. As it has a similar attitude to Lear’s image, it suggests that this was his model and/or that artists who were engaged to do draw-

12

Bromme, Zonengemälde Naturgeschichte, 129. This possibility is suggested by Vivien Noakes in a note in an auction catalogue issued by Phillips Auctioneers, London in May 2000. 14 Lear to William Jardine, 16 January 1834, 3/64 Jardine Papers. 15 Ibid., February 19, 1834, May 1, 1834. 13

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ings for Marsupalia were given specific instructions as to how animals should appear. Lear’s drawing is markedly different from the French and German illustrations mentioned above. The tail is short, all legs are flexed, the head is tense and the figure appears to react to something outside the boundary of the picture. Behind the figure, a desolate plain with a solitary eucalypt-like tree supplies an appropriately inhospitable setting. This image is the first to derive from Britain since the engraving in the Transactions of the Linnean Society that is not an obvious copy of another illustration. It is also the first to explicitly depict a vicious or threatening animal. It initiates a transformation in the ideas projected in visual representations of the thylacine and heralds developments in natural history publishing towards works aimed at a mass audience. Prior to his fame as a writer of limericks, Lear was a wellrespected zoological artist who had been commissioned by the Zoological Society of London to draw animals in Regent’s Park Zoo for a guidebook and in 1830–32 produced and published a volume of hand-coloured lithographs of parrots drawn from the aviaries at the Zoo. Later, he worked for John Gould and produced bird illustrations for the 13th Earl of Derby at his large menagerie at Knowsley Hall outside Liverpool, where he began composing rhymes to amuse Lord Derby’s children. Some of these featured the kangaroo, but the thylacine was never the subject of his comic verse. One of very few drawings that survived the early days of the colony comes from the journal of George Augustus Robinson, a lay preacher employed by the administrators of Van Diemen’s Land to act as ‘conciliator’ with the Aboriginal people (Figure 15). This unpublished drawing is not mentioned in N. J. B. Plomley’s standard transcription of the diary, or in any other work. Robinson travelled to remote regions of Van Diemen’s Land to find the 300 or so remaining members of the indigenous Palawa community and bring them into areas settled by Europeans. They were then ‘repatriated’ to Flinders Island off the north coast of Van Diemen’s Land where many of them died.16 The pencil sketch of the thylacine appears following the entry for Thursday, 19th June, 1834 in the manuscript of Robinson’s diary in

16

For discussions of Robinson’s activities in Van Diemen’s Land see Rae-Ellis, Black Robinson and Mudrooroo, Doctor Wooreddy.

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Figure 15. Hyæna, drawing in the Journal of G. A. Robinson, 1834. Pencil. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

the Mitchell Library in Sydney17 and relates to the brief entry for the 18th June in which Robinson writes: Jack said he saw the hyaena hunting a kangaroo on the scent like a dog. He ran and speared him in the tail, and the dog caught him by the neck. They brought him home. It was a bitch hyaena. Had it skinned and the skull saved.

On the 21st June he notes “hazy weather with heavy and incessant rain and hail. Natives hunted this morning, caught several kangaroo” and then writes: The cause of the bad weather is attributed to the circumstances of the carcase of the hyaena being left exposed on the ground and the natives wondered I had not told the white men to have made a little hut to cover the bones, which they do themselves, make a little house.18

17 18

Robinson, Journal, CY Reel 1441. Plomley, Friendly Mission, 886–88.

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Plomley notes that the comments of Aboriginal people refer to the practice of erecting a tent-like cover of greenery over a body at a cremation site, which is called a mannalean or neeninglinim, but does not say if this was also made over the bodies of other animals. Similarly, French explorer Nicolas Baudin writes of a “tomb” of ashes in which human bones were found and remarks that it was “covered with grass and small pieces of bark which were held in place by two lances, the ends of which were driven into the ground”.19 If Palawa people buried thylacine remains in the same way as human bodies, it implies some form of respect for the species. However, Robinson mentions “hyaena” in eighteen entries between 1829 and 1834, most of them in relation to hunting or killing by both white and Aboriginal inhabitants of the island. The accounts of Aboriginal life in Robinson’s diary, transcribed by Plomley, are filtered through European perspectives and values and are often open to interpretation. The entry for the 21st of November 1831 records that three cubs were killed by an Aboriginal man called Lacklay “before I saw them” and that “the old one got away”. Robinson does not record seeing Lacklay kill the animals. He reports that Umarrah and his wife, who only “purposed to eat them”, carried the carcases of the animals away. He writes that he is surprised at what he understands is their intention to eat a thylacine because kangaroos were plentiful in the area. Thylacine bones have not been found near Aboriginal hearths in Tasmania or anywhere else in Australia. But as Robinson mentions the desirability of procuring thylacines to tame, his Aboriginal companions were probably encouraged to capture or kill animals for their curiosity value, for scientific study, or to collect the bounty in force at the time. Indeed, according to Robinson’s diary, thylacines seem to have been killed almost automatically. The bounty applied by “Mr. Curr” on behalf of the Van Diemen’s Land Company is the subject of some entries, with Robinson mentioning that the “New Hollanders” skinned a thylacine “for the purposes of carrying it to Cape Grim to get the ten shillings reward from the Company”. Many of the entries mention female thylacines with young and Robinson also expresses a desire to catch live animals for taming, but more often he acquires the skin of a dead thylacine.20 Robinson’s drawing is a reminder of 19 20

Plomley, Baudin Expedition, 111. Plomley, Friendly Mission, 645, 527.

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Figure 16. Dog-faced opossum in Hugh Murray, Encyclopædia of Geography, 1834. Wood engraving. National Library of Scotland.

the situation in the colony: the intense interest in the species, its presence in the areas in which Robinson travelled, the effect of European cultural practices on Aboriginal customs and the constant killing of the thylacines by human inhabitants and dogs. A curious anomaly in thylacine images appears in Murray’s Encyclopædia of Geography in 1834, and in 1839 and 1840 editions of the work (Figure 16). Tasmanian writer and illustrator Louisa Anne Meredith wrote in her book My Home in Tasmania that she considered this image the best she had seen. The tiny wood engraving is labelled “Dog-faced Opossum”, but the text by William Swainson states that the animal “suggests the idea of a union of the dog and the panther”. During the years between the rumour of a panther-like creature in Harris’s letter and this reference there had also been allusions to a “wild cat” in popular writing, such as Mrs. Augustus Prinsep’s The Journal of a Voyage from Calcutta to Van Diemen's Land published in 1833. Similar comparisons are made by W. C. Wentworth in 1819 and repeated in 1822 in Description of Van Diemen’s Land designed for emigrants by George Evans, the then Surveyor General. Wentworth writes “the native dog … is unknown

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here; but there is an animal of the panther tribe in its stead which … commits dreadful havoc among the flocks”. Like several other early writers, he adds that these attacks are not frequent.21 The figure in Murray’s book stands next to an engraving of a dingo, or New Holland Dog, that has a distinctly wolf-like appearance but a text that identifies it as “the only native domestic animal”. Swainson says the dingo is fierce and voracious, but adds “all our domestic breeds of cattle, sheep, and horses have long been introduced [to the Australian colonies], and have rapidly multiplied”. The verbal construction of the thylacine as ‘wild’ through its connection with a panther, in comparison with the “domestic” dingo that appears to pose no threat to other domestic animals, is a crucial element in this text and reinforces earlier representations of the thylacine as a sheep killer. The image/text rupture that occurs in both the description of the thylacine and the dingo suggests that text, rather than image, facilitates the long-term repetition of an idea and, ironically, exemplifies Swainson’s introductory observations about Australasian zoology being “inconsistent” and Australasia being “the land of contrarieties”. As this image/text appeared in a geographical work, it also indicates how readily ideas about the thylacine were shaped intertextually. A cheap, popular representation from this period demonstrates how image and texts could abound with signifiers of violence and danger and explicitly describe a threatening thylacine. A sepia wood engraving in W. I. Bicknell’s Scripture Natural History and Guide to General Zoology published in 1835, shows a menacing, hairy animal (Figure 17). Books such as this usually feature animals from the Bible, with few from the New World included. The caption “New South Wales Wolf” is an error that references the years before 1825 when Van Diemen’s Land was administered from New South Wales. However, in later years an entry in Melbourne Monthly Magazine in 1855 claimed a thylacine was killed by a shepherd “near the Blue Mountains on the Sydney side” and that he made the animal’s skin into a waistcoat.22 The figure resembles images of the wolf that appear in contemporary natural history works; for instance, the Red Wolf on 21 Wentworth, Statistical Description of NSW, 118–19; Evans, Description of VDL, 56–57. 22 ‘Cambrian,’ “Natural History of Australasia,” 360–62. In Australia’s Vanishing Animals, Tim Flannery mentions that there were reports of sightings of the thylacine in the Blue Mountains in the mid-twentieth century (58).

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page 62 of Desmarest’s 1820 volume in Encyclopédie Méthodique that has barred teeth and bristling fur. The narrow, hairy muzzle, long thin body and pointed ears of this figure are reminiscent of the thylacine in Lesson’s Centurie Zoologique discussed above. The mountains in the background of the picture, however, anticipate the evolution of wolf imagery that culminated later in the nineteenth century and is associated with bounties, death and the thylacine’s gradual disappearance from the landscape. *** These illustrations demonstrate the movement of ideas, people, books and images as they circulated within Europe, and between Europe and Van Diemen’s Land. Information about the inhabitants of colonial possessions came from and was communicated through a network of sources and sites. A sentence in Murray’s Encyclopædia of Geography encapsulates the political context in which knowledge of new territories was procured, disseminated and digested in the early nineteenth century: “there is now scarcely a shore, however remote, or the interior of a continent however barbarous and difficult of access that has not been surveyed and described”. The book stresses the familial links people in Europe had with the New World and the importance of “recent, authentic and accurate accounts” of the settlements.23 Animals, both native and introduced, were an integral part of pastoral life in these far away places and the thylacine, like many other ‘new’ species, was brought closer to home and under cultural control by classification, definition and by naming. Transformations in visual and verbal constructions of the species in the first half of the nineteenth century and the new features with which some of them were endowed, operated to the detriment of the thylacine and supported the interests of stakeholders in the wool industry. However, Edward Lear’s drawing was not used for William Jardine’s series The Naturalist’s Library, instead, the figure of the thylacine in the Marsupalia volume was drawn by a lesser-known artist, William Dickes. Unfortunately, the image he produced is one of the most anatomically misleading impressions of the species; it corresponded closely to the suggestion in previous texts that the thylacine was dangerous, violent and unheimlich; it was one of the most persistently re-used and copied representations of the nineteenth cen23

Murray, Encyclopedia of Geography, A4.

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tury; and the work it appeared in is still held in seven library collections in Tasmania. This version of reality inscribed in zoological and natural history works soon became the basis for an established discourse about the thylacine.

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CHAPTER TWO

VERMIN! The second major group of figures of the thylacine emerges when the production and dissemination of natural history works was rapidly increasing and this has important implications for the generation and diffusion of ideas about the species. By 1840 the study of natural history had become popular as a recreational activity. Affordable publications were now available and were aimed at a general audience, while the sale and circulation of books was burgeoning. Lynn Barbar attributes the attractiveness of natural history in the early nineteenth century, particularly in Britain, to the discouragement of its study in schools and the stagnation in biological studies, which meant that the parameters of the subject were static and accessible. She describes interest in natural history as a “national obsession” and books on the topic as “only marginally less popular than the novels of Dickens”. Harriet Ritvo notes that by 1821 readers had access to works through thousands of clubs and non-circulating libraries in Britain. In the colony of Van Diemen’s Land, books were available through private collections, mechanics institute libraries (1829+), local subscription libraries (1833+) and the main scientific resource, the Royal Society Library (1846+), which was intended to be “widely accessible to the public”.1 The illustration at the centre of this chapter appeared in the series The Naturalist’s Library, soon after the introduction of the first bounty on the thylacine by the Van Diemen’s Land Company in 1830. While some elements of the image are apparent in the transformations discussed in the preceding chapter, the illustration successfully embodies the economic imperatives of the Company. Long-established assumptions were expressed through a visualisation of the species that clearly referenced despised animals of the Old World. The images discussed in this chapter mark a turning point in the representation of the thylacine, as well as a defining moment in natural history publishing, and demonstrate how early anxieties and 1

Barbar, Heyday of Natural History, 14–15; Ritvo, Animal Estate, 9; Piesse, “Foundation of Society,” 154.

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speculations were distilled into loathing for the animal. To varying degrees, they picture what is perceived in Western society as ‘vermin’: an animal that has a cringing, cowardly demeanour like many representations of foxes or hyenas. As such, these images encouraged the hunting and killing of the species and justified the first bounty and the implementation of the second. They also appear in the temporal space between the first visualisation of a live animal in Tasmania and the arrival of the first thylacine at a European zoo in 1851 and are reproduced until 1925. The Naturalist’s Library The Naturalist’s Library was an innovative forty-volume series edited by William Jardine and published in Edinburgh at intervals of three months or so between 1833 and 1854. Comparable popular natural history works existing at the time include An History of the Earth and Animated Nature by Oliver Goldsmith that often relied on medieval sources, an English translation of Baron Cuvier’s The Animal Kingdom, and Buffon’s Natural History of the Globe. According to Susan Sheets-Pyenson, W. H. Lizars the publisher and engraver of The Naturalist’s Library, and the series editor, Sir William Jardine, took advantage of a surge of interest in novel species, an insatiable demand for inexpensive works of identification and new technologies such as steam printing, stereotyping and steel engraving to produce a different style of natural history. The serialised release and format of the series was designed to appeal to “all but the lowest levels of the Victorian middle classes” and its cost of six shillings was “a fraction of the price of most natural history books at that time”.2 Wellknown scientists were engaged to write the texts and each volume included an extended memoir of a naturalist. The series, then, was perceived to have a firm scientific basis. A large part of the appeal of the work was the small and ornate nature of the volumes that were bound in Moroccon leather and embossed with gilt. As Lizars notes in a letter to Jardine, “our Book is an ornamental one as much as a scientific one”. Of crucial importance were the hundreds of lively hand-coloured illustrations, of which “the more beautiful figures should come first”. Lizars main2

Sheets-Pyenson, “War in Natural History,” 51–53.

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tained that the images were the key to the series’ success because “anyone unacquainted with zoology can obtain pleasure and profit from glancing at illustrations alone”.3 Indeed, an edition that contained only the illustrations, called Leaves from the Book of Nature, was also published. This very large volume consists of small handcoloured images that adorn the huge pages like tiny jewels, particularly in the case of humming–birds; but on page 97 three dull-coloured figures are labelled “native to Van Diemens’ Land” and two of these have open mouths and look vicious.4 The effect of physical, textual, discursive and notional framing on the perception of images is demonstrated by comparing the illustrations in the large work with the same ones in the many small books of the 40 volume series, each with their detailed texts. The combination of ‘authoritative’ text and entertaining illustrations in The Naturalist’s Library was extremely successful—introductory volumes received exuberant reviews and early releases were so popular that the publisher could not keep up with the demand for new volumes. Sheets-Pyenson believes that this, and other entrepreneurial exercises in natural history publishing, shaped as well as predicted the popular taste of the reading public.5 Their taste for vigorous and entertaining images and its interpretation in illustrations of the thylacine has implications that will become apparent in the following analysis. An additional insight into the motivations behind the production of the series and how its popularity was achieved in relation to the thylacine entry, can be gleaned from extant letters between W. H. Lizars the publisher, printer and engraver of the series, the writer of the volume The Natural History of Marsupialia, or Pouched Animals G. R. Waterhouse and the artist, Edward Lear, with the editor of the series, Sir William Jardine. In Tasmania, the popularity of the series is indicated by its inclusion in nineteenth century catalogues such as that of the Van Diemen’s Land Mechanics Institute, the Tasmanian Public Library, the Launceston Mechanics Institute, Longford Library, the Bothwell Literary Society and Westcott’s Books. There is also evidence that it was sought by prominent

3 Lizars to William Jardine, 10 January 1835, 3/73 Jardine Papers; SheetsPyenson, “War in Natural History,” 54–57. 4 Lizars, Leaves from Nature, 15, 97. 5 Allen, Naturalist in Britain, 95–98; Sheets-Pyenson, “War in Natural History,” 52–67.

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Figure 18. Thylacinus cynocephalus in G. R. Waterhouse, Marsupialia or Pouched Animals, vol. XI of Mammalia, The Naturalist's Library, 1841. Engraving.

Tasmanian naturalist R. C. Gunn, who sent the first thylacines to London from Launceston in 1850.6 Lizars’ Engraving The engraving of the thylacine first published in 1841 in volume XXIV of The Naturalist’s Library—Mammalia: Marsupialia or Pouched Animals, XI of the volumes dealing with mammals—was produced from a drawing by William Dickes (Figure 18). Waterhouse recommended Dickes as illustrator for the volume because he was “the best artist I know for such subjects”. Some copies of the volume include the inscription “Dickes delt.” beneath the illustration of the thylacine, but a copy of the volume in the Royal Society of Tasmania collection, dated 1841, has an identical image with no Dickes’ signature, although the engraving of the platypus in the same volume is signed “Dickes delt.”. Tom Iredale comments on the omission of artist's names from illustrations, the confusion created by the many 6

Wilson, Library of Gunn, 4.

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reprints and alterations to the series, as well as three different title pages for the work.7 Subsequent uses of the image are just as inconsistent. For instance, the plates from Marsupialia seem to have been used in A Handbook to the Marsupialia and Monontremata by Lydekker for Allen's Naturalist’s Library (1894) and Lloyd's Natural History (1896) discussed below, although the comments about illustrations in the preface are ambiguous and they are only attributed to “Wyman and Sons printer”. In Phases of Animal Life (1892), however, Dickes’ name as well as Lizars’ is retained and the attribution “From Jardine” is included beneath the image. Illustrations in all editions of The Naturalist’s Library Marsupialia, however, include the imprint “W. H. Lizars”, the well-known Edinburgh printers and publishers of the set. Apart from imprints and signatures, the images in the 1841 and 1884 editions of the work are identical, with the figure of the thylacine facing to the right of the page in a crouching position against an elaborate and intricately worked bank of flowering plants and grasses.8 This background and the fine detail in the steel-engraved figure that accentuates fur, claws and teeth, underscores the ‘naturalness’ of the animal’s attitude. It looks aggressive, but the humped back, splayed front legs and lowered position of the head and neck signify a creature that is being threatened and is taking a defensive stance. The back legs are loosely bent, not taut and ready to spring; the wide eye showing white denotes fear; the ears are erect and attentive to the front. The picture shows a terrified animal facing an enemy. But recognition of this message requires a leap in time and perception, for the cultural expectations of most nineteenth century viewers would have meant that the figure was read as a vicious animal threatening something or someone outside the picture’s frame. Because the thylacine was the dominant predator in the Tasmanian landscape, the point of view is fixed: the protagonist would have to be a human or

7 Waterhouse to William Jardine, 2 July 1838, 3/74 Jardine Papers—Waterhouse mentions that Dickes has illustrated “Mr. Darwin’s work, The Voyage of the Beagle”; Iredale, “The Naturalist’s Library,” 322–25. 8 Unfinished drawings in a folder of drawings and prints for The Naturalist’s Library in the National Library of Scotland show that backgrounds were worked up around pencil outlines of the figures; that is, they were drawn separately from the finished figure, perhaps by another artist. Another folder in the Scottish Museum shows hand coloured figures on detailed, but uncoloured backgrounds, as occurs in some editions of the work.

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a dog and the picture is unlikely to evoke any feelings of concern for the species. The position of the figure is similar to Dickes’ illustration of a species of jackal or fox classified as Canis fulvipes in the section “Mammalia” in Charles Darwin’s The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, especially in the angle of the front legs, the upraised head and snarling mouth.9 Taxidermists describe this tense, defensive attitude as the “red fox” position. Like the wolf, the fox has traditionally been considered cowardly and cunning and in the eighteenth century became the object of organised hunting. The text states that the thylacine was commonly called “zebra opossum” and “zebra wolf” but that it is now referred to as “hyæna”. As discussed earlier, the hyena was also a universally hated animal associated with appetite, grave-robbing and death. In Buffon’s Natural History (1831), the striped hyæna is said to “reside in the caverns of mountains, in the clefts of rocks, or in dens”, to live “by depredation, like the wolf”, “break open sheep-cotes at night”, sometimes attack man and ravage with a “voracity insatiable”. The entry concludes, however, “of few animals, have so many absurd stories been told”.10 Some of these stories are identical to those told about the thylacine and although Waterhouse headed his entry “The Thylacinus”, the contents of his text show that few Australian animals were so relentlessly aligned with other species considered ferocious or repulsive. Waterhouse was curator of mammals at the British Museum from 1836 to 1842 and also curator of the Zoological Society Museum, and wrote widely on zoological subjects. He had a special interest in taxonomy and brought a diligently scientific approach to the work that is at odds with the dramatic images. According to letters from Lizars to the editor of the series, it was the desire of the publishers to produce “popular showy plates” that “excited the public”, while the meticulous rhetorical delineation of the thylacine exemplifies what is perceived as close, ‘objective’ observation that is rare in popular zoological works. The first part of the entry consists of an examination 9 G. R. Waterhouse also wrote the section on Mammalia in The Voyage of the Beagle, but while the figures are similar to the marsupials in The Naturalist’s Library, the backgrounds are completely different. This supports the idea that a different artist sometimes executed the backgrounds of natural history illustrations. As Chris Smeenk points out, this is an “altogether unexplored field of study” in zoological literature (pers. comm. September 22, 2004). 10 Buffon, Natural History, 54–58.

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of the animal’s body that can be compared to the techniques of engraving the fine detail of the image onto a cold sheet of steel. Embedded in the account are the movements of the human hands that facilitate such a minute observation. The writer handles the ears—“on the inner side the hairs are brown-white, slightly inclining to yellowish”; feels the hair on the tail—“it is covered with somewhat woolly fur like that of the body”, “beneath, the hairs are comparatively long”; examines the snout—“the muzzle is dusky; the hairs on the upper lip are white”; carefully turns the animal over—“on the belly the hairs are also brown at the base, but rather paler than those on the back”; fingers the feet—“[the] underside of the toes is devoid of hair and exceedingly rough; a narrow naked space extends from the great pad at the base”; and opens the pouch—“the hairs in the region of the pouch of the female are of a deep rust colour”.11 This intrusive, obsessional recording of the animal’s body produces what Roland Barthes, in reference to literary texts, calls “the reality effect” that “makes notation the pure encounter of an object and its expression”. The insistent recording of details amounts to “referential plenitude” that no function can justify. Even though the form of the thylacine was unique and unusual to European viewers, much of the information contained in this description is superfluous, serving only to objectify the animal, authenticate the work, or justify scientific scrutiny and the collection of ‘knowledge’. In essence, the imagetext12 is a political description—the result of a defining and controlling gaze—with the text, in particular, demonstrating power in the guise of what Linda Nochlin refers to as the “simple, artless reflection” of the scientific investigator.13 Waterhouse concludes his entry with “the above description is taken from a specimen in the Museum of the Zoological Society” and he includes a footnote referring also to “two skins”.14 While the popular image and scientific text about the thylacine work together to produce an effect of precision and realism, in most editions of the series there is a physical distance between image and 11 Lizars to William Jardine, 6 July 1836, 15 January 1833, 3/74, 3/68 Jardine Papers; Waterhouse, Natural History of Marsupialia, 123–26. 12 Barthes, Rustle of Language, 148, 141. Following Mitchell, Picture Theory, 89, I refer to the descriptive words and illustrations in natural history texts considered together as “imagetext”, or as “image-text” when referring to the relations between them, or as “image/text” when the gap between them is problematic or there is a rupture in representation. 13 Nochlin, Imaginary Orient, 123. 14 Waterhouse, Natural History of Marsupialia, 123–28.

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text that undermines the effectiveness of their interaction. For instance, the illustration of the thylacine (Plate V in Marsupialia) is grouped with other images at the back of the book and quite difficult to locate. There is no reference to the engraving in the text and no specific indication as to the model used for Dickes’ drawing. However, in a letter to Jardine headed “Zoological Society” and mentioning Dickes’ engagement, Waterhouse comments “we possess upwards of fifty species of Marsupial animals in our Museum and several alive in the Menagerie, there is therefore abundance of material”. It is safe, then, to assume that the model for the text, a mounted specimen listed in the 1838 catalogue of the Society, was also the model for the illustration. The International Thylacine Specimen Database shows a mount with short, bent legs, a restrained head and open mouth—an attitude that is markedly different from most other thylacine specimens in museums in Europe and Australia, but stunningly similar to that of the animal in the illustration—that is held by Otago Museum in New Zealand (Figure 19).15 As the Zoological Society’s Museum collection was sold in 1856, it is possible that this very close match found its way there, but there are no records for the mount and no indication of where it originated.16 Advice from taxidermists and museum staff suggests that it is an example from early in the century, made by a practitioner unfamiliar with the species who assumed the thylacine was fox-like and so mounted a skin in the “red fox” position.17 On the other hand, if the mount was made after 1841 when Dickes’ drawing appeared, it is possible that the taxidermist used the image in Marsupialia as a model for the mount, rather than the other way around. If this is the case, the three-dimensional representation gives Dickes’ image even wider resonances: when it is displayed in a public institution, a specimen carries additional authority and receives even wider popular and scientific exposure. A letter from Waterhouse to Jardine specifically about the artist Mr. Dickes, mentions that he “has been for some time past so exceedingly busy that I could not get him to come here and work for us” and that Dickes takes work home to “finish up”. However, in a final correspondence Waterhouse stresses that he is “much pleased” with 15 Waterhouse to William Jardine, 16 July 1838, 6/138 Jardine Papers; International Thylacine Database, 2006. 16 Ilka Soehle, pers. comm., March 15, 2005. 17 Ken Everett, pers. comm., April 19, 2005; Max Wilson, pers. comm., May 24, 2005.

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Figure 19. Taxidermy mount, Otago Museum New Zealand. Specimen VT2607 International Thylacine Specimen Database, 2006.

Dickes’ drawings and that “no pains have been spared to make them correct—they are drawn under my own eye” and that they are only taken home to finish and to add the backgrounds. He adds, “they then undergo a second examination and are corrected from the specimens [my italics]”. But the Jardine Papers also give an insight into the publication of natural history works that indicates ‘scientific rigour’ such as this was not always exercised in the production of illustrations for the series. Sheet-Pyenson comments that, as specimens that could serve as models were scarce in Edinburgh, an inexpensive solution was to trace plates from other works that Lizars could then “engrave directly … without paying artist fees”.18 When time was at a premium and artists were busy, they could also copy illustrations from previous works, as is made clear in a letter from Lizars to Jardine in 1835 when he suggests:

18 Waterhouse to William Jardine, 18 April 1839, 30 June 1839, 6/138 Jardine Papers; Sheets-Pyenson, “War in Natural History,” 66. William Dickes was a relatively unknown artist, while Edward Lear already had a reputation for drawing parrots for the Zoological Society of London. Lear received £1/50 each for drawings that were used for Felinae (Lear to William Jardine, 16 July 1834, 3/64 Jardine Papers), while Dickes was paid only 15 shillings for each illustration he did for Marsupialia (Waterhouse to William Jardine, 7 February 1840, 6/38 Jardine Papers).

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whatever figures you select from Daniel’s Africa I will get Stuart [James Stewart, the artist who drew the majority of the illustrations for The Naturalist’ Library] to redraw in such positions as will defy challenge from the Proprietors and I also intend him to draw all those from Cuvier—mark the Countries where the animals come from that the proper scenery may be introduced.19

Indeed, when the illustration of the thylacine in Marsupialia is compared to the appealing image of the species that appears in Cuvier’s Le Règne Animal (see Figure 11) some resemblance can be found in the shape of the head, the position of the ears and eyes, and the general proportions of the body. If Lizars was particularly interested in speed and low cost of production, as Sheets-Pyenson suggests he was,20 Dickes could have saved time by transforming the static, innocent-looking French zoological image into a crouching, snarling animal that would appeal to a popular audience rather than bother to carefully draw the Zoological Museum specimen, especially as there was no copyright agreement between France and Britain until 1852. But the intense energy and menace projected by the image implies that there were other factors motivating the artist and taxidermist. Constructing a Sheep-Killer Moves to eradicate the thylacine in northwestern Tasmania preceded the writing and preparation of the volume in 1838–39 by 8 years, but the mention of sheep predation had arisen long before. The first was in George Barrington’s History of New South Wales ... and all its dependencies … dated 1810, where it is stated “a species of hyena has lately been seen at Port Dalrymple [a likely reference to Paterson’s report], extremely fierce, having a very large mouth, strong sharp claws, and very strong limbed”. The text then maintains that it “does not attack human beings, but confines its ravages to sheep and poultry”. In another work published in 1819, W. C. Wentworth whose crossing of the Blue Mountains opened up the inland of New South Wales for sheep and cattle grazing, followed this with a reference to “an animal of the panther tribe” which “commits dreadful havoc among the flocks”. This statement is repeated in Evans’ Description of Van Diemen’s Land in 1822. Paddle argues that these largely 19 20

Lizars to William Jardine, 16 February 1835, 3/73 Jardine Papers. Sheets-Pyenson, “War in Natural History,” 62–67.

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unfounded claims that sheep-killing was an established habit of the thylacine were made as “a political gesture to gain primary investment interest in the colony of New South Wales” rather than Tasmania, pointing out that Wentworth’s statements about the thylacine that “bore so little resemblance to reality” were much repeated by other authors.21 In 1830 these scattered reports about the disposition of the thylacine coalesced in a memorandum from the Van Diemen’s Land Company by Edward Curr, who had earlier railed against sheepstealing but made not a mention of attacks by thylacines. The memo now informed the public that the Hampshire and Surrey Hills Establishment was authorised to pay rewards for the destruction of the “hyena”. Payments for thylacines were double that offered for the Tasmanian devils and feral dogs, despite the lack of evidence for sustained attacks on sheep. Paddle suggests that the thylacine served as “a convenient scapegoat” for a variety of problems encountered by the VDL Company in the years preceding the introduction of the 1830 bounty that resulted in stock losses.22 In addition to knowledge of the bounty’s existence, the most immediate and compelling source for the picture of the thylacine in The Naturalist’s Library is revealed in the descriptive text that accompanies it, which quotes settler and naturalist Ronald Gunn’s report of the species from the Annals of Natural History 1838—“the Thylacinus is common in the more remote parts of the colony … it usually attacks sheep at night … its pace is very slow [my italics]”. This rhetorical imagery would have provided sufficient justification for the depiction of an animal that could and should be exterminated. Also quoted are several passages from Harris’s description, including reference to the trapped animal he observed.23 While works published in Britain—where wool buyers, investors, and others with interests in Van Diemen’s Land were resident— encouraged the extermination of the thylacine and showed little con21 Barrington, History of NSW, 262–63; Wentworth, Description of NSW, 118–19; Evans, Description of VDL, 56–57; Paddle, Last Tasmanian Tiger, 103–4. In 1813 W. C. Wentworth and John Macarthur, later called the “father” of the Australian sheep industry, discovered a way across the Blue Mountains near Sydney and opened up the vast and fertile country in the west of New South Wales for sheep grazing. 22 Paddle, Last Tasmanian Tiger, 114–15. Chapter 5 of Paddle’s book contains a detailed analysis of the evidence for and against the thylacine as a significant sheep predator. 23 Waterhouse, Marsupialia, 128.

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cern about other animals that might be affected by European settlement practices, some French publications were more sensitive to the predicament of native animals in the colony. Volume 3 of Voyage Autour du Monde par les de l’Inde et de Chine la Favorite by M. Laplace published in 1835, designates the thylacine the only real enemy of the sheep flocks and states that it is named devil-dog (chien du diable) by the farmers, due to its bloodthirsty and cunning instinct. But the reference to ‘devil-dog’ implies the animal referred to may have been confused with the Tasmanian devil. What is more interesting is the faint concern the text then expresses about this animal: the war to the death the European dogs wage on it has greatly diminished the species. Unfortunately this war has not been fatal just to the beasts of prey; the graceful and harmless kangaroo has only been able … to escape with great difficulty.

Reference is then made to English settlers, “who are starting to lament the rapid disappearance of the different varieties of this singular quadruped, which nature has only granted to New Holland and Van-Diemen [trans. Liz Koolhof]”.24 The observation that the English were “starting to lament” the disappearance of thylacines in 1835 is not in evidence in material published in Britain at this time. Indeed, the situation of the species is encapsulated in the defensive stance displayed by Dickes’ image. A letter from Waterhouse to Jardine written near the completion of Marsupialia expressed his hope that “the work would not only be popular but might for a long time to come be a work for reference to professional naturalists”.25 Images in natural history works such as this visualised, reinforced, and circulated the idea that the thylacine was an undesirable animal. The impact of scientific curiosity about the species in Europe is evident in the obsessive detail of the text that accompanies it and the number of specimens that had already been shipped to Europe for research. With the slaughter of thylacines for bounty payments, dozens of animals killed for display in imperial exhibitions later in the century and the capture of animals for public exhibition in zoos that was soon to come, the specimens described in Marsupialia directly contributed to the extinction of the relatively small population of thylacines in the colony. The advertised authority 24 25

Laplace, Voyage du Monde, 225. Waterhouse to William Jardine, 28 January 1841, 6/138 Jardine Papers.

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of works like The Naturalist’s Library, together with their commercial success and growing popularity, rendered this image and its copies particularly effective in depicting a ‘fact’, spreading a notion, and encouraging what was believed to be appropriate actions. Copies and Reproductions The image of the thylacine in The Naturalist’s Library appears again in volume 1 of a two-volume work, A Natural History of the Mammalia, by Waterhouse that is dated 1846 and deals with marsupials. The wood engraving in this book is smaller, uncoloured, reversed (indicating it is a copy of Lizars’ illustration) and has no signatures. On the foot of the page the new engraver’s name, H. S. Beckwith, is inscribed. The low ridge, grasses and flowers that appear around the figure in the previous work have been reduced to a minimal foreground, but the position and attitude of the animal’s body are the same and the fur, teeth, tail and marking details are indistinguishable from Dickes’ fox or rat-like image. The illustrations in this work are grouped two to a page at the back of the book, with the figure of the thylacine the same size as the image of a water opossum from Brazil on the same page. But while the thylacine is tense and snarling, all of the other animals in this volume are in neutral positions with their mouths closed. The text of this publication mentions the full range of common names given to the species— tiger, zebra-opossum, zebra-wolf and dog-headed opossum—but Waterhouse gives a different impression of the animal than he did in his previous work. The similarity to a wolf is initially stressed: “about equal to the size of a Common Wolf … general resemblance … to a Wolf or large Dog” but later Waterhouse asserts that the thylacine can attain a “formidable size”.26 This description includes dimensions that are taken from a female and a male specimen in the British Museum; it states that there is also a skeleton of an adult male in the Museum of the College of Surgeons from which measurements of the skull have been recorded; and mentions that “Prof. Owen” has dissected three specimens—two females and a male. Letters from Sir John Richardson to Richard Owen in the National Library in Canberra, Australia, state that Sir John Franklin 26

Waterhouse, Maruspiata, 456–57.

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had consigned “the mature carcase of one thylacine and the [?] of two others” as well as a young female specimen and various other body parts of members of the species, in dubious condition, to Owen at the British Museum in 1841 and 1843. In Owen’s communication “On the Rudimental Marsupial Bones in the Thylacinus” published in The Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London in 1843, he assumed that the species “soon is likely to be, extinct”. In his text in The Natural History of Mammalia, Waterhouse adds that there was evidence that four pouch-young had fed from the teats of one of the female specimens before she had been killed. In a passage about the thylacine in the Tasmanian Journal of Natural Science 1846, the same year that this work of Waterhouse’s was published, Lieutenant Breton relates an instance where the pouch-young of a slaughtered female thylacine “were found to adhere so firmly to the nipple, that it had to be cut, and the mouths of the young were then forced open”.27 These are some of the real animals that emerge from behind colonial images—individual animals from a small community that was gradually being reduced. According to The Natural History of Mammalia, the number of specimens available to scientists in Britain alone had increased from three to possibly six in the six years since Waterhouse wrote the text for Jardine’s Naturalist’s Library. Paddle counts five specimens in Europe by 1827. One was in the possession of the Linnean Society; two were in Leiden Museum in The Netherlands, another at Joshua Brookes Museum and another in the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris.28 By 1846, the specimens mentioned in The Natural History of Mammalia can be added to the list, but this too is a conservative estimate. The International Thylacine Specimen Database (2006) compiled by Stephen Sleightholme identifies ninety-four taxidermy mounts in international museums.29 Although many of these are unable to be dated, some are in institutions not previously known to have thylacine material, so it is probable that there were many more bodies and body parts exported than 27 Richardson to Richard Owen, 20 April 1841, 28 April 1843, Letters to Richard Owen, 2280 Richard Owen Papers; Owen, “Rudimental Bones,” 149; Waterhouse, Marsupiata, 461; Breton, “Excursion,” 12–26. Breton continues, “they lived about two months in a room, and were then found dead in the fireplace, to which they had, it seems, retired for warmth”. 28 Paddle, Last Tasmanian Tiger, 105; Temminck, Monographies de Mammologie, 65; Renshaw, More Essays, 219–20. 29 The 2009 update of this database lists a number of newly discovered specimens.

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have formerly been documented. The entries for the thylacine in many contemporary texts is longer and more comprehensive than that for other marsupials, implying that the species was of particular scientific interest and therefore may have been more eagerly sought for examination. And while the entries for possums and kangaroos in zoological literature often include exact measurements and a record of the examination of hair colour on various parts of the body, few have references to skins, specimens, or dissection. In contrast to the imagetext about the thylacine, then, entries and images of other marsupials in this work connote living animals. Three works by Richard Lydekker, that appear at the time the government bounty of 1888–1908 was in force, contain reproductions from Lizars’ original steel engraving plate. In the case of all these works, the attribution “from Jardine” appears after the caption “The Australian Thylacine”, while “Dickes delt.” and “Lizars sc.” is present on either side of the print itself. Published in 1892, the work Phases of Animal Life, Past and Present takes a Darwinian approach (which will be discussed more fully in the following chapter) typical of zoological literature of the late nineteenth century. The thylacine is one of several marsupials to be dealt with in the text and it is immediately revealed that the species was “commonly known to the colonists as the Wolf”. This is confirmed in the following sentence where the Latinised name ‘thylacine’ is translated as “Pouched Wolf” and it is explained that this name is applied to the animal from its peculiarly “dog-like appearance”. In scientific fashion, then, the ideas of ‘wolf’ and ‘dog’ are conflated by their classification and applied to a member of a completely different Family. The text then states that the thylacine “may indeed be regarded as playing the part of the wolf in Tasmania, and the damage inflicted by it on the flocks of the settlers is, or was, very considerable [my italics]”. There is an explicit connection, then, between the visual image and the rhetorical imagery in the text that, for many readers, may have been reinforced by knowledge of the bounty on the species. The word “was” indicates the success of the proclamation—despite interest in and awareness of the status of marsupials demonstrated in works of this period: the history of the Marsupials—a history deeply interesting to the zoologist as showing how, humanly speaking, a type of animals, characteristic of an early part of the earth’s existence, has been preserved to us in one remote region by the complete isolation of an island-continent,

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and in another by the retiring habits of its representatives and the absence of severe competition in the struggle for existence.30

That is, until the arrival of Europeans in Australia. Prints of Lizars’ engraving also appear in identical contexts in 1894 and 1896 in volumes in two series—Allen’s Naturalist’s Library and Lloyd’s Natural History. Both works are by Lydekker and called A Handbook to the Marsupialia and Monotremata and both have prefaces that state the work was designed as a cheaper alternative to Gould’s Mammals of Australia, which was considered both “rare and costly”. They were also intended to be a “scientific, yet popular, account of Australian Mammals” and it is stated, “especial care” had been taken with the plates, which are those “originally published in Jardine’s Naturalist’s Library”. The editor acknowledges the “liberality” of the publishers of that text for allowing the reproduction of the plates that have been re-colored “from actual specimens in the British Museum” and printed by Wyman and Sons Ltd.31 It is significant that at the height of the government bounty this figure appears in so many works and how the potential viewers of the image were thereby extended. Ironically, in the introduction to these works, Lydekker admits and regrets that contemporary zoologists rely “for the most part” on observations of marsupials published “many years ago”. He also notes that “so like in appearance to a Wolf is this animal, that the name of Tasmanian Wolf might well receive general adoption, were it not for the circumstances that the application of the name of a placental mammal to a marsupial is best, when possible, avoided”. In fact, the label ‘Tasmanian Wolf’ or ‘Marsupial Wolf’ had begun to be used in natural history literature during the 1870s, and by 1900 one or the other was overwhelmingly preferred.32 Later, Lydekker comments on the “ferocity” of the species and this time is quite explicit about its probable disappearance, adding “the Thylacine was at one time an abundant animal on its native island” and “the damage which it inflicts on the flocks of the settlers has, however, given rise to a relentless war of extermination, which has resulted in the almost complete extinction of this, the largest of the Australian carnivores, 30

Lydekker, Phases of Life, 182–85. Lydekker, Handbook to Marsupialia, 1894: v–vi. 32 A discussion of the implications of thylacine naming in respect to the wolf is covered in more detail in chapter 4. 31

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in the more settled portions of the country”. References to sheepkilling became mandatory in the second half of the century and intensified during the 1880s and 1890s. This use of the figure and the texts that accompany it demonstrate how anthropocentric constructions of the thylacine developed consistently over time and that the effects of such constructions then appear in references to the near extermination of the species.33 Adaptations The earliest variation of the engraving in The Naturalist’s Library appears in a French work by Paul Gervais, Histoire Naturelle des Mammifères published in 1855, and then in a four-volume work called Cassell’s Popular Natural History in 1863, 1870 and 1896, as well as in several editions of Johnson’s Natural History between 1879 and 1889 (Figure 20). This engraving is clearly an adaptation of the image discussed above, with the figure having a similarly elongated form, thin tail, humped back and rather delicate feet. But it lacks the signifiers of tension and threat in the previous engraving; that is, the open mouth, splayed front feet, the firmly grounded quality of all limbs, and alert ears placed far back on the head. The background, too, shows a more serene scene and does not have the turbulent lines seen in the bank behind the original figure and the curving spear-like grasses. This new thylacine looks almost cat-like, sinuous, with lines that appear to be whiskers and, while it does have wide eyes, there is nothing else to indicate fear. This picture merely shows a strangely formed animal, not a hostile or dangerous one. It is consistent with other French images in the lack of ferocity it projects, but the textual entry describes members of the species as “almost as big as a wolf” and notes that their form, desires and habits are not so different from that animal. It also maintains that “the English” call the species “tiger” or “hyena” and goes on to discuss the classification, detail the dentition and describe the anatomy of the species in the style of French scientific works (trans. Liz Koolhof).34 As with many works that contain relatively sympathetic images, this work is rare in Australia.

33 34

Lydekker, Handbook to Marsupialia, 1894: viii, 152–53. Gervais, Histoire des Mammifères, 280–81.

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Figure 20. Dog-headed Thylacinus in Cassell’s Popular Natural History, 1863. Wood engraving.

On the other hand, the first edition of Cassell’s Popular Natural History which appeared in 1863 with subsequent editions circa 1870 and 1896 gives some idea of discourses about animals common in British works at the time. The introduction to the five-volume set stresses the uses of different species and begins “animal life is constantly claiming our attention. Animals supply us with food, minister to our pleasures; transport us from place to place”. The creationist discourse is apparent in references to the “diffusion”, “novelties” and “abundance” of nature with a capital ‘N’. These are also labelled in economic terms as “Products” of the earth and the branches and divisions of these “commodities” are noted. Animals are “arranged … in a descending series, of which the first object of importance is Man”. In the context of progress and economic management, it is not difficult to understand why sheep were given precedence over thylacines in the minds and actions of British scientists and settlers. The work ethic that helped sustain economic growth is applied to animals as the unnamed author envisages all mammals as potentially industrious subjects, dividing them into four-handed, wing-handed, insect-

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eating, gnawing, flesh-eating, thick-skinned, ruminating, toothless and pouch-bearing. Affirming the political and economic purpose of the work, the preface concludes by proclaiming the “national importance” of acclimatising animal species from temperate regions to Britain. The gold-embossed, ornate volumes themselves demonstrate the achievements and value of human endeavour and express commercial imperatives. The work is typical of popular books of the period that celebrate the British Empire, industry, progress, Nature and the infinite variety of God’s creation. Many also contain glaring errors and misinformation about animals. The other repository of this image, Johnson’s Natural History, however, claims to be a “trustworthy key … of the animal kingdom” and its five lines of text about the thylacine leave little room for error; however, it stresses the label “wolf”, talks of the power and size of the species, and its “frequent … depredations among the sheep”.35 A curious variation on the rat imagery in Dickes’ image appears in 1856, in a French work by a notoriously inaccurate naturalist called Dr. Chenu (Figure 21). The image in the Encyclopédie d’Histoire Naturelle is obviously intended to denote the thylacine, as it is labelled “Thylacine à tête de Chien” (dog-headed thylacine), but the animal in the engraving looks very much like a rat. It has the almost hairless tail of that animal as well as tiny legs and feet and long whiskers. The picture of the Tasmanian devil on a following page shows a similar image with long whiskers and shrunken limbs, indicating a basic misunderstanding about the form of both species. The text also generates errors, claiming that Prince Charles Bonaparte, rather than C. J. Temminck, classified the species in a family of its own, which he gave the name Thylacinidae. The remainder of the entry gives a detailed description of the body, maintaining erroneously that the tail is compressed and that the animal is a swimmer and inhabits coastal regions. It concludes with a long discussion of the teeth of the thylacine compared with other carnivores and relates various theories about the classification of thylacines using fossil evidence [trans. Nicole Johnson]. The image and the text in this work shows how completely incorrect the representation of animals in scientific works can be, although the discourse that frames the image—the weighing of ‘facts’ and reciting of opinions—may dissuade readers, especially 35

Cassell’s Popular Natural History, iii–iv; Goodrich and Winchell, Johnson’s Natural History, 665.

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Figure 21. Thylacine à tête de Chien in Dr Chenu, Encyclopédie d’Histoire Naturelle, 1856. Engraving.

those unfamiliar with the thylacine as most of the readers of this work would have been, from questioning the veracity of the account. Following the tradition of Classical naturalists, the title page claims that the book is “the complete treatise” of natural science after the work of the most eminent naturalists of all countries and all times.36 Another image, similar to that which appears in Cassell’s Popular Natural History, was published in The Museum of Natural History; The Animal Kingdom in 1860. The text that accompanies it repeats many of the standard phrases of other works. It maintains that the thylacine seems to prefer sheep to “any other kind of animal food” and that a fossil of the species has been found in “the tertiary gypsum beds of Paris—a fact of extreme interest, taken in connection with other extinct marsupial remains elsewhere found in Europe, and demonstrating the wide geographical distribution these creatures maintained in former times”. Similar statements appear in Lesson’s Centurie Zoologique, where the discovery is attributed to Cuvier, and again in Géurin-Méneville’s Dictionnaire Pittoresque discussed in 36 Chenu, Encyclopédie d'Histoire, 522–24. In the Australian Museum Magazine in 1922, Launcelot Harrison remarks “an amusing and bare-faced attempt to justify the use of Blumenbach’s name [paradoxus for the platypus] is made by Chenu (1879)” (Harrison,“Notes on Platypus”, 138).

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Transformations. The odd, distorted body of the figure in the illustration looks as if it had crawled out of the gypsum beds after a million years of sleep. The medium of lithography softens the image, so that while it has the same form as Dickes’ illustration, none of the fear and little of the tension are evident. The pleasing, cat-like face and short furry coat of the creature do not fit with the text that stresses its “highly carnivorous nature” and compares the animal to a wolf and a “fox-hound”. A feather-fronded plant has been added to give the picture an exotic tone and code the animal’s habitat as Eastern. With a label of “Pouched wolf” this image supplies the features that exemplify the colonial discourse of the strange.37 Through ignorance and fear, the figure of the thylacine has been manipulated visually and rhetorically until it becomes a shadow of the terrified creature in The Naturalist’s Library. The image illustrates how signifiers can be stripped from an illustration, as well as exposing the hollowness of claims about the factual basis of scientific works at that time. A more convincing copy of the engraving after Dickes appears in a popular science work by Thomas Rymer Jones published in 1865 and 1872 and called The Animal Creation; a Popular Introduction to Zoology (Figure 22). The figure of the thylacine labelled “Zebra Wolf” now crouches on the sloping bank of a river, but some elements are very similar to Lizars’ engraving. It replicates the defensive attitude of the original, but the lack of hair detail in this wood engraving, particularly noticeable in the absence of fine hairs on the nose, reduces the naturalism of the former image. The brief text mentions that thylacines are “very few in number: some of them, however, are formidable for their strength and ferocity”. The entry states that the thylacine is hated by settlers for its “depredations among the sheep on the plains”.38 Generally in works such as this that appear in the latter part of the century there is correspondence between image and text, in contrast to the confusion and rupture that appears in earlier zoological literature. This concurrence intensifies the effect the image-text creates. The actual impact of Dickes’ image and the figures that are derived from it is difficult to measure, but the breadth of works they appear in, their popular nature and numerous editions, as well as their existence in many libraries, suggests that they were exposed to a very large audience. The messages they produce, in con37 38

Richardson et al., Museum of Natural History, 215. Jones, Animal Creation, 367–68.

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Figure 22. Zebra Wolf in Thomas Rymer Jones, The Animal Creation; a Popular Introduction to Zoology, 1872. Wood engraving.

junction with all of the texts that accompany them, are unequivocal—the thylacine is a vicious carnivore, a useless creature that attacks sheep. It is vermin. When the primary image discussed in this chapter was used in mass-produced media such as newspapers, it attracted an even greater audience. On April 16, 1866 a copy of Lizars’ engraving with the signature ‘C F A’ appeared in the Illustrated Sydney News (Figure 23). The use of such an inaccurate and biased image in a newspaper at this time bridges the gap between the introduction of the first and second bounties bounty that operated from 1830–38 and 1839–49 and were limited to Woolnorth, the pastoral property in the northwest of the island, and the beginning of the third bounty in 1888, when a number of images of this kind closely preceded the event (these are discussed in chapter 4). The thylacine is one of a number of Australian animals pictured on the same page of the newspaper, with the accompanying text a few pages away. The figure is reversed, indicating it is a copy of Lizars’ image; the tail has been curled under

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Figure 23. Tasmanian Tiger in Illustrated Sydney News, 1866. Wood engraving. National Library of Australia PIC 079.44 ILL (440095).

the animal instead of behind it; and a new background encloses the hunched, snarling body. Illustrations were an important part of the newspaper’s appeal, especially when they depicted animals that were rapidly disappearing from the Australian landscape. The text on page 14 notes that the “Emeu” was once abundant in the writer’s neighbourhood, but that the last one “shot a few months ago near Long Bay, was probably a tame bird”.39 Colonial power is articulated in the casual way in which this information is disclosed and in the label of “Tasmanian Tiger” for the thylacine, a name that was common in Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales in the middle of the century. It recalls the hunting, shooting and trapping practices that were a quintessential part of the colonial experience in Australasia and the East. This ‘tiger’ is described as a “bloodthirsty animal” that “at some remote period” existed “not many hundred miles from Sydney, as has been proved from the number of teeth and bones found in the caves of Wellington Valley”.40 Its present habitat is described as the “rocks and impenetrable glens of the highest mountains” of Tasmania, where it creates 39

Anon., “Tasmanian Tiger,” 12–14. There is a discussion of the Wellington Cave fossils and their contribution to the representation of the thylacine in chapter 4. 40

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“terror” among the flocks of the settlers. The combination of image and text reaches its most damaging in situations such as this, where sensational representations and mass circulation combine. In this context, the last line “the young produced is about four at a time”, a fact very rarely included in descriptions of the thylacine in popular works, segues into the popular fear of animals that multiply rapidly. The idea of humans being ‘taken over’ by hordes of vermin is implicit in this imagetext. The suggestion that the thylacine was an animal of this kind specifically encourages an organised response, such as the 1888 bounty in which the Tasmanian government officially sanctioned the extermination of the species through the payment of a reward. Economic Zoology The application of a bounty on the thylacine demonstrates an economy of value. The thylacine is reduced to an animal that has no importance in relation to sheep, which supply monetary rewards to imperial investors and settlers, but as a dangerous opponent of progress in the colony. This idea is constructed in various ways; for instance in images, as shown in this chapter, by distorting the form of the animal to fit the profile of other species traditionally represented as a threat to human endeavours. In literature at the end of the nineteenth century this construction occurs again, as books about ‘economic zoology’ appear in which the value of animals is systematically rated. This is also when the third bounty was imposed. The First Report on Economic Zoology, issued by British Museum in 1903, classified animals in various groups according to their “economic relation” to humans. For instance, those in Group A are animals captured or slaughtered for food; in Group B are those bred or cultivated; in Group C are animals that directly promote “man’s operations as a civilised being” without being killed, captured or trained by him (this includes scavengers such as vultures and earthworms); in Group D are animals which cause bodily injury, such has lions, wolves and mosquitoes; in Group E are those which cause injury to stock or agriculture; in Group F are those destructive to man’s art and industry; and in Group G are those known as “beneficials” on account that they check those in Groups D, E, and F. The Report avoids mentioning the conservation of animals in any of the

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groups, but approves of the actions of spiders, hover-flies that feed on aphids, carnivorous ground beetles, some fish, all insectivorous birds and mammals such as skunk, hedgehogs, shrews and foxes because they are parasitic on the pests of crops, animals and man. The book refers those interested in animal conservation to seek out botanists.41 Viewed through the prism of commerce, it is clear that many animals native to Australia were deemed a threat and it was necessary to control them if progress was to be made. At the close of the First World War, other factors influenced the role that animals were perceived to play in relation to humans. A book published in 1919 includes a chapter on the “moral aspects of zoology”, in which the study of Zoology was perceived as innocent of the “savagery” and “destructiveness” that was present in “modern warfare”. Soon, medicine was added to the list of areas that would benefit from the scientific study of animals.42 Then, in 1925, a small photographic reproduction of the image of the thylacine from The Naturalist’s Library took central place in an article called “Man, Ape and Tiger” by W. P. Pyecraft, in a section headed “The World of Science” in the Illustrated London News. Beneath the picture is the caption “One of the Australasian animals whose preservation is necessary to Medical Science: the Thylacine, or ‘Tasmanian Tiger’, now almost extinct.” Pyecraft refers to the “Evolution Theory” and the “despised ‘beasts that perish’” and speaks of the “atrocities” committed as a result of the human “lust for life”. He discusses Economic Zoology, the study of which, he says, is still in its infancy. Pointing to the human obsession with “usefulness,” he sees the only hope of saving species from extinction is to show “that they can be put to some use” and refers to an essay by Colin Mackenzie on the medical importance of the native animals of Australia.43 In Mackenzie’s essay, published in the Papers and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Tasmania in 1925, the then director of the recently founded National Museum of Australian Zoology (later the Institute of Anatomy) points out that many Australian animals that were common twenty years ago are “becoming increasingly rare”. He urges the preservation of species such as the platypus and thylacine for what they might offer for the study of human diseases, specifically 41 42 43

Theobald, First Report, xi–xxxiv. Kellog, Elementary Textbook, 1–2; Dendy, Animal Life, v–vii, 26. Pyecraft, “Man, Ape, Tiger,” 998.

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mentioning the thylacine in relation to a simplified intestinal tract with a “well-defined vagal nerve” that could be important in consideration of the “lock” system of the human alimentary canal. This appeal to potential value, combined with the benefit to knowledge of the human body, makes a powerful statement for preservation. Pyecraft, however, pleads for “the study of natural history for its own sake, the study of science for its own sake … to understand what we mean by ‘the Balance of Nature’ and the motives which lie behind our actions [my italics]”.44 Given the radical ideas expressed by Pyecraft, it is ironic that this particular image was used to illustrate the essay. On the other hand, it does indicate the fear engendered in an animal threatened by human “lust” and encapsulates how a change in perceptions of the thylacine can alter the reading of an image. In using Dickes’ visualisation of the thylacine to illustrate the article it also shows how irrelevant images were considered to be in relation to text, or how indiscriminate the choice was where images were concerned. Appearing in 1925, Pyecraft’s article also suggests how far thinking about animals had to progress before this urge to preserve species was articulated. *** The image in The Naturalist’s Library, in which the fears of explorers and settlers were distilled into a vision of economic concern and then a motivation for organised extermination of the species in Van Diemen’s Land, is crucial to the story of the thylacine’s extinction. As its appearance coincided with improvements in technology that enabled the mass production of images and texts, the picture constitutes a potent force in the spread of ideas that were detrimental to the species’ survival. Tracing the precise movement of ideas is difficult, but the ease of developing destructive practices can be observed in the enthusiasm with which the bounties were instigated and pursued. This is apparent in the repercussions of a bounty on a different animal that ultimately resulted in its abandonment. Lady Jane Franklin, the wife of Tasmania’s governor from 1837–1843 Sir John Franklin, expressed her “intense repugnance” for snakes by requesting a colonial official, Captain Moriarty, to undertake a scheme in which a shilling was paid for each dead snake brought to a police station. Lady Franklin believed snakes were “one of the greatest 44

MacKenzie, “Australian Fauna,” 206; Pyecraft, ibid.

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(physical) evils” in the colony and should therefore be “pursued to extermination”. The offer resulted in convicts routinely abandoning their labours to kill snakes and, fortunately, after £600 was paid out in one season, she revoked the bounty.45 Natural history literature, and the magazines and newspapers that copied the images found in them, were major sites of visual interpretations of feelings that Jane Franklin and others held about many animals in European colonies. This second major figure of the thylacine, widely circulated in a major work with scientific associations, as well as many other zoological works until long after the devastating government bounty scheme came into operation in 1888, is an important indictment of the discourse of science in furthering the species’ extermination.

45

Fitzpatrick, Franklin in Tasmania, 41; Franklin to Captain Moriarty, 89/1–4 Calder Papers.

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CHAPTER THREE

“MR. GOULD’S VERY BEAUTIFUL WORK” When thylacines arrived at London Zoo, it was the first time that living models were used for the pictures that appeared in a publication since Harris’s drawing was printed in the Transactions of the Linnean Society of London. Because of the species’ novelty value, great excitement accompanied their arrival. These rare and unusual animals from a distant colony stimulated the interest of writers and artists who competed to describe and define them and many illustrations are invested with particularly obvious signifiers of colonialism—references to the exotic, the savage and the strange. While earlier images were often made with recourse to imperfectly preserved specimens, second-hand reports and previous illustrations, or were produced by artists unfamiliar with the Tasmanian habitat of the species, these new images were often copied in Australia. Only a few had the potential to generate a kinder attitude toward the thylacine, but they are among the most appealing and sensitive images ever published of the thylacine. The publications in which many of these illustrations appear are also the most prestigious and familiar published in the nineteenth century. One image from John Gould’s extravagant work, The Mammals of Australia, is the most widely used representation of the thylacine and is still circulating in various forms in the twenty-first century. Responses to the representations were, and still are, influenced by the belief that they are accurate because of the status and popularity of the books in which they appear, because they were modelled on living animals, and by the seductive nature of the new medium of lithography. In combination with cultural and economic factors operating in Europe and Tasmania and the emergence of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, these images were even more powerful in their potential to generate a significant response to members of the species than those that had been published previously.

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chapter three The Thylacine Comes to Britain

The first thylacines to be seen in Europe arrived in London in May 1850. In a letter to D. W. Mitchell, the secretary of the Zoological Society of London, settler and naturalist Ronald Gunn who had sent the animals from Launceston, Tasmania, stated that after six months in confinement the female of the pair had “become sufficiently tame to permit its head to be scratched”. But immediately before the letter in the Proceedings, the thylacine is defined as “one of the rarest and most difficult forms … of Marsupials”.1 The “difficulty” probably refers to the species’ reputed sheep-killing and ‘savagery’. This comment would have generated curiosity and great interest in the animals at the zoo in Regent’s Park. As director of the Zoo, Mitchell had introduced a system referred to as “starring”, where there was always at least one new interesting animal exhibit on display. This practice included press coverage with animals presented “for their scientific or political significance, as evidence of British ability to subdue exotic territories and convert their products to useful purposes”.2 The illustrations of the thylacines in The Mammals of Australia first appeared in 1851 in part III of a 13-part version of the work produced between 1845 and 1863, and then bound as a 3 volume edition in 1863 (Figure 24 and 24.1). The image of a pair of thylacines is one of few positive suggestions about the future of the species in a natural history work. But, in fact, neither of the animals pictured lived very long. The female used as a model for the illustration died in 1857 and the male in 1853. They did not reproduce in captivity, despite the belief of Ronald Gunn that those he sent from Launceston would “very probably breed”. A Launceston newspaper, the Examiner, reported the safe arrival of another pair of thylacines at London Zoo in 1885 and Professor W. H. Flower is quoted as saying “they are a very handsome pair, and very tame … if we could get them to breed it would be a grand thing”. More pairs arrived in London in 1886, 1888 and 1891. None of them reproduced.3 The lithographs of thylacines by H. C. Richter, one of Gould’s employees, are stylised representations in common with the other 1

Gunn, “Letter to the Secretary,” 89–90. Ritvo, Animal Estate, 217. 3 Moeller, Der Beutelwolf, 158; Anon., “Museum Hopes Pair Will Breed,” reprinted in Examiner, 7. 2

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illustrations in Gould’s book. The full, black eyes give the foremost animal of the pair a soft, deer-like expression; but in the second figure and in the large head-view, their almond shape is accentuated and surrounded by a much lighter wash and darker shaded lines that focus attention on the eye. These slanted eyes would have made the animal appear exotic, mysterious and savage to a nineteenth century European audience. Such a reading is contained in a book called Excelsior: Helps to Progress in Religion, Science and Literature published in 1855, where the text mentions Gould’s “great work” and notes that the head of the male is shown “in such a point of view as to exhibit the applicability of one of the names applied to it by the colonists, that of ‘zebra-wolf’”.4 Excelsior refers not only to the exoticism of the zebra, but also to the savage connotations in the ‘wolf’ part of the name. More recently, zoologist Eric Guiler suggests a similar reading of the male head that accompanies the lithograph of the pair when he says that the eyes exhibit “a somewhat mysterious cruelty”.5 Other aspects of the illustration also generate a reading of exoticism. The large-leafed plant in the highly visible space below the chin of the head study, and between the head and feet of the foremost thylacine of the pair, are not merely shapes unfamiliar to a European audience, but leaves that are oversized, connoting excess in the form of an extreme climate or landscape. In Part III of the original edition of The Mammals of Australia (1851) plants with large leaves occur without fail in pictures of animals found in Tasmania. None of the plants in the backgrounds of these pictures can be positively identified; they certainly do not occur in Tasmania. However, some vaguely resemble the tropical solamun, South American geum and an Asian plant, Nandina domestica—plants from oriental, or tropical locations. The way the thylacine is represented in these pictures inclines toward what postcolonial theorist Edward Said refers to as “orientalism”. That is, certain features in the picture operate intertextually with countless other constructions that served to define anything in the vicinity of the East as depraved and other—“a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange”.6 When looking at the draw4 5 6

Excelsior, 247. Guiler and Godard, Tasmanian Tiger, 97. Said, “Knowing the Oriental,” 195–97.

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ing on which the lithograph was based, it seems that many of these associations have been made in the process of transferring the image to lithographic stone. It was at this stage that, as Bernard Smith points out, an original sketch was often transformed to conform to the “canons of taste” operating in Europe at various times in the nineteenth century.7 The changes made to the image are clearly apparent from comparing the preparatory drawing in pencil and watercolour by Henry Richter with the finished lithograph he also made (Figure 25). The drawing is a softer, less extreme version of the figures. Both thylacines have a benign appearance, with the second figure only dimly delineated and the plant mentioned earlier barely discernible. The only hint of ambiguity is the inscription “Tasmanian Wolf—from a female” on the lower right hand corner. This information also indicates that the second figure has been adapted from a drawing of the female animal only. Gunn described the female as tame enough to be touched and commented that the newly caught male “seems to be on the best of terms” with the female, although “not yet so familiar with the presence of man”, which is perhaps why only the female is mentioned on Richter’s drawing.8 In the lithograph the eyes of both figures have been outlined and accentuated and, particularly in the head study and the second animal of the pair, have been given an upward tilt at the outer edge. This difference is significant, especially as the second figure and the “figure of the head represent[ing] that of the male of the natural size” mentioned in the text, are merely imaginative visualisations of the female, rather than careful drawings of the male model. Oliver Goldsmith’s An History of the Earth and Animated Nature, of which there were twenty editions between 1774 and 1876, contends that “the feature that principally distinguishes the visage of the wolf from that of the dog, is the eye, which opens slantingly upwards … whereas in the dog, it opens more at right angles with the nose, as in man”.9 The shape of the eyes in the lithograph in Gould’s work, then, would have been instantly recognised as connoting savagery in its association with the wolf and decidedly other in relation to domesticated animals, like the dog, and to ‘man’—in particular, Western man. 7 8 9

Smith, Imagining South Pacific, 173–79. Gunn, “Letter to the Secretary,” 90. Goldsmith, History of the Earth, 1834: 253.

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There are also differences in the appearance of other body parts in the drawing and the lithograph. For instance, the nose and ears are emphasised and refined in the lithograph so that the figures’ heads appear small and delicate in comparison with their bodies; their legs are shorter than in the drawing, the torso appears thicker, and fur and muscle detail is diminished. Even the stripes have been reduced and in the lithograph have been applied as precisely graduated dark lines, rather than appearing as if they are the uneven result of the animals’ contrasting hair colouring. Some of the elements in the illustration are the result of Richter’s lithographic style, which Allan McEvey defines as “a smooth finish”, displaying precise, meticulous detail.10 This style is facilitated by the innate properties of lithography as opposed to engraving. Lithography techniques consist of smudging and brushing, while strokes of the crayon are used to achieve finely toned lines. These processes are quite different from the cuts and incisions associated with the practice of engraving. Indeed, lithography is sometimes seen as a deceptive medium. In this case it results in what seems, at first glance, an innocent image. The illustrations in Gould’s lavish book have been admired for the elegance of their figures, the neatness of their forms, and the competence of their production. But there is something else happening in this picture of thylacines. Although the vegetation in the background replaces the wire of the cage at the Zoological Gardens, in both the drawing and the print the figures’ gaze is directed toward something outside the frame of the enclosure/picture. Here is an indelible trace of the two animals that arrived at Regent’s Park Zoo in 1850 after the long sea journey from Launceston—the questing eyes and noses of the figures in the illustration are focused beyond the invisible bars. The models for this image were most likely looking at humans looking at them in the zoo. In his essay “Why Look at Animals?” social critic John Berger writes, “the fact that [animals] can observe us has lost all significance. They are the objects of our ever-extending knowledge”.11 This image shows, however, that animals were not nec10

McEvey, John Gould's Contribution, 16–17. Berger, “Why Look at Animals?,” 14. Berger’s essay remains a central text in the field of Human-Animal Studies where scholars are exploring ideas relating to both nineteenth and twenty-first century zoos. See for example: Malamud, Reading Zoos; Hanson, Animal Attractions; Rothfels, Savages and Beasts; Hancocks, Different Nature; Mullan and Marvin, Zoo Culture. However, Berger’s essay has recently been critiqued by Jonathan Burt in “John Berger”. See also the following note. 11

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essarily the impassive objects of various human gazes. The models for this image were looking back.12 Often the situation of the models used for illustrations in natural history publications, whether dead specimens or animals in zoos, generates motifs of abjection and confinement. According to the Guide to the Gardens of the Zoological Society of London 1852, the new thylacine acquisitions were housed in the Terrace Dens in the centre of London Zoo, devoted to the popular Order Carnivora and accessed via a Terrace Walk from the north entrance down steps to the cavern-like cages located, symbolically, beneath it. Historian Harriet Ritvo points out how the elevated terrace manifested official Zoological Society policy that targeted the scientific and social elites, until economic considerations in 1846 forced the Society to accept Mitchell’s advice to open the Zoo to anyone who could pay the admission fee of 6d on Mondays and 1 shilling on other days of the week. By 1869, perhaps because of their nocturnal behaviour and agitation in captivity, the popularity of thylacines had faded. They were demoted to the “sheds” near other marsupials in the far northern corner of the Gardens.13 The particularly stocky shape of the figures in this illustration, compared with photographs of thylacines, is undoubtedly the result of the diet and lack of exercise they were subjected to in captivity. The Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 1855 reports the results of a dissection performed on the male of the pair in Richter’s picture that reveals the animal was “excessively fat, the fat on its abdomen and other parts weighing probably four or five pounds”. This probably contributed to their deaths, although the writer of the article says, “the cause of death was unapparent”.14 Ironically, the 12 Gould describes the figures as “in life-like positions” (Mammals of Australia, 1863: 54). Compare his illustration with the pair in Figure 71, which shows a photograph of thylacines who were looking through the wire of their cage in Beaumaris Zoo Hobart, c. 1930. Brower comments on a similar effect in a photograph of a deer in a pose that “implies an engagement with the image’s off-stage”. He suggests that the photograph positions the viewer as an outside threat (Brower, “Take Only Photographs,” 16). In the case of Gould’s figures, however, the viewer is merely positioned as a spectator; presumably, similar to those who elicit a response from the thylacines in the photograph. 13 Mitchell, Popular Guide, 8; Ritvo, Animal Estate, 212–14; Moeller, Der Beutelwolf, 158 explains why thylacines were not popular with zoo visitors. 14 Crisp, “On the Tasmanian Wolf,” 188–91. Compare this information with research by Andrew Kitchener on illustrations of the dodo made in Mauritius and estimates of the body mass of this species assessed from preserved skeletal material,

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entry for the kangaroo in the Guide mentions the excellence of their “venison”—the thylacine’s preferred food in the wild—as meat for the (human) table. The entry ends with the observation that “young ones may be seen at any moment peering out of their comfortable quarters in the maternal pouch”. The contrast between the “quarters” of the young kangaroos and the cramped sheds in which the thylacines slept, ate and exercised could scarcely have been drawn more effectively. The Mammals of Australia The Guide to the Gardens refers to “Mr. Gould’s very beautiful work”, a common perception of his publications and the images they contain. The lithographs of the thylacine are associated more often with Gould than with Henry Richter, the artist, or individuals of the species in London Zoo. They are considered just two of many images in The Mammals of Australia; a fragment of what has been constructed as the vast monument to Gould’s distinguished career. Allan McEvey’s monograph, John Gould’s Contribution to British Art, concentrates on the “authenticity” and “originality” of the images and justifies the association of the illustrations with Gould, rather than Richter, because Gould was the driving force in the production of the lithographic art. Most biographers have concurred, often on the basis of an emphatic statement in the diary of Gould’s daughter: “everything was overlooked by father”.15 Critical approaches to and rigorous analysis of his work seem to have been obstructed by the status he has achieved from his enormous output and recording of so many bird and mammal species. Some biographers, however, do imply criticism of his methods, attitudes and character. For example, Ann Datta’s John Gould in Australia: Letters and Drawings (1997) and Isabella Tree’s The Ruling Passion of John Gould (1991). Once Gould’s reputation is put aside, we can ask the questions historian and literary theorist Michel Foucault suggests in his essay “What is an author?”—“What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where

which indicates the dodo was relatively lean. Images of an obese bird were probably based on captive examples “which had become extremely fat owing to an unrestricted and unsuitable diet” (Kitchener, “On the Dodo,” 297). 15 Cited in McEvey, John Gould’s Contribution, 6.

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has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself?”.16 The very large, meticulously prepared and executed images are the dominant element in The Mammals of Australia and other books by Gould. The text explains and supports the pictures. But both image and text have often been reproduced independently, or used to illuminate new texts. When the pictures of the thylacine are viewed in isolation, some aspects of the image may have little significance, but when considered in their historical context and in relation to the rhetorical constructions that initially accompanied them, a very different story emerges. In volume 1 of the three-volume 1863 edition of The Mammals of Australia the figure now labelled “Head, of the size of life” that is identified as male in the text, appears with a short text on the opposite page. This text, not present in the 13-part original publication of the work that was issued between 1845 and 1863,17 includes the often-quoted sentence that is usually interpreted as a canny prediction, but in relation to the particularly menacing head study, the text as a whole and mid-nineteenth century attitudes toward predators, it seems more like a proclamation of death: When the comparatively small island of Tasmania becomes more densely populated … the numbers of this singular animal will speedily diminish, extermination will have its full sway, and it will then, like the Wolf in England and Scotland, be recorded as an animal of the past: though this will be the source of much regret, neither the shepherd nor the farmer can be blamed for wishing to rid the island of so troublesome a creature. A price is already upon the head of the native Tiger, as it is called ….18

Most sources that quote this passage omit the clauses beginning “though this will be the source of much regret” and so do not include the implication that the actions of the shepherd and the farmer are justified and Gould’s acceptance of the bounty already imposed by pastoral companies. They ignore the unequivocal nature of the declaration that the thylacine “will then … be recorded as an animal of the past”. What Gould’s text is actually stating is that the thylacine’s extinction is inevitable. On the other hand, in the entry for the Great 16

Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 275. Two other species are given additional texts at the beginning of their entries in the 1863 edition—koalas, because they was predicted to become extinct “like too many larger Australian mammals” and wombats. 18 Gould, Mammals, 1863: 53. 17

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Red Kangaroo in volume 2 of the 1863 edition of The Mammals of Australia, the text advises that official moves be made to protect some Australian animals: Let me then urge [the Anglo-Australians] to bestir themselves … to establish laws for the preservation of the large Kangaroos, the Emu, and other conspicuous indigenous animals: with out such protection, the remnant that is left will soon disappear, to be followed by unavailing regret for the apathy with which they had been previously regarded [my italics].19

The use of the word “conspicuous” relates to an earlier remark that it is the “larger and more conspicuous productions of an island that are often, as a natural consequence, the first that become extirpated; and this result often takes place more speedily where no protection is afforded to them”. Gould then specifically mentions the need to protect “highly singular, in many instances noble” indigenous animals and deplores the introduction of species from “other climes, whose forms and nature are not adapted to that country”. However, in the entry for the grey kangaroo he promotes the “naturalisation” of kangaroos into Britain, hoping to see “our large parks and forests graced with the presence of this highly ornamental and singular animal” and includes long passages in entries for both the grey and red kangaroos on the hunting practices of settlers in Van Diemen’s Land without a word of censure. Gould’s concern, then, is selective and the plea for preservation of the red kangaroo is an example of the position and value given only to certain animals. Historian Ann Datta points out that although Gould was aware of the destruction of birds for the use of their feathers in the costume and millinery industry in the nineteenth century, he did not get involved. And although he disapproved of the introduction of salmon to Tasmanian waters in private letters to Morton Allport, he did not make his views public.20 Politically, the case of the thylacine was complex, especially in contrast to the red kangaroo whose scarcity was the result of a vague “wanton manner in which it is unrelentingly killed” and the fact that “the kind of country that it frequents [is] of the utmost value to the pastoral community”. The kangaroo competed with sheep indirectly, so Gould’s disapproval is indirect and confron19 20

Gould, Mammals, 1863: 6. Datta, John Gould in Australia, 233–35.

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tation is avoided, while preservation by the “enlightened Governor and Assembly of New South Wales” is the focus of appeal. The koala is also the subject of Gould’s concern and like the red kangaroo has avoided extinction, at that time perhaps because of requests such as those Gould publicised in his work. It is obvious from his comments that the naturalist did not make the same pleas for the thylacine because of its reputation as a sheep-killer. By mid-nineteenth century this view is forcibly presented in visual and verbal representations in zoological publications, as well as in reports from settlers of the kind recorded in journals and handbooks, in newspapers and probably by Gould’s friends in the colony. The blunt remark “no plea can be urged for [the thylacine’s] protection or preservation, as it extremely destructive to sheep” in the Tasmania Museum column in the Mercury newspaper in November 1910, indicates the way this view persisted. Gould, as an influential British naturalist, failed to question the veracity of these claims or confront the idea that extermination was the answer to the problem the thylacine was perceived to pose for the sheep industry. Soon after Gould’s book was published, however, George Bennett in Gatherings of a Naturalist in Australasia deplored “the war of extermination recklessly waged” against Australian fauna. Books such as Man and Nature (1864) by American George Perkins Marsh also appeared, explaining to settlers the consequences of subverting the balance of nature with indiscriminate forest clearing, the introduction of pests and diseases and the extermination of animals in the lands they farmed. Marsh did not dwell on the extinction of animal species and indeed refers to “brute destroyers, beasts and birds and insects of prey”; but he does point out that civilised or “stationary life” destroys the “balance which nature has established between her organised and her inorganic creations”. But this ‘balance’ is interpreted in ambiguous terms when he discusses predators: “when hunters pursue the wolf, the graminivorous [herbivorous] wild quadrupeds increase, and thus in turn promote the multiplication of their great four-footed destroyer by augmenting the supply of his nourishment”. We can see that his explanation is put in terms that support the idea of large carnivores as destructive and the idea of limiting their numbers is an unfortunate reinforcement of existing attitudes. Lowenthal, editor of a later edition of Marsh’s work, maintains that Europeans “rapidly adopted Marsh’s ideas” and that his book was

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rediscovered in the 1930s.21 But even if its message was to be read in a way that benefited the thylacine, the first edition is not present in historical collections in Tasmania and, although the second edition is present (consistent with increasing interest in and moves for the conservation of animal species at the time) it was, by then, too late for the thylacine. Gould’s work also contains statements that defer concern about the thylacine’s disappearance. A comment at the end of the preamble to the species’ entry in the 1863 edition of The Mammals of Australia—“the fastnesses of the Tasmanian rocky gullies, clothed with impenetrable forests, will for the present, preserve it from destruction”—is another rarely quoted in relation to Gould’s attitude toward the thylacine. The idea of deferral is also embedded in the main text in both Part III of the thirteen-part publication of the work in 1851 and this three-volume edition of 1863, where it is stated: on the other hand, so much of Tasmania still remains in a state of nature, and so much of its forest land still uncleared, that an abundance of covert still remains in which the animal is secure from the attacks of man; many years must therefore elapse before it can become entirely extinct ….22

This passage, particularly the indecisive and relative nature of the term “many more years”, would have encouraged minimal concern about the animal and exemplifies the complacency that often surrounds the issue of the species’ vulnerability. Some texts, closer to Tasmania, were less optimistic about the time it would take for the thylacine to become extinct. For example, in The History of Tasmania (1852) John West writes: “it is very probable that in a very few years this animal, so highly interesting to the zoologist, will become extinct; it is now extremely rare, even in the wildest and least frequented parts of the island”. In 1855 in volume 1 of the Melbourne Monthly Magazine the thylacine was considered “fast verging on extinction” and a report in Hobart’s Mercury newspaper on 20 May 1858 referred to “these nearly obsolete animals”. The Guide to the Gardens of the Zoological Society of London 1869, on the other hand, pronounced “as [the thylacine] … inhabits the most inaccessible haunts, [it] will still defy its enemies for many a long year”.

21 22

Lowenthal, Man and Nature, 36–40, 76–7, xxi–xxiii. Gould, Mammals, 1851: n.p.; Gould, Mammals, 1863: 54

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Elsewhere in Gould’s work he adheres to common contemporary attitudes toward Australian animals. In the introduction to the threevolume edition first published in 1863, also issued separately as a companion to the thirteen parts, he refers to marsupials as less highly organised mammals with deficient brains because their embryonic lives were carried out externally. They are, Gould maintains, “a very low form of life”.23 Later he states that the thylacine is “the most bloodthirsty of the Australian mammals—the Wolf of the Marsupials”. There is a passage about sheep killing and the statement “to man, however, it is not an object of alarm; for the shepherd, aided by his dog and stick in hand, does not for a moment hesitate about attacking and killing it”. And then—“Van Diemen’s Land is the true and only home of this somewhat formidable beast”. Here, Gould subtly affirms the gothic associations of the thylacine by suggesting that the species is inferior and threatening, that Van Diemen’s Land (using its old, demon-like name) is its only “true” home and supports this animal’s extermination by implying that when the thylacine is killed, the island’s inhabitants will be safe. Image and text now correspond perfectly. On the surface they are smooth and adept representations that interweave the strange and familiar, but both contain suggestions that encouraged the species’ destruction. In subsequent commentaries and biographies the selection of certain passages from Gould’s work and the disregarding of others has contributed to the construction of an aesthetic boundary around his work. Like others books of the time, The Mammals of Australia subscribed and contributed to the discourse of the ‘evil predator that needs to be obliterated’. But while the book’s negative suppositions are rarely mentioned now, Gould’s imagetext may have been read with much more care, interest, and understanding at the time of its publication.

23 This attitude is also apparent in the twentieth century. For example, in the entry for the thylacine in Wild Life of the World published in 1915 Richard Lydekker refers to marsupials as animals of “low and primitive type” and states there is reason to believe that the thylacine’s tail indicates “direct inheritance from reptilian ancestors”. His text stresses the “exceedingly imperfect” state of development of newly born marsupials that he later calls “little abortions” (Lydekker, Wild Life of the World, 216–18).

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Colonial Networks The Mammals of Australia was a large, lavishly illustrated publication that was expensive to produce and required a network of contacts to market. The original thirteen parts were published over seventeen years and sold by subscription. Previously a taxidermist, Gould had undertaken a number of expeditions to the colonies, collecting specimens, skins and subscribers. His wife Elizabeth accompanied him to Australia, contributing sketches for some of the lithographs in his books. In his eleven months in Van Diemen’s Land over 1838 and 1839, he collected more than five hundred birds, including the now endangered forty-spotted pardalote and swift parrot, sixty nests with eggs and three nine-gallon kegs of specimens in spirits for his spectacular book The Birds of Australia. It seems that while involved in this colonial plunder Gould became interested in writing and collecting for Mammals, eventually describing forty-five new species.24 Among Gould’s friends in the colony were the Governor, Sir John Franklin, and the Reverend Thomas Ewing. Letters from the latter indicate that Ewing handled subscriptions and collected money for Gould’s publications. The names of subscribers listed in the front of the 1863 edition of The Mammals of Australia include the Royal Society of Tasmania, local solicitor Morton Allport, Christ’s College Hobart, and Tasmanian naturalist and farmer R. C. Gunn. According to Ann Datta, in return for Ewing’s assistance in collecting subscriptions and performing other favours, Gould supplied him with books for the public libraries in Tasmania. In a letter to the Zoological Society of London in 1839, Gould also makes special mention of Sir John Franklin’s “unremitting kindness” to him while in the colony.25 Gould was essentially a practical businessman who, through clever production and marketing, made sure his lithographic images dominated natural history illustration in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1866 Gould had 146 subscribers for the three-volume edition of The Mammals of Australia, which cost £41.26 The dissemination of this expensive publication, as well as his choice of other books for the libraries of Tasmania, gave him considerable influence in the formation of ideas about the animals it discussed. In turn, the per24 25 26

Datta, John Gould in Australia, 121, 147. Gould, “Letter to the Chairman,” 141. Palmer, Life of Joseph Wolf, 71.

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ceived pressure to conform to attitudes toward the thylacine held by his subscribers and friends who had power in the colony may have affected the shape and tone of the imagetext largely written and designed by Gould, and dictated his silence on conservation issues. To the present day, the prestige, popularity, and endurance of Gould’s work have ensured that his visualisation of the thylacine has remained visible and influential in many copies and derivations, some of which will be mentioned later in this chapter. Joseph Wolf There were other impressions of the thylacines that arrived at London Zoo in 1850 that encouraged very different attitudes to those projected by Gould’s images. But these lithographs had either limited publication or circulation, so they have rarely been reproduced and are not well known today. Joseph Wolf, one of the most admired and prolific natural history illustrators of the nineteenth century, created two of these images. Wolf trained as a lithographer in Germany and worked with ornithologists before arriving in England in 1848. The secretary of the London Zoological Society, D. W. Mitchell, who believed Wolf was “the best available talent in Europe”, invited him to London and soon Wolf became official artist for the Society, recording new arrivals at the Zoo in 282 illustrations for the Society’s Proceedings between 1850 and 1865. He also worked for Gould on occasions, but remained a freelance artist for most of his long career. He produced wildlife illustrations for scientific and natural history literature, poetry books, educational material and hunting manuals published in Britain and on the Continent. Wolf’s biographer, A. H. Palmer, states that most of these were “auto-lithographs”. That is, Wolf was responsible for both original drawing and lithograph. Many other illustrations attributed to Wolf, however, were originally designed by him, but copied and lithographed by someone else.27 In the 1850 issue of Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, Wolf’s lithograph of the thylacine is positioned opposite Gunn’s letter about the history and habits of the two animals he sent to Van Diemen’s Land (Figure 26). It would therefore appear to be an impression of the same pair pictured in Gould’s work. The image differs 27

Palmer, Life of Joseph Wolf, 71.

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from Richter’s illustrations in that its soft colours, warmed by base yellow/gold ink, draw the viewer toward the figures. Other devices derived from fine art and landscape painting are used to involve the onlooker in the life of the animals, rather than merely illustrate their physical features. The image is also unusual, particularly for a scientific journal, in that one of the pair is gazing directly at the viewer. The eyes of the female incorporate the spectator into the visual field. This engagement with the beholder is unique in nineteenth-century images of the species. She is lying down; the artist appears to have sketched for so long (with a glance that goes back and forth, studying the thylacines and then his drawing) that she has relaxed, but still must watch him. The pair is shown in typical gender positions: by his vigilant and protective attitude the standing animal is coded male, while the passive, wide-eyed figure lying at his feet is implicitly female. The positions of the animals encourage a reader to imagine the pair has been surprised in their natural habitat, caught in a moment that mimics the social behaviour of humans. This picture absorbs the human viewer into the scene. Wolf is credited with initiating a change in wildlife illustration, introducing the techniques of landscape art into illustrative work and revealing the ‘truth’ of nature based on long observation of living animals. For over twenty years he lived in Primrose Hill, very close to the zoo in Regent’s Park, which he often visited daily. He was familiar to the Zoo’s employees, was informed of new and interesting exhibits, and talked to scientists and other artists during the many hours he spent sketching the animals. Some of the elements for which Wolf is famous are exemplified in this image of thylacines: depth is created by overlapping the figures, as well as by graduated tones; the direct gaze of the female ‘fixes’ the imaginary onlooker; and intimacy is created through the lines that lead the viewer’s eye down the standing figure’s back and foreleg, around the curve of the seated female’s striped rump to engagement with her eyes—techniques often used in artistic tradition, but rarely in zoological illustration.28 The importance of the animal’s eyes is obvious from the original sketch for this image on a folded scrap of brown paper, found in the library of the Zoological Society of London in 2004 (Figure 27). In view of the statement by Schulze-Hagen—“unfortunately not a single 28

Schulze-Hagen and Geus, Joseph Wolf, 96, 153; Palmer, Life of Joseph Wolf, 95–97.

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sketch book was found after Wolf’s death”—the discovery of this drawing is significant.29 The image is reversed, perhaps indicating that the drawing was traced onto the lithographic stone, and below the standing figure Wolf has drawn another outline of the female’s head. Ironically, one in which her ears seem more accurately depicted. This drawing attests to the value of direct communication with an animal subject and, in this case, the effect of the experience has been transferred to the published lithograph. Unfortunately, the lithograph and many others are not included in the Royal Society of Tasmania’s early copies of the Proceedings, so Tasmanian readers are unlikely to have had the opportunity of viewing this gentle visualisation of R. C. Gunn’s “most valuable and interesting gift” to the Zoological Society of London. An engraved version of this image is used in some editions of the Guide to the Zoological Gardens of London issued between 1852 and 1903, but these pamphlets are also difficult to find in Tasmania. The text that appears with the engraving in the 1852 edition paraphrases Gunn’s letter and makes much of the revelation that the species was rarely caught alive as it was usually killed in the snares, and that it was with the greatest difficulty and by offering large rewards that the present interesting specimens were secured for the Society. Comparison of the lithograph and the engraved image clearly shows the differences between the two media: the subtle, delicate effect of chalk and paint and the harder, linear impression produced by the wood engraving. The text interacts favourably with the image, however, stressing the rarity and agility of the animals and undercutting the heaviness of the engraving. This is an example of what Donna Haraway refers to as the “specular commerce” between human and animal representation,30 but it also demonstrates the ‘commerce’ that goes on between an image and its text. By 1880 the text in the Guide to the Gardens had changed to emphasise the species’ resemblance to a wolf and its fierceness and undesirability. Then, in 1892, a dark demonised copy of the engraving, showing the male alone, appeared in Mammalia, their various forms and habits and Cassell’s Concise Natural History, both of which are held in the Royal Society of Tasmania library. These troubling images are discussed in chapter 4. 29 30

Ibid., Joseph Wolf, 76–91. Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy,” 25.

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Figure 28. De Buidelwolf in H. Schlegel, De Dierentuin van het Koninklijk Zoologisch Genootschap Natura Artis Magistra te Amsterdam, 1872. Wood engraving. Photo © The British Library Board 7205.g.8.

A dramatic transformation of Wolf’s image appeared in 1872 in a Dutch publication De Diertentuin (The Zoological Garden) by Wolf’s German mentor, Hermann Schlegel, a zoologist at the Natural History Museum in Leiden (Figure 28). Schlegel had engaged Joseph Wolf to participate in illustrating a now very rare book on falconry, Traité de Fauconnerie (1845–53) with life-size coloured lithographs of birds of prey, just before Wolf came to Britain. Apart from writing texts, however, Schlegel was also a highly skilled bird artist who wrote a treatise on natural history illustration, in which he addressed the expectations of professional naturalists as well as connoisseurs of art, explaining: The purpose of such an illustration is to take the place of those elements that one is able to see or examine in nature only with difficulty, so that they can be clearly discerned in the illustration and their form, colour, proportions and further characteristics can be deduced therefrom as accurately as possible.31 31

Quoted in Schulze-Hagen and Geus, Joseph Wolf, 97–98.

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Heidrun Ludwig points out that Schelgel’s priorities were “a complete departure from what had been required of wildlife artists” before that time, when most worked in the museum, rather than “in nature”. He admires Wolf’s skill in “capturing … the posture and character of every species as well as the relationship between their parts, and at finding the happy medium between the style required by the naturalist and the broad painterly treatment desired by the lover of art”.32 The image of the thylacine in De Dierentuin, however, is not signed and three other artists are mentioned as illustrators. One of them is J. Smit, a lithographer with whom Wolf worked on other publications, so he may have been familiar with the image of the thylacines in the Proceedings, which was available in Leiden, and copied it. Many other pictures in De Dierentuin are based on publications or originals issued or held in Leiden, but it was a common practice for several artists to work on the production of an image, so Smit may not have been the only one to contribute to this engraving.33 The most significant element in the image is the new background. The mountain habitat in which the thylacine was supposed to live is now a prominent feature, with the grassy mound in Wolf’s lithograph turned into a precipitous cliff, complete with sinister tree roots. These ominous signifiers were to become a common element in popular images of the thylacine in the following decades and, indeed, the text that accompanies the engraving stresses the thylacine’s resemblance to “our” wolf and mentions sheep-killing, nocturnal behaviour and the species’ near-extinction, but also the fact that “in captivity it becomes very tame [trans. J. G. van Moort-Kapteijn]”. This new background, the thinner, pointier nose of the standing figure, and the harshness of the engraving medium completely transform the tone of Wolf’s original picture. Over the years, the viewer has been progressively alienated from the subject, beginning with the engraved version of Wolf’s image and finally this stark transformation. This sequence is repeated again and again in images of the thylacine from the beginning of the century to its end. A second lithograph by Joseph Wolf of the pair of thylacines in London Zoo appears in a large, limited-edition work called Zoological Sketches by Joseph Wolf published in 1861, of which only two copies .

32 33

Ibid., 29. Chris Smeenk, pers. comm. Sep. 22, 2004.

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are extant in Australian library collections (Figure 29). This publication resulted from the decision in 1852 of the Council of the Zoological Society of London to create “an accurate artistic record of the living form and expression of the many rare species of animals that exist from time to time in the menagerie”.34 Wolf was commissioned to execute a series of watercolour drawings. The drawing of the two thylacines includes the date 27th December 1853, so it was probably made when only the female of the original pair remained in the Zoo. These delicate watercolours were hung in the Picture Gallery at the Zoo and in the Society’s Lecture Room. Fifty of them were later lithographed and coloured by Joseph Smit, edited by the Zoo’s director Philip Sclater, and published in book form as Zoological Sketches. As only ninety-four copies were subscribed, this publication is now rare, although as late as 1895 Wolf’s biographer stated, “separate coloured plates can be got at the publisher’s at a cost of 7s.6d. each”.35 The watercolour that preceded the lithograph of the thylacine again shows how a preparatory sketch changes when transformed into a print. It bears out Wolf’s comment that “all the vigour” of a drawing can never be transferred to lithographic stone even if the artist is the same—the result is always different. The overall effect of the sketch is much softer and the undefined background does not impose additional meanings on the figures, as the published lithograph does. Wolf believed drawings were “far more interesting than the elaborate works of which they are precursors …. They resemble an infinitely touching, infinitely simple air, rather than the complex, scientific instrumental display”.36 His comment is exemplified in both this drawing and the pencil sketch on the piece of brown paper. Both watercolour and lithographed image in Zoological Sketches are comparable in size to the picture of the pair in The Mammals of Australia, and the stance and position of the two animals is also similar. In fact it is so different to the illustration that Wolf provided for the Proceedings and so similar to the illustration of the pair in Gould’s work, that it is hard to believe he was not influenced by Richter’s lithograph. However, in Wolf’s version both animals have alert and 34

Palmer, Life of Joseph Wolf, 109. One of these later reproductions is held by the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. It was produced using photolithography, a method rarely used before the twentieth century. 36 Ibid., 114; quoted in Schulze-Hagen and Geus, Joseph Wolf, 162. 35

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attentive expressions, with their heads raised in a sniffing attitude. Neither the appearance of the thylacines nor the background has the intertextual references apparent in Richter’s picture. Rather, many aspects of this representation, such as the naturalistic woodland with a knotted tree trunk and autumnal leaves added by the lithographer, refer to a location familiar to European readers. Other elements in the image, such as the short legs and the position of the animal’s heel, are anatomically misleading. It is interesting too that these figures are much fatter than those in Wolf’s earlier drawing and lithograph, perhaps indicating how these animals became more and more obese in captivity. Although Wolf’s biographer remarks on the ability of the artist to present animals “so naturally” as if in their “wild unpersecuted life”, that for a time it is forgotten that they are “captives in London”,37 the solitary thylacines in the Zoo would have displayed few of their natural habits for Wolf to record. The thylacines in Zoological Sketches, however, are more sympathetic and evocative of an animal to which an observer might relate than Richter’s perfect, polished lithographs. The effect of Wolf’s image on perceptions of the thylacine, admittedly in a very different era, is revealed in Wilfrid Blunt’s 1976 history of the London Zoo which describes the “Tasmanian wolves” as “delightful marsupials” and “elegant creatures, so prettily striped on the rump”. Their yearning, upturned faces encapsulate the effects of confinement and considerably extend the traces of desire embodied in the attitude of the figures in Gould’s work. The text about the thylacine in Zoological Sketches is also understated, as it refers to the thylacines held by the Zoo as “individuals of this extremely curious and interesting animal” and “the only specimens that have ever reached Europe alive”. These statements are tempered by reference to the species’ alleged “addiction” to sheep and the last line of the entry that notes, merely as an interesting fact, “perpetual war is … raged against [the thylacine] by the Tasmanian shepherds, whose determined persecution must eventually lead to its extinction”.38

37 38

Palmer, Life of Joseph Wolf, 110. Blunt, Ark in the Park, 66.

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Copies Joseph Wolf’s benign images of the thylacine are rarely seen today, but there were many reproductions influenced by Richter’s lithographs circulating in the nineteenth century and many more that are still being reproduced in the twenty-first century. Some of these images duplicate the savagery of the original figures, others exaggerate their exoticism, and still others nullify the aspects of the illustration in Gould’s book that tend to demonise the species. An image of thylacines similar to those in Richter’s lithograph appeared in an Australian publication also called The Mammals of Australia in 1869–71, with a text by the Director of the Australian Museum in Sydney, Gerard Krefft (Figure 30). This large image is one of only four illustrations of the thylacine published in an Australian natural history work before 1936. A 1979 facsimile of the work calls the lithographs by Harriet Scott and Helena Forde “sensitive and delicate”, but its preface informs the reader that the Council for Education originally published them as “Object Lessons, for the use of their schools”. The contemporary shift in attitudes toward the images indicates how easily the original purpose and messages of many historical prints are forgotten or ignored. According to Krefft’s preface, this compilation of images with additional text was also aimed at a juvenile audience. He states that the lithographs were executed from drawings by the artists’ father, A. W. Scott, but the signature on the drawing of the thylacine states “Harriet Scott delt et lith”, implying that Harriet both drew and lithographed the illustration. In the entry for Scott in the Dictionary of Australian Artists Joan Kerr writes that the drawing was based on a photograph by Victor Prout of a mounted specimen in the Australian Museum, but my attempts to find any record of this photograph have been fruitless. In his preface Krefft writes “the price of Mr. Gould’s elaborate Work places it beyond the reach of ordinary means, and Mr. Waterhouse’s Natural History of Mammalia—the best treatise on Marsupiata ever published—has been long out of print, so that the present Book may be considered the only one of its kind now available”. Krefft’s The Mammals of Australia, then, is a conscious alternative to the books of Gould and Waterhouse discussed earlier. It is a foliosized publication with similar dimensions to Gould’s Mammals and Harriet Scott’s lithograph of the thylacine has the same qualities as Richter’s polished and handsome images. On one level the illustra-

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Figure 30. Tasmanian Tiger in Gerard Krefft, The Mammals of Australia, 1871. Lithograph.

tion presents a picture-book-pretty figure, as approachable as a domestic cat, with powerful feet like a lion or large dog, a ruffled edge to its ear and a composed mouth. But the eye, different again from those of the figures in Gould’s work, implies the animal has dangerous intentions by its oblique shape, upward tapering at the outer corner and off-centre gleam. Like the illustration in Gould’s book, this picture wants to be admired, and often is, for its rendering of the figure’s attractive body, precise stripes, burnished eyes and nose and for the care that went into its execution. But it operates like the description of the oriental Tiger in the extremely popular work An History of the Earth and Animated Nature written by Oliver Goldsmith in the 1770s and reprinted many times in the nineteenth century. It states: no quadruped can be more beautiful than this animal: the glossy smoothness of the hair … the extreme blackness of the streaks with which he is marked … an extremely elegant form …. Unhappily, however, this animal’s disposition is as mischievous as its form is admirable; as if Providence was willing to show the small value of beauty,

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by bestowing it on the most noxious of quadrupeds. We have at present one of these animals in the Tower [Menagerie in London], which to the view appears the most good-natured creature in the world; its physiognomy is far from fierce or angry; it has … a gentle placid air; yet for all this, it is fierce and savage beyond measure; neither correction can terrify, nor indulgence tame it.39

The suggestion that the thylacine is a deceptive animal like the tiger is achieved in Harriet Scott’s lithograph by a set of cunning devices. The large figure—so clearly defined and so beautiful—declares its ominous intentions only by the shape of its eye, its ready stance and tense neck. And working with these almost imperceptible signifiers are a flock of tiny sheep in an Arcadian landscape immediately beneath the neck and nose of the figure, the mountain lair implied by the rocky foreground, the snow-covered mountains that tower behind it, and the connotation of mystery in the waterhole that looks so natural. This illustration, which originally hung without its text on the walls of numerous schools in New South Wales, is clearly designed for the deliberate, astute gaze of a young audience. It is seductive, it desires the complete attention of the viewer, it toys with the aesthetic senses and pounces on the unwary. Krefft’s brief text, on the other hand, is blunt and to the point. It begins, “this animal is the largest and most ferocious of the whole Mammalian Fauna of Australia and frequently visits the plain country to attack the sheep-folds”. Krefft describes the dramatic habitat in the background of the illustration—“the summits of the western mountains of Tasmania appear to be their stronghold”. He explains that, if trapped, “Tasmanian tigers” are certain to gnaw off the captured limb if they can reach it. He states that they will kill hundreds of sheep at a time and that they have attacked humans. As Krefft’s words are read, the hidden messages of the image become clearer. This text directs the gaze to the ominous signs the picture contains. It articulates intertextual references and shatters the impressions of peace and prettiness generated by the picture. But readers of the book have been prepared for images of violence and death in the preface to the work, where Krefft takes the opportunity to appeal to the residents of country districts for contributions to the national zoological collection, particularly the echidna and platypus “shot during August, September and October … especially 39

Goldsmith, History of the Earth, 1855: 367.

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their young”; “sun or smoke dried skeletons, skins of Mammals, Birds, Fishes, and Small animals in brine, Insects and Shells in spirits”. The entry for the platypus informs children: “a solution of strong salt and alum is sufficient for the preservation of the bodies, which should be opened, well washed (but not otherwise meddled with), and put in brine”. Krefft was responsible for adding a large number of specimens to the Museum’s collection during his ten years as Director of the institution and his anatomical and physiological studies are acknowledged as establishing the Australian Museum “firmly in the international world of science”.40 This illustration carries attitudes likely to have been of particular authority and influence in Australia, issued as it was under the name of the Director of the Museum, a national institution devoted to the pursuit of science and the recording and construction of opinions about zoological subjects, and then presented to the country’s young residents. Louisa Meredith It is clear that images in natural history publications emanating from Australia during this period were even more extreme in their condemnation of the thylacine and encouragement of the species’ extermination than those originating in Europe. In Tasmania, one of the most familiar early copies of Richter’s image for Gould is an illustration by settler Louisa Ann Meredith in her books Our Island Home (1879) and Tasmanian Friends and Foes: Feathered, Furred and Finned (1881) (Figure 31). This black and white lithograph suggests that Meredith slavishly copied and reduced the image in Mammals, as the figures have the same pointed snouts and sloping eyes and the same large-leaved plant is positioned at the base of the foremost animal’s neck. Soft crayon lines and a slight upward tilt of the head have diffused the hard-edged, smooth impression given by the plate in Gould’s work, so that this image gives a far less menacing impression of the species. However, the text of Meredith’s Friends and Foes, a “family chronicle of country life, natural history, and veritable adventure” based on the experiences of her family in Tasmania, firmly places the thylacine in the ‘foe’ category. On pages 65 and 66 her fictional character, Guy, repeats the familiar stories about the 40

Strahan, Rare and Curious Specimens, 30.

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Figure 31. Tasmanian Tiger in Louisa Anne Meredith, Tasmanian Friends and Foes, 1881. Lithograph.

thylacine: “no care or kindness will civilise it in the least … have seen the captive brutes, chained up, of course, and well fed, but not safe to go near”. Guy also mentions their propensity to attack sheep, commenting “but we do not hear of them very often now”. Meredith made similar comments under her own name in My Home in Tasmania, published nearly thirty years earlier. She says on page 264 that “the ‘Native Tigers’ are yet more to be dreaded among sheep than the ‘devils’; but, fortunately, they are far less numerous [my italics]”. The name ‘tiger’ was used for the thylacine in Tasmania and Australia, rarely in Europe or in zoological literature. It is the first common name cited at the beginning of Gould’s text, Meredith uses the name throughout her books, and it is applied to the images associated with the Australian Museum discussed previously, and in the following sections. In Asia the tiger, like the thylacine, was facing the possibility of extinction. A report in the British journal Saturday Magazine on March 19, 1836 states “the constant warfare” waged against the tiger in India threatened “to make the species rare, if not to extinguish it”. The association of thylacines with tigers links the species again with the East, the exotic and the strange. Today, the word ‘tiger’ has positive connotations of strength and beauty, but in the nineteenth century, far from being admired animals, tigers epitomised what humans feared in regard to the animal kingdom.

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The species was “an emblem of savagery and butchery … like the wolf, the hyena and some other big cats, it was often called “cowardly”, which apparently meant unwilling to face men with guns … [it was said that] no discipline can correct the savage nature of the tiger, nor any degree of kind treatment reclaim him”.41 This is a conclusion Meredith also expresses in a story she tells on pages 264–65 of My Home in Tasmania about the skin of a thylacine and how she came to possess it. A shepherd had caught a young thylacine in a snare while killing its mother. The man had come to Meredith to receive “the usual tribute of money or tobacco, which is always given for a tiger killed or taken”. Meredith continues: He had the animal secured by a chain and collar, and when it was to be carried off, slipped a strong bag very adroitly over its head and shoulders, pushed the hind legs in, and fastened it. I pitied the unhappy beast most heartily, and would fain have begged more gentle usage for him; but I was compelled to acknowledge some coercion necessary, as, when I gently stroked his back (after taking the precaution of engaging his great teeth in the discussion of a piece of meat), I was in danger of having my hand snapped off.

Earlier, Meredith has commented on the thylacine’s physical likeness to a dog and it seems she expected a recently traumatised native animal to behave like a domesticated one, even though many dogs would object to being touched when eating. She finds a place for this particular thylacine in Governor Sir Eardley Wilmot’s collection, but says the animal “resisted all endeavours to civilise and tame it”, so the skin was eventually preserved “instead of the living form of my ungentle protégé”. On the basis of this experience she goes on to conclude, “I believe the tigers are truly untamable [sic]”. Her statement corresponds neatly with traditional constructions of the Asian tiger and contrasts sharply with the experiences of Tasmanian naturalist R. C. Gunn revealed in a letter read at a meeting of the Royal Society of Tasmania in 1851. The letter says “my living thylacine is becoming tamer: it seems far from a vicious animal at its worst, and the name tiger or Hyena gives a most unjust idea of its fierceness”.42 In his book The Colonial Earth, Tim Bonyhady points to the contribution of Louisa Meredith and her husband to the promotion of environmental protection in Australia, to her campaign to protect 41 42

Ritvo, Animal Estate, 28. Gunn, “Letter from R. C. Gunn,” 157.

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animals, particularly black swans, and to her key role in establishing the Tasmanian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. But as he rightly says, “Louisa Anne Meredith is significant not only for what she did but also for what she did not do”.43 The ‘friends’ in Tasmanian Friends and Foes are small, timid, or attractive animals. In Bush Friends, another of her books, they are flowers, berries and butterflies. Like Gould, Meredith was in a position to influence opinion in the colony, but her relatively sympathetic version of Richter’s illustration of the thylacine was not supported in her texts. This is another example of the contradictory values expressed in the nineteenth century and an indication of how the thylacine was constructed as a threat, even by those who championed kindness to other native animals. Broinowski’s Folly Another copy of Richter’s lithograph was, like Gerald Krefft’s book, originally produced for the Department of Public Instruction in New South Wales and has a particularly interesting relationship with Gould’s publisher, Henry Sotheran (Figure 32). With other images of Australian mammals and birds, prints of this copy were first mounted on boards, varnished, and hung in classrooms throughout New South Wales.44 When compared to the image in Krefft’s book, however, this picture would have had quite a different effect on the attitudes of school children. The large image was drawn and lithographed by Gracius J. Broinowski using the animal in the forefront of Richter’s lithograph in Mammals as a model. The figure is reversed, indicating it is copied, but there are significant differences in this illustration. First, the exotic foliage in Richter’s image is omitted and it does not include any features such as the mountains that are so prominent in Scott’s picture. Rather than both front feet being placed together, Broinowski’s figure has one leg in front of the other so that tension is absent from the image. But the most crucial difference is in the way the eye is depicted. Here it is rounder and the darkly pinched, extended corners have been diffused in lighter, pastel shading. The result is a representation of the thylacine that lacks any

43 44

Bonyhady, Colonial Earth, 131. Hindwood, “Gracius Broinowski,” 357.

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connotations of threat and is nothing more than a pale tracing of the ominous animal in Gould’s work. The New South Wales Department of Public Instruction accepted only 500 sets of Broinowski’s lithographed figure instead of the 1000 as originally ordered. So in 1884 and 1885 the artist had a number of the sets that remained bound with appropriate text and called it Birds and Mammals of Australia. The text is largely taken from Krefft’s work, beginning with the words “this animal is the largest and most ferocious of the whole Mammalian Fauna in Australia”, repeating the adage that if caught they are “certain” to gnaw off the trapped limb, and stating that thylacines will kill hundreds of sheep and have attacked men. Broinowski’s use of the images from Gould’s book, however, presented a problem for its publisher, Henry Sotheran, who issued a request forbidding the author “from proceeding further with the reproduction”. Sotheran’s threatened an injunction because they, in fact, intended publishing a reduced version of Gould’s work for “the Australian Colonies”.45 Broinoswki stopped production and only three complete copies of the work are held in Australian libraries, one of them in the Royal Society of Tasmania library. Unfortunately, while there were justifiable legal reasons for preventing Broinowski from publishing his work, this move allowed images that disadvantaged the thylacine to dominate representations of the species published in the second half of the nineteenth century. More Copies It was not images alone that established and extended damaging perceptions of the thylacine, but images and texts that worked together, or innocuous images accompanied by extravagant narratives. In a very early twentieth-century work, A Naturalist in Tasmania by Geoffrey Smith, there appeared an adaptation of Richter’s lithograph with a particularly damaging text. In the preface Smith reveals that “the illustrations in this book are partly from photographs and drawings of my own, or made under my direction, while many are borrowed from [photographer] Mr. Beattie of Hobart”. The drawing of the “tiger”, however, is “a composite drawing by Mr. Bayzand of Oxford, partly after Gould and partly my own suggestions” (Figure 45

Ibid., 359.

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Figure 33. Native Tiger or Thylacine in Geoffrey Smith, A Naturalist in Tasmania, 1909. Lithograph.

33). This animal looks much more like a dog than Richter’s thylacine, although it stands in the same position as the figures and has the same sniffing, searching attitude. Unlike most other descriptions of the species in natural history literature, Smith’s notes are compiled from “stories” told to him by a shepherd he met on a visit to Lake St Clair in central Tasmania and he states that “it will not be very long before [the thylacine] becomes extinct”. His comments contain few phrases from other works, instead he states that the thylacine is much thinner than the wolf, has “rather poor fur of a yellowishbrown colour”, that it hunts by night and generally singly. Then he states that “the destructiveness of the animal is greatly enhanced by the fact that the Tiger will only make one meal of a sheep, merely sucking the blood from the jugular vein or perhaps devouring the fat round the kidneys”. Robert Paddle investigates imputations of “vampirism” in relation to the thylacine at some length in his book The Last Tasmanian Tiger and finds that it is a specifically twentieth-century construction that was generally accepted in scientific literature. He cites more than twenty publications between 1927 and 1976 that refer to this ‘habit’. The work by Smith written in 1909 is the first of this type, and Paddle attributes the adoption of the myth to Smith’s status as an Oxford academic and a war hero. He also quotes a letter from Smith that makes a statement not unlike that made by George Prideaux Harris

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more than one hundred years earlier: “there are all sorts of legends of strange animals about, especially in the lake district”.46 Although I think the stories Smith records fall short of a construction of ‘vampirism’, they do indicate the way unsupported myths arose in Tasmania and were then repeated in scientific and popular literature. They also demonstrate how visitors from Europe, together with local people with a vested interest in exterminating the thylacine, generated rhetorical images of exoticism and otherness. The visual image Smith produces does not contain the orientalism apparent in Gould’s work, but the text compensates by investing the illustration with undertones of blood and violence even more chilling than the deceptive original—it makes explicit the connotations present in Richter’s lithograph. The text in Smith’s book also contends that the thylacine is a “cowardly animal” and that the shepherds wage “incessant war on the creature, in summer laying traps and hunting it with dogs, and in winter following up its tracks through the snow”. Then, a reward of a pound is given for the head by the Government, but the shepherd generally rides round with the head to several sheep-owners in the district, and takes toll from them all before depositing it at the police station. As a consequence, a large reward must be offered for the carcass of a Tiger, and an offer of £10 during a year for a live Tiger to be delivered in Launceston was unsuccessful. It pays a shepherd very much better just to hack off its head and take it round on his rides.47

If Paddle’s doubts about the veracity of the stories told to Smith are correct, then this statement is also questionable. However, it is consistent with reports about the rarity of the species (in that making the most of each captured thylacine would be expedient) and the difficulty museums and zoos had in obtaining live or dead specimens. Paddle’s ongoing research seems to confirm Smith’s statement.48 In the extremes of its rhetorical imagery, the text in Smith’s work makes a major contribution to the network of misconceptions and damaging constructions, but the reader is also informed about how the bounty operated, the violence and corruption it encouraged, and the manner in which members of the species suffered.

46 47 48

Paddle, Last Tasmanian Tiger, 30–35. Smith, Naturalist in Tasmania, 96–97. Paddle, “Mutiny on Thylacine Bounty.”

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In light of the type of stories that were circulating, it is significant that the first detailed zoological work published in Tasmania draws heavily on the images in both Smith’s work and Gould’s The Mammals of Australia. A Synopsis of the Vertebrate Animals of Tasmania was written by Clive Lord, Director of the Tasmanian Museum in Hobart and H. H. Scott, Curator of the Launceston Museum in the north of the state, and appeared in 1924. A line drawing beneath the species’ name seems to be traced from Smith’s image (Figure 34) while on the opposite page a copy of Gould’s head of a male has been printed with the addition of white highlights to the eyes making it even more demonic than the original (Figure 34.1). The representation again exhibits dissonance between image and text, but this time the image carries the unsympathetic connotations, while the text slides from one extreme to the other. The thylacine is described as “large and wolf-like” but then “in reality quite a shy animal”. The focus of texts such as this early in the twentieth century is often the need for the collection of material for recording and research in museums. Rather than urging preservation and making moves to ensure the protection of the species, the matter is left to chance, as is indicated by statements such as “unless unexpected developments occur” extinction will become reality.49 It is surprising that a work emanating from Tasmania, where live specimens of the thylacine were resident in the new-look Hobart Zoo in 1924, used images made in Britain in 1851. This testifies to the weight of Gould’s artistic reputation, the influence of zoological literature from Europe, and the cultural cringe of colonial scientists. In the early twentieth century Gould’s image also turns up in a number of other formats. A lantern-slide in the State Library of Victoria, Australia, picture collection—one of 105 slides in a presentation called Views of Tasmania by J. W. Beattie, a prolific Tasmanian photographer—shows a reproduction of Richter’s lithograph of the pair in London Zoo. Beattie had concerns about native animals and the Tasmanian environment and prepared and delivered popular Lantern Lectures to accompany his slides, but I did not find any commentary for his picture of the thylacine. There is another reproduction of this image, attributed to Beattie, in a 1934 travel book issued by the Tasmanian Government Tourist Bureau called Tasmania: The Wonderland. It describes the thylacine and Tasmanian devil as prim49

Lord, Synopsis of Vertebrate Animals, 264–66.

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Figure 34. Tasmanian Marsupial Wolf in Clive Lord and H. H. Scott, A Synopsis of the Vertebrate Animals of Tasmania, 1924. Lithograph.

Figure 34.1. Copy of “Head, of the size of life” from John Gould, The Mammals of Australia in A Synopsis of the Vertebrate Animals of Tasmania.

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itive types and notes that both can be seen at Hobart Zoo. A book by Charles Barrett published in Melbourne circa 1932 with the title Australian Animals: A Book for Nature Lovers also reproduces Gould’s illustration, but now it has a very different text that reverses common constructions of the thylacine in the early twentieth century. It has “become rare. Man is to blame for this”; “has been persecuted from the early days of settlement, as a sheep killer or a dangerous beast”; the tiger is “inoffensive where man is concerned” and “despite recent efforts at protection, this unique native animal seems doomed to join the extinct Tasmanian emu in the Land of the Lost [my italics]”. In 1973, in a series of articles called “Our Rare Ones” in a December issue of the popular Australian magazine Womans’ Day, a reproduction of the illustration from Mammals appears with a text that asks “Is the thylacine extinct?”. It also mentions sightings and uses the word “mystery”. In 1991 Tim Flannery used the lithograph and twenty other Gouldian illustrations in Australia’s Vanishing Animals: Endangered and Extinct Native Species. The image remains the same; the attitudes and text change. The negative inferences contained in Gould’s work that were read by countless people who had the means to influence the survival or extinction of the species are now forgotten. Late in the twentieth century, the most familiar refiguring of Richter’s illustration came into being. It was, until very recently, the label of a Tasmanian beer that ensured the pair has a constant presence in Australia and a greater, more popular, and widely dispersed audience than it ever had in Gould’s day. The sleek, resilient thylacines on Cascade Premium Lager bottles were eminently suitable for the label of a drink that traditionally targeted male consumers and is now aimed at a more sophisticated market. Although the menacing gaze of the original figures is at odds with current attitudes toward the species, these images embody greater economic power than was ever dreamt of by Richter or Gould. *** Gould’s lithographs and their early copies dominate representations of the thylacine from the mid to late nineteenth century. Coding that favoured the extermination of the species permeates almost all illustrations and their texts in this period. The presence of these elements, especially in publications that emanated from Australia, indicates the intense political focus of some zoological literature and the interac-

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tion of images with the discourse of extermination. They appeared as surviving numbers of the species declined and the capture and killing of those that were left became more frenzied. These images also led to the culmination of damaging stereotypes and maligning of the animal that is seen in the next set of images, which demonstrate how a long tradition of visual and verbal constructions of the European wolf was transferred to the thylacine with devastating effect in the late nineteenth century.

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CHAPTER FOUR

A TASMANIAN WOLF In the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s a series of wolf-like illustrations of the thylacine predominated in natural history literature. These images draw on specific and well-established intertextual connections with the European wolf and are much more obvious in their construction of the thylacine as a threat to human practices than any previous illustrations. They are accompanied by labelling that defines this association: “Tasmanian” or “Marsupial Wolf” then becomes the principal name given to the species in zoological works until well into the twentieth century. The images appear primarily in English publications and overlap in time with those discussed in chapter 3, but persist for a shorter period that coincides with the operation of the Tasmanian government bounty on the thylacine. This bounty was responsible for a dramatic and final dwindling of the species’ numbers. References to ‘wolf’ in relation to the thylacine appear in a number of sources soon after European settlement. In the first published verbal description of the species in 1805, Lieutenant Governor Paterson commented that the thylacine “remind[ed] the observer of the appearance of a low wolf dog”, and this association intermittently but insistently reappears as a signifier in both images and texts.1 In some early scientific descriptions, however, the resemblance was considered superficial. As early as 1827 Temminck noted that a thylacine was in “size similar to that of a young wolf”, but also that “on the whole, and at first glance, the basic shape of this animal offers a lot of similarities with the Loups, but it resembles more the Dasyures and the Sarigues families, through its elongated body and short extremities [trans. Nicole Johnson]”.2 However, in the nineteenth and twentieth century serious zoological works, as well as more popular publications that included illustrations, continued to refer to a similarity between the thylacine and the European wolf. By the late twentieth century zoologists often justified the comparison by referring to 1 2

Paterson, Sydney Gazette, 3. Temminck, Monographies de Mammologie, 63–64.

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the concept of ‘convergent evolution’, where there is a similarity of form and behaviour between organisms living in a similar environment but belonging to different branches of the evolutionary tree.3 Following Darwin’s theories about the variation and evolution of species, this similarity is usually interpreted as indicating that similar selection pressures were in operation. According to Begon et al., however, because marsupial and placental mammals sprang from a common ancestral line, similarities between them exemplify the parallels in the “evolutionary pathways of phylogenetically related groups that have radiated after they were isolated from each other”.4 Neither form is mentioned in any of the later works in which these images appear and the acceptance of this principle in relation to the thylacine and the wolf depends on whether superficial physical resemblance is stressed over deeper morphological, behavioural and social differences, as well as the motives behind the assumption. Studies such as those by Heinz Moeller (1968) and Allen Keast (1982), which analyse the anatomy and body proportions of the thylacine compared with the wolf and the hyena, find that the measurements of the thylacine are quite different, with the closest resemblance in the skulls. But here, too, Moeller notes that the carnassial teeth of the thylacine are weaker than those of the wolf and that this may be associated with the smaller prey that the thylacine killed.5 Keast states the thylacine “is less convergent structurally on … the placental Wolf (Canis lupus), than superficial criteria would suggest”, in that “it is different from the Wolf in virtually all structural features relating to its pursuit carnivore role”. He notes that the length of all four limbs is greater in the wolf that the thylacine, that the neck of the wolf is longer, and that the hindlimb/spine ratio is greater in the wolf.6 Guiler concludes that “the general build and body form of the wolf give it an agile appearance while the thylacine appears slower and clumsy with an ungainly heavy tail”.7 The hunting habits of the thylacine were correspondingly different from those of the wolf with the morphology of thylacines adapted to slow gait and “pounce and pur3

Begon et al., Ecology, 22. Ibid., 23. 5 Quoted in Guiler, Thylacine, 52. A comparison of photographs of the skulls of the thylacine and the wolf can be accessed on http://www.naturalworlds.org/ thylacine/skull/wolf_thylacine_skulls.htm . 6 Keast, Thylacine, 674–81. 7 Guiler, Thylacine, 51–53. 4

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suit” predation on smaller prey, in contrast with the fast chase and slashing bite of the wolf.8 The thylacine was also a solitary hunter, rather than hunting in packs like the wolf.9 Significantly, in a reconstruction of the likely prey size of the thylacine, Jones’ and Stoddart’s findings suggest that the species “killed medium-sized prey (1–5 kg) that were small relative to its body size (15–30 kg), with a crushing, penetrating bite” and that its body type, gait and slow speed suggest hunting in reasonably open habitats consistent with their former distribution and sightings. Everywhere, that is, except the thickly-forested and mountainous regions in the west of the island suggested in many illustrations. Ultimately, Jones and Stoddart also conclude “ecomorphological convergence of the thylacine with canids was superficial”.10 The idea of convergent or parallel evolution, then, does not justify the wolf-like images discussed in this chapter nor support the assumption that the thylacine was a voracious sheep killer. The flowering of wolf mythology and iconography in illustrations of the thylacine coincided with a change in the style of zoological and natural history illustrations in the latter part of the nineteenth century from schematic to naturalistic. Significantly, there is a return to the wood engraving, so the representations in this chapter produce unequivocal messages. They are linked to intertexts by unmistakable semiotic references and they generate compelling, often over-determined meanings. As far as the habitat of the thylacine is concerned, however, the images considered in this chapter repeat the misconceptions of previous works, so that far from having an ecological relevance, they merely amplify the tendency to mislead that is obvious in previous illustrations that have no significant backgrounds. In terms of the extinction of the thylacine, the significance of visual and verbal associations with the European wolf is central to an understanding of why the government bounty was so enthusiastically invoked and administered.

8

Jones and Stoddart “Reconstruction of Predatory Behaviour,” 239–46. Guiler, Thylacine, 80. In comparison, Paddle finds varying reports of hunting techniques in the nineteenth century and concludes that thylacines therefore had “different styles of hunting” behaviour (Paddle, Last Tasmanian Tiger, 44). Most zoologists, however, accept that thylacines were solitary hunters, for example, Jones and Stoddart in “Reconstruction of Predatory Behaviour,” 243. 10 Jones and Stoddart, “Reconstruction of Predatory Behaviour,” 239. 9

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Most texts about the thylacine in natural history works published from the second half of the nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century suggest the name ‘wolf’ and occasionally ‘tiger’ were in common use in Tasmania. A. R. Wallace’s geographical work on Australasia notes that “tiger wolf” was used by the settlers; Arthur Nicols’ book Zoological Notes states that the colonists called the thylacine “Tasmanian wolf”; W. S. Dallas, member of the Linnean Society, states that it was called “Zebra Wolf, Hyena and Tiger”; Chambers’s Encyclopædia 1882 mentions “wolf” or “tiger-wolf”; the Catalogue of the Marsupalia in the British Museum heads its description with “Thylacine or Tasmania Wolf”; while the Victorian Naturalist 1887 describes the species as the “Tasmanian tiger, sometimes called the marsupial wolf”.11 ‘Tasmanian wolf’ was used in scientific works as well as popular publications. This naming and the illustrations of the species executed by artists, printmakers and, later, photographers should be viewed in the light of Dale Spender’s assertion that “people are not led to the same view of the universe by the same physical evidence [because] their vision is shaped by the different names that are employed to classify physical evidence”.12 This statement not only applies to the way images of a Tasmanian ‘wolf’ were constructed by artists and craftsmen, but also suggests that at different times in history viewers of the illustrations will read into the images ideas generally held about wolves. It is worth, then, elaborating on the meanings that association with the wolf entailed in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. A 1911 book called Every Boy’s Book of the Zoo is explicit about the significance of wolf-naming for a general audience. It exclaims “The Wolf! What a lot there often is in a name” and goes on to evoke “the lonely traveller, suddenly pounced upon by a pack of these howling and powerful wild beasts”. Entries for the European wolf in natural history works in the nineteenth century are unequivocal in their representation of the species as a ferocious predator, and entries for the thylacine repeat almost verbatim many of the stories related and phrases used to describe wolves in much earlier works. But even if 11 Wallace, Australasia, 245; Nicholas, Zoological Notes, 76; Dallas, Natural History, 673; Chambers’ Encyclopædia, Thomas, Catalogue of Marsupialia, 276; Wintle, “The Fossil Mammalian Remains,” 27. 12 Spender, Man Made Language, 163.

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they did not, Spender writes of the phenomenon of naming: “new names systematically subscribe to old beliefs, they are locked into principles that already exist, and there seems no way out of this even if those principles are inadequate or false”. For example, in Cassell’s Popular Natural History it is said that wolves could not be tamed, that males devour their cubs, that they “leap upon walls eight foot high” and that they pull down horses and sheep by the throat. Wild Sports of the World: A Boy’s Book of Natural History and Adventure describes the wolf as “combining the cunning of the fox, and the ferocity of the tiger” and notes that the wolf is “without doubt, one of the most cruel and bloodthirsty of man’s four-footed foes”. Wolves are also said to emerge from the woods “craving for slaughter”, to destroy dogs, their “most deadly enemy” and, significantly, every measure was thought permissible to capture them—“snares, springtraps, pitfalls and even poison”. 13 Wolves were still found on the Continent in the nineteenth century when these words were written, but they were extinct in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales as the result of a history of bounties, or similar inducements to kill them. Today they have been exterminated in most of Europe, although a few remain in northern Spain, Italy, Germany and Scandinavia. Before the Norman Conquest the animals in Britain were protected, with severe penalties for those convicted of killing wolves and foxes within the limits of the forest. Then in 938, according to James Harting, Edgar imposed a “tribute” on the King of Wales for 300 wolf skins. This virtual bounty on wolves continued to be paid for three years, but ceased when it was said the King could not find any more wolves in Wales. In England, wolf populations fluctuated; in 1306 they were considered “rare, but not extinct”. British Animals Extinct within Historic Times records that wolves were hunted in return for land in 1320 and that later “stringent measures were being devised for the destruction of wolves in all or most of the inhabited districts”.14 By 1500 the wolf had disappeared from England. In Scotland, Acts were passed for the destruction of wolves, forests were cut down or burned to expel wolves in areas where they abounded, and by 1684 the animal was believed to be extinct there, 13 Berridge, Every Boy’s Zoo, 224; Spender, Man Made Language, 164; Cassell’s Popular Natural History, 63–67; Greenwood, Wild Sports, 271; Wright, Mammalia n.d., 402–6. 14 Harting, British Animals, 146–47.

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although narratives of the ‘last’ animal killed were numerous till 1743. In a similar way, laws were passed to exterminate wolves from Ireland and the last wolf there was reputed to have been killed in 1709, although they were reportedly seen until 1770. Imagetexts discussed in this chapter frequently allude, both explicitly and implicitly, to the immense volume of well-known stories and myths about the European wolf that have appeared in anecdotes and popular genres, especially those for children, for centuries. Awareness of the extent and nature of this intertextuality is particularly important in understanding the impact that representations that keyed into wolf mythology must have had on nineteenth-century viewers and policymakers and on the survival of the thylacine. The wolf was linked with witchcraft, lycanthropy, night, magic and the devil.15 Stories and images circulating in the nineteenth century supported and developed these ideas. For instance, the fairytale “Little Red Riding Hood” that was and still is part of most children’s experience, ensured that the ideas of danger and the wolf were intimately connected. There are also numerous versions of this story for sophisticated adult audiences and Jack Zipes contends that Perrault and Grimm’s extremely popular retelling of the tale came to play a crucial role in the ‘civilising’ process in Europe and America. He traces the origins of the story to seventeenth century oral folktales told by women in France, that were intended to warn children against the danger of talking to strangers in the woods, but the wolf in later adaptations for both children and adults operates on a number of levels with “pictures … clearly intended to serve as a warning to young girls who might be seduced by ‘men-wolves’”. The wolf in these stories is deceptive and treacherous: a hostile force that, in one manifestation, stands for Nature. In Grimm’s tale, Red Riding Hood is supplied with a male protector to rescue her and her grandmother from the wolf. Zipes argues that Perrault’s eighteenth-century version, that had “massive circulation in print in the 18th and 19th century”, perpetuated strong notions of male dominance, unlike the original folktale in which Red Riding Hood finds a way to outwit the wolf and escape with no assistance from anyone. This ‘protector’ is a hunter who serves as a model of how men should behave. Zipes 15 Many associations of the wolf with evil are as old as the Bible. For a fuller account of stories and superstitions about the wolf from medieval publications to recent practices see Lopez, Wolves and Men, 140–46 and Knight, “Extinction of Japanese Wolf,” 139.

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maintains that Grimm’s retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood” took second place only to the Bible in nineteenth-century Germany and that most translations into English were based on this version.16 The associations made in zoological and natural history literature between the thylacine in Tasmania and the European wolf segues into the grand narrative of the ferocious predator and the masculine hero. It constitutes another contemporary retelling of the folktale in a particularly potent form combining, as it does, a familiar story of danger with a suggested solution to the problem—hunting and killing the animal. Crying Wolf A forerunner of wolf-like images of the thylacine in natural history literature is a tiny figure on the bottom right-hand corner of a map of Van Diemen’s Land published in London by J. and F. Tallis in 1851 (Figure 35). The pointed ears, long hairy coat and long legs are characteristic of depictions of the European wolf; only the figure’s tail resembles the kangaroo-like appendage of the thylacine. Elements of this image are apparent in previous representations (see Figures 16 and 17), but this is the first that fully develops wolf imagery in the form, rather than behaviour of the species. The figure is on the bottom right of the map, while at the top there is a tranquil scene of Hobart and, significantly, on the left bottom corner opposite the thylacine and behind a garden of exotic flowers and introduced trees is a drawing of the palatial residence of the “VDL company’s agent at Circular Head”. By setting these two illustrations on opposite sides of the base of the map (an imperial cartographic figure that defines the island) a problematic binary is suggested. On the one hand there is the economic imperative of the European pastoral industry, and on the other the thylacine, which is visualised as a threatening figure looking down on the invisible settlement. Ironically, the first of a sequence of wolf-like images in natural history literature (Figure 36) was produced by Joseph Wolf, one of 16 Zipes, Trials and Tribulations, 4–7, 30–39, is primarily concerned with gender issues and sexuality, including how versions of the story fostered notions of violence. For the connection between wolf eradication and masculinity in the twentieth century see Jody Emel, “Are you Man enough, Big Enough and Bad Enough?” 91–116.

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Figure 35. Thylacinus cynocephalus in R. Montgomery Martin, The Illustrated Atlas and Modern History of the World, 1851. Detail. Wood engraving.

Figure 36. Tasmanian Wolf in Excelsior: Helps to Progress in Religion, Science and Literature, 1855. Wood engraving. W L Crowther Library, Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office.

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the most prominent of the new-style illustrators and someone who also produced some of the most sympathetic images of the thylacine. The image appears in volume 3 of a publication called Excelsior: Helps to Progress in Religion, Science and Literature published in 1855. The quotation on the volume’s title page—“Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before”—defines ‘progress’ and anticipates one of the reactions to the ideas associated with Darwin’s theories, which are discussed later in this chapter.17 This figure does not have the sway back that is shown in Wolf’s illustration of the pair for Zoological Sketches and it projects none of the familial associations of his earlier lithograph for the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London (Figures 26 and 29). Perhaps this image expresses Wolf’s stated dislike for scientific work and his preference “to convey something of [the animal’s] habits, character and temperament” in the manner of romantic art, for here Wolf renders the difference between the two types of illustration—a “mere representation” of an animal and “a picture in which there is an idea”.18 The idea projected in this image is that of a focused, predatory animal that is looking at something in the landscape below. The figure is stalking its prey and the controlled power in the body and potential hazard to the object of the animal’s gaze are clearly signified. The European leaves that surround the figure in this wood engraving are so similar to those that appear in Wolf’s previous pictures of the thylacine that they operate as a signature. The forest of fir trees in the right distance acts as a visual index that refers to centuries-old European wolf mythology embodied in stories such as “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Peter and the Wolf”. Rather than offering the results of observing a live, captive animal, Joseph Wolf reinforces one of the dominant perceptions about a wild thylacine—that it was a dangerous predator. Despite reference to the “tiger-wolf” on the contents page of Excelsior, the illustration of the thylacine is identified as 17 The place of the species in this scenario becomes clearer in subsequent publications. For instance, a book on mammals published in 1906 combines wolf imagery with a reference to the obsolescence of the thylacine when it refers to a figure in a photograph as a “much-dreaded beast” with the “look of an ancient creodont and the manners of a modern wolf” (Ingersoll, Life of Animals, 511). Much later, in 1931, an English weekly newspaper called Field ran a full-page story about “A Prehistoric Beast Still Living”, however by then attitudes had changed and the subtitle urges the preservation of this “striped Wolf” (Morey, “Prehistoric Beast,” 822). 18 Kemp, “Taking it on Trust,” 135; Palmer, Life of Joseph Wolf, 107.

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“The Tasmanian Wolf”. The text details attacks on sheep in a passage that is littered with words such as “savage” and “formidable” and comments “it has become an object with the settler to destroy every specimen he can fall in with, so that it is much rarer than it was at the time Mr. Harris, its first describer, wrote its history”. At the end of this passage comparison with the tiger, which is called “the barred tyrant of the Indian Jungles”, is also invoked.19 ‘W’, the writer of the text, quotes the remark in the Guide to the Zoological Gardens of London about the thylacine’s “resemblance to the character of the wolf, whose treachery and suspicious manners in confinement must have struck everyone who gazed on this ‘gaunt savage’ in his den in Regent’s Park [my italics]”. The text also refers to the pair of “shy and restless” specimens in the Gardens, but the male thylacine Gunn had sent to the Zoological Society was dead by the end of 1853. It states that the thylacines can bound upwards nearly to the roof of the place where they are confined, calling up both mythical stories of the wolf’s capabilities and the tendency to “spring” that Gunn mentioned in relation to the female in the letter about his gift.20 Agility and the implied capacity for surprise attack adds another dimension to the imagined danger of the species and exemplifies the tendency for every report of unusual behaviour, whether verified or not, to be exploited in representations of the animal during this period. The plate of Wolf’s crouching figure is used again in Lydekker’s The Royal Natural History in 1895, this time as a decorative feature at the bottom of the contents page, unlabelled, and with Wolf’s signature and fir trees removed. Its position would have given the image considerable exposure as it was placed on a page of this book probably viewed by every reader who opened it. The placement also implies that the picture was considered so interesting or evocative it was used to enhance the dramatic effect of the whole volume. A lithograph in a Dutch publication shows the thylacine in a similar position, but develops the wolf imagery in the body of the 19

Excelsior, 244–49. Gunn, Letter to Secretary, 90. Gunn mentions that “a trustworthy person” reported that the female thylacine “was excessively agile—springing from the floor to the walls” of an unfinished house he had put her in. The anonymous writer of Excelsior may have referred to Gunn’s letter, or the 1852 Guide to the Gardens of the Zoological Society of London that quotes the letter, rather than observing this behaviour in Regent’s Park, as it is rarely mentioned in relation to the thylacine in other confined situations. 20

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animal. It is the most wolf-like illustration dealt with so far, with the environment behind the figure indexing the mountainous habitat of some European wolves. The first appearance of this image was in De Dieren, Afgebeeld, Beschreven en in Hunne Levenswijze Geschetst by L. A. J. Burgersdijk, published in Leiden (formerly Leyden) in 1864 (Figure 37). It is believed to have been executed by well-known Dutch lithographic artist and associate of Joseph Wolf, Joseph Smit. Smit also worked for Hermannn Schlegel, director of the National Museum of Natural History in Leiden, where two specimens of the thylacine were acquired in the 1820s. One of them, a mount with a thin body and a narrow, slightly raised head, may have been the model for this image. Chris Smeenk, Curator of Mammals at the present Museum at Leiden—Naturalis—compared the illustration with the two specimens held there and found that “the drawing is remarkably similar to the larger animal we have, one of Temminck’s syntypes of C. harrisii. The number of stripes, the long one extending onto the thigh, the forked one behind that and the two final stripes joined, are nearly the same as the right side of the mounted skin”. Smeenk considers that the resemblance is “too obvious to be the result of chance. The other, smaller, skin in our collection is very different”.21 Temminck noted in 1827 that the skulls had been removed from these perfectly preserved (“d’une conservation parfaite”) specimens in Leiden Museum,22 which may account for the flattened head of the illustrated figure. The long narrow snout and neck elongated by the tanning process are also distinctive. The indefinite impression and pastel colouring of the lithograph in Burgersdijk’s book softens the menacing effect of the figure, but its large size in relation to the background, keen posture and heightened awareness—exaggerated by the lines that force the viewer’s eye outside the space of the illustration— contribute to the feeling of edginess this picture conveys. The detail in the foliage and rocks in the foreground pull the eye back into the scene and have the effect of authenticating it. With the snowy mountains behind the figure, pictorial aspects of this image resonate with Harriet Scott’s deceptively attractive illustration discussed in chapter 3. The lithograph in this Dutch publication, however, displays a more European interpretation of a Tasmanian landscape. 21 Smeenk, pers. comm. September 13, 2004. I am also grateful to Dr. Smeenk for information relating to Joseph Smit, Hermann Schlegel and L. A. J. Burgersdijk referred to later in this book. 22 Temminck, Monographies de Mammologie, 65.

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The picture of the thylacine in De Dieren is placed on a page with an image of an ugly and ferocious Tasmanian devil. In comparison, the thylacine has the cowardly appearance that is often referred to in descriptions of the European wolf. The image is labelled “Buidelwolf” (translated literally and popularly as ‘pouch wolf’ but, scientifically as ‘marsupial wolf’) and the text explains that the name ‘wolf’ is earned (“en verdient zijn naam”) from its appearance, as well as its habits. It also states that the thylacine’s alleged taste for sheep is shared with its European namesake. The environment in the illustration is justified by the remark that remaining members of the species have retreated to the “western mountains” and then Harris’s imagery of chasms and darkness is invoked once more. In its description of the Tasmanian devil—“De Zwarte Buidelmarter”—the teeth of both species are said to have the same characteristics as “real beasts of prey [trans. Inga Hofling]”.23 As the teeth of carnivorous marsupials are substantially different from those of the placental carnivores, this statement is indicative of a Eurocentric tendency to associate the thylacine with familiar animals. Neither here, where the teeth are the focus of description, nor in the introduction to the section dealing with marsupials is any mention made of the function of the thylacine’s pouch. This tendency to dwell on predation and violent behaviour exemplifies entries for the thylacine in popular works and compromises attitudes to the species throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and beyond. The lithograph discussed above reappears as an engraving in important and popular German and English works in the 1860s and 1870s. First, an engraved copy by R. Kretschmer appears in volume 1 of Illustrirtes Thierleben in 1864, the first edition of an extremely popular and well-known German zoological work, Brehms Thierleben.24 Successive editions established this title as the primary reference work about animals in Germany and part of the cultural heritage of German-speaking people. Alex Potts calls this work “a classic of [the] new form of illustrated natural history”. The introduction to the French translation stresses the naturalism of the images: they “make the animals come alive in their distinctive physiognomy and familiar attitude, harmoniously framed in the landscapes of their homeland” 23

Burgersdijk, De Dieren, 506–8. Later editions of Brehms Thierleben use other illustrations of the thylacine, including photographs: see Figure 45 and Figure 60. 24

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and they are like “genre pictures taken on the spot of the intimate life of wild or domestic animals”.25 The image is labelled Beutelhund, Zebra or Beutelwolf, the latter a name that Cäsar Claude states was “adopted and spread immediately by dictionaries and illustrated magazines” in Germany. It remains the only popular name for the thylacine in Germany today. Claude comments that the mountainous background is only shown as “backdrop-like scenery [trans. Dagmar Nordberg]” into which the figure is not successfully integrated, but the detail of vegetation in the foreground contradicts this statement.26 The reworking of the image as a wood engraving also results in an explicitly ferocious and threatening figure. Detail of the teeth, hair, snarling mouth and pointed ears of the figure is now possible; every aspect of the lithograph is now distinct, detailed and exaggerated— for instance, the engraved figure has a clearly defined long, shaggy coat and loose skin. Comparing the two images defines the difference between lithography and engraving—the engraving is decisive in the ideas it carries; the details demand close attention; the foliage and tiny flowers in the foreground shimmer; the snow on the mountains glows; and the rough coat of the large animal visualises the idea of danger and alarm. The written description that accompanies this image immediately addresses the illustration. It says of the thylacine: “he carries his name fully, as one realises with a single glance at our illustration, because he seems to be indeed, a wild hound”. Despite this early reference to the dog (hund) it is not repeated in the remainder of the text, but the term Zebrawolf or Beutelwolf is constantly employed. Many of the ideas about habitat are derived from Harris’s description, but the species is described as “alert, and even wild and dangerous” and that he [sic] mostly emerges from a fight victorious because his enemies indeed could only be dogs. The paragraph concludes, “he truly is a real wolf and in his home country he causes, relative to his far lesser size, just as much damage as his northern namesake [trans. Dagmar Nordberg]”. The thylacines in London Zoo are mentioned as the only examples of the species that have ever come to Europe alive, so the preparation of this work for publication must have preceded 25

Potts, Natural Order, 32. Claude, Beutelwolf, 54–56. Smeenk suggests that this engraving may be a copy of the lithograph in De Dieren, or both engraving and lithograph may have been copied from the same original drawing, possibly by another artist but probably also by Joseph Smit (pers. comm. September 17, 2004). 26

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the arrival of a thylacine at Berlin Zoo in 1864.27 The selectivity of ideas included in entries in zoological works is exemplified in the recounting of Gunn’s story of the thylacines he sent to Regent’s Park. An ability to leap to great heights is repeated yet again and a preference for mutton is stressed, but there is no mention of the tameness of the female who, Gunn maintained, allowed her head to be scratched through the bars of her cage “without showing any anger or irritation”, or that his children daily passed the enclosure where the pair was kept.28 In the same year, an almost identical print by W. J. Colman engraved by the Brothers Daziel appeared in the Mammalia volume of the English publication The Illustrated Natural History by Rev. J. G. Wood (Figure 38). Further editions of this work, with similar titles and including the same picture, were published in 1867 (as Routledge’s Popular Natural History), 1872, 1874 and 1876. Confirming its wide circulation in the nineteenth century, various editions of the title are found in public libraries in every State in Australia. The text gives precedence to the name “Tasmanian Wolf” and includes the rarely-used classification Paracyon cynocephalus, suggested by John Gray in the Annals of Philosophy (1825) and mentioned in Cuvier (1827) but which, according to Oldfield Thomas in the Catalogue of Marsupalia and Monotremata in the Collection of the British Museum (Natural History) 1888, “has no claim to adoption, as its original mention is unaccompanied not only by a diagnosis, but also by any indication of what species it is intended to contain, although its author afterwards assigned it to the Thylacine”.29 Paracyon (Greek) means ‘dog-like’, so use of this taxonomic label endows the image/text, which focuses on similarities to the wolf, with an element of irony. The text states that the home of the thylacine is “so deeply buried in rocky crevices that it is impenetrable to the light of day” and that in this “murky recess the female produces her young”. These references to darkness, dirt and confined space imply distasteful habits and place the thylacine in the same perceptual zone as the hyena and jackal, while the conical mountains that dominate the background of the picture perform the same function as the fir trees 27 Brehm, Illustrites Thierleben, 5–6. According to Moeller in Der Beutelwolf, this thylacine only survived for 5 months, which may be why Brehm also mentions that in captivity “some insist … [thylacines are] difficult to keep alive”. 28 Gunn, Letter to the Secretary, 90. 29 Thomas, Catalogue of Marsupialia, 255.

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Figure 38. Tasmanian Wolf in J. G. Wood, The Illustrated Natural History, London, 1865. Wood engraving.

in Joseph Wolf’s illustration (see Figure 35). Text and image begin to bond much more closely in this book, with the words in The Illustrated Natural History speaking directly to the picture: “as may be imagined from the very expressive name which has been appropriated to the animal which is represented in the engraving, its character is not the most amiable, nor its appearance the most inviting”.30 The text’s ironic understatement does not diminish the agreement of verbal and visual codes that construct, in this and previous examples of the image’s use, a strange and menacing distortion of the European wolf. A less explicitly wolf-like image appears in a popular publication translated from a French work by Arthur Mangin in the 1870s called The Desert World; or the Scenery, Animal, Vegetable life, and Physical character of the Wilderness and Waste places of the Earth (Figure 39). On a page preceding the preface there is a quotation from Wordsworth: “For I have learned / To look on Nature, not as in the hour / Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes / The still sad 30

Wood, New Illustrated Natural History, 126–27.

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Figure 39. Thylacynus cynocephalus in Arthur Mangin, The Desert World, 1872. Wood engraving.

music of humanity”. These lines reference the effect of time on perceptions, as well as Biblical notions of wilderness as a place of contemplation. The text defines the desert in paradoxical terms, finding “sterility and death” there and stating that it is an area where man has not cultivated the earth, where nature has resisted human industry, and yet where there is “ample material for the admiration of the artist, the meditations of the thinker, the researches of the naturalist and the physician”. Australia is called a new world of zoology and botany, “a world apart”, and only the more unusual marsupials are selected for description. The thylacine is referred to as “Tasmanian Wolf” and, although the names ‘tiger’ and ‘hyæna’ are also mentioned, is said to “resemble a wolf in many respects, but … its elongated muzzle is almost cylindrical in shape, and very thick”. However, the snout of the figure in the illustration accommodates the wolf imagery in the text, as do the pointed ears and long body: the form would tend to take on the connotations of its label, rather than the qualifications supplied by the text. The form and position of the figure is similar to

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the male in Wolf’s lithograph of the pair in London Zoo that appeared in Zoological Sketches in 1863 and, because it faces in the same direction, it is likely to have been copied from Wolf’s lithograph. However, there are subtle differences; for instance, this image has long whiskers on the nose, mountainous terrain in the background and a raised head. Similarities to the behaviour attributed to wolves are made explicit in the text: “there exists in Tasmania an animal of carnivorous habits almost as large as a wolf” that “has a wolf’s appetite, and commits havoc in the same manner among the flocks of the colonists”.31 This type of imagery and reference to predatory behaviour with sheep is constantly mentioned in the decade preceding the government bounty in 1880, suggesting the climate of opinion in Europe and Tasmania, as well as the effectiveness of propaganda. More Continental Versions A similar, but hairier and much more intimidating image is found in Louis Figuier’s Mammalia: Their Various Forms and Habits. This work appears in two different editions in 1870 and 1874 and in versions attributed to Percival Wright published in 1875, revised circa 1887 and 1892 (Figure 40). It also turns up in Australien: Das Neue Buch der Reisen und Entdeckungen (The New Book of Voyages and Discoveries) a German work by Fr. Christmann published in 1870 and in an Italian book, I Tasmaniani: Cenni Storici ed Etnologici di un Popolo e Stinto (The Tasmanians: Historical and Ethnological Account of an Extinct People) by E. H. Giglioli in 1874. Signed “A. Mesnel” or ‘B’, this illustration is also derived from the male in Joseph Wolf’s lithograph of the pair in the Zoological Gardens that appeared in engraved form in the Guide to the London Zoo, but here it is given an intimidating attitude. The male is alone and the hairs on his neck and torso have been lengthened to give the animal a wolf-like appearance. While some of the vegetation is similar to that in Wolf’s image, the unruly grasses, deeply shadowed bank and darkfaced clouds added to the foreground and background of the picture function as tropes for the sinister. These transformations of Wolf’s gentle, early response to the live animals in London Zoo epitomise the manner in which damaging constructs were persistently pro31

Mangin, Desert World, 371–72.

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Figure 40. Thylacin in E. Percival Wright, Mammalia: Their Various Forms and Habits, 1892. Wood engraving.

duced at the end of the century when the eradication of the species was at its height. The text that appears on the pages before and after this image is brief and calls thylacines the “strongest and fiercest of all the marsupials”, comparing their habits to the “sanguinary appetite” of wolves, despite noting “in the Australian colonies the names of familiar animals … are misapplied to the indigenous marsupials [my italics]”.32 Even koalas look ferocious in this work, but kangaroos are depicted in the usual manner of natural history works—with young in their pouch. The extremely brief text about the thylacine in I Tasmaniani follows a paragraph about an Aboriginal cremation ritual during which a dog was found devouring part of the corpse. It is stated that the Tasmanians are the only people on earth that do not possess dogs, those “constant companion[s] of man in all his stages of civilisation 32

Wright, Mammalia, 28–29.

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and barbarism”. The text calls the thylacine “the indigenous marsupial dog”, claiming that it could not be domesticated because of its “low intelligence [trans. Patricia Bessell]”. The text in the German work Australien describes the thylacine as “ein wirtliches Raubthier” (a true predator) that now occurs “only rarely”, while the phrases and imagery of Harris’s first text that refer to ravines and gorges, half rotten fish, and dark places are reiterated to underscore the ominous image. The words in Illustrirtes Thierleben that refer to the species as wild and dangerous are repeated, along with the statement that the thylacine “achieves as much devastation as does his namesake the wolf in the Old World [trans. Dagmar Nordberg]”.33 The text in both these works metaphorically develops and extends the dark shadows in the image, while the hairy wolf-like body and the air of unpredictability inferred by the clouds, the untidy grasses and the unstable position of the figure encourages fear of the animal. Meyers Konversations-Lexikon fifth edition 1893, a well-known and very popular German encyclopedia of general knowledge that was the standard reference work in middle class households in Europe, contains a different wolf-like illustration (Figure 41). This is a composite of the thylacine image in Brehms Thierleben 1877 (see Figure 45) and the traditional illustrations of the European wolf in zoological works. The tail and haunches of the figure seem to derive from the engraving after Mützel, while the thick, shaggy coat signifies a wolf and the slim legs a pursuit predator. The face of this animal is particularly unpleasant, with a dark circle around the eye drawing attention to its narrow shape and oblique position. The thylacine stands at the base of the page with engravings of other Beuteltiere (marsupials), including a similarly shaggy Tasmanian devil, a Virginian opossum, and marsupial mice. The figure is large and menacing in relation to the other marsupials and the depiction of the spiky grass tree in the background accentuates the imperial notion of a hostile, unfamiliar environment. The text is a brief version of that in Brehms Tierleben, stating that the thylacine resembles a “wild dog”, that it has been driven back into the hinterland, and that it does “as much damage as the wolf [trans. Dagmar Nordberg]”.34 Images such as this in a popular work published in Europe both reflect and reinforced attitudes toward the thylacine during the years the bounty 33 34

Giglioli, I Tasmaniani, 108–9; Christmann, Australien, 242–43. Meyer, Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, 935.

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Figure 41. Der Beutelwolf in Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, 1893. Wood engraving.

was in force. These illustrations also show how the shape of the figure and details about the behaviour of the species were transformed to fit the European stereotype of a dangerous animal. Meanwhile, in 1888 a new pair of thylacines had arrived at London Zoo and the engraving after Wolf in the Guide to the Gardens that provided a form on which to model Figure 40, discussed above, appears with a new text that is much reduced from the 1869 edition. It begins “in one of the dens adjoining the Wolves will be found a pair of another Carnivorous Mammal”. Thylacines were originally housed in the Carnivore Terrace dens for “Wild Beasts”, as the Guide for 1852 explains, and were described as the “rarest animals” exhibited there. They occupied the “centre division” of the eagle aviary next to raptorial birds from 1858 to 1862 and ‘sheds’ of their own near other marsupials in 1869, according to the Guides for the relevant years. In about 1884, four years before the government bounty was introduced, they were moved to what was then the hyena’s and bear’s dens in the same location as the Carnivore Terrace in which they were first housed. The 1885 Guide describes thylacines as “closely simulating the Wolf in form”, although stresses that they belong to an entirely different order, but then refers to the species as the “Native Wolf” and ends with the comment “its speedy extermination [is] almost certain. Even now it is very scarce and difficult to obtain”. Next door, the European Wolf, already extinct in Britain, the American Wolf and the now extinct Japanese Wolf were housed.

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Perhaps it was envisaged there would be no replacements for the thylacine, for the entry in the 1885 Guide ends with an abrupt dismissal: “the visitor should now mount the steps at the end of the terrace and inspect—14. THE BEAR PIT”.35 On the page opposite the text in the 1888 edition of the Guide, the relatively large engraving by Joseph Wolf of the female and attendant male is a disjunctive image that challenges the discursive frame that surrounds it. The interaction of this image/text with the zoo visitor and the living animals in the cage must have produced complex sight-lines. But there was little time for the image to affect perceptions of this pair of thylacines in London Zoo, for within two months of the Guide’s publication both of them were dead.36 Newspaper Illustrations In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the messages projected in illustrations of the thylacine in the European natural history books discussed above were repeated in mass-produced Australian publications. The following images show how effectively associations with wolves were developed in the popular press that had a large circulation in the settlements in and near Tasmania. The first of these appeared in Australian Graphic: An Illustrated Intercolonial Newspaper in 1884 (Figure 42). An editorial in an issue of the magazine the previous year, boasted that the publication offered to the public of “these Southern lands … a magazine-newspaper which,—viewed as a whole,—as a combination of copious illustration, various literary matter, excellence of mechanical detail, and cheapness of price— stands unsurpassed amongst the newspapers of the globe”. One of the functions of the pictorial press, it states, is to “exert an educational influence” through the “association of the artist’s pencil and the engraver’s burin with the steam printing press” that gives “vitality, force and vivid reality to the broadsheet which it never before possessed”.37 In the same issue there is a column outlining the method of engraving used in the newspaper: known as ‘Crocker’s process’, it involved painting on glass with fluoric acid, producing a fine line and “a cheap, rapid and durable means of reproducing drawings”. It 35 36 37

Mitchell, Popular Guide, 5–9; Sclater, Guide to the Gardens (1885), 24. Moeller, Beutelwolf, 158. Anon., “Somewhat Egotistical,” 2.

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Figure 42. Tasmanian Zebra Wolf in Australian Graphic: An Illustrated Intercolonial Newspaper, 1884. Wood engraving. State Library of New South Wales.

is noted that one of the advantages of the process is that “the artist has no interpreter but himself [sic]”, unlike the wood engraving where “the artist’s conception is frequently modified in the treatment it receives at the hands of the engraver”. Instead, the “suggestiveness of the artist’s work is faithfully retained”.38 The gaunt thylacine in Australian Graphic is the epitome of ravenous appetite. The tree on the right with its tangled roots or fallen branch, a signifier of death and desolation, is present in some form in all of the three illustrations mentioned in this section. The rocky background exaggerates the suggestions of the texts by focusing closely on a specific aspect of the environment stated to be the habitat of the thylacine and the wolf. The rocks in the foreground close in on the figure with the same effect as the idea of the fissure or cleft that traps and isolates the animal in Harris’s text. The thylacine, then, is completely othered by a mass of negative signifiers. The text in this publication proclaims the species “almost unknown” and mistakenly 38

Anon., “Australian Graphic Process,” 3.

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refers to animals in London Zoo as “quickly pining away through confinement, and perhaps disease”. The “zebra wolf” is described as an “object of dread” because of “a most unmistakable appetite … for mutton” which, the text states, it prefers to the kangaroo in the illustration. While the names ‘tiger,’ ‘zebra’ and ‘hyena’ are said to be applied because of the animal’s stripes, the effect of the name ‘wolf’ is explained in the “war of extermination” that has ensured that the few survivors of the species in Tasmania are “confined to the wildest and most inaccessible regions”.39 Perhaps the most extreme example of wolf imagery appears in a copy of the Illustrated Australian News published in Melbourne in December 1885 (Figure 43). This picture presents an expansive view of the animal’s habitat, compared to the enclosed scene in the illustration discussed above. The lean, long-bodied striped figures near a rocky ledge, on what appears to be a mountaintop, look as if they might be playfully baying or barking. When the brief text informs readers that the drawing is taken from a group of mounted specimens in the National Museum, the constructed nature of the image undercuts the impact of the picture; however, the text is six pages away from the image! Thylacines are called “the largest and most formidable … of the carnivorous marsupials” that “in ferocity rather exceeds a wolf” and their behaviour is interpreted as deceptive, counteracting any assumption that they might be playful.40 This information transforms the figure on the right of the picture into an aggressive animal, the grey-black quality of the print darkens and the image becomes suggestive of violence and fear. The illustration is particularly evocative of the gothic landscape imagined to be the home of the thylacine—“the impenetrable glens in the neighbourhood of the highest mountain[s]” that Harris mentioned—when open eucalypt forest was actually their preferred habitat.41 Although this scene resembles the mountainous southwest region of Tasmania, the context and combination of signifiers in the picture and the intertextual associations that are referenced make it a doubly misrepresentative example of the habitat of the thylacine. This image, appearing three years before the government bounty was applied, provides evidence that constructions of the thylacine circulating in Australia were even 39

Anon., “Tasmanian Zebra Wolf,” n.p. Anon., “Marsupial Wolves,” 218. 41 See Jones and Stoddart, “Reconstruction,” 244 and Guiler and Godard, Tasmanian Tiger, 71 for more about the habitat of the species. 40

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Figure 43. Marsupial Wolves in Illustrated Australian News, 1885. Wood engraving. Latrobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria.

more extreme than those in European works. Their publication in the popular press ensured that they influenced perceptions close to the habitat of the thylacine and encouraged government extermination policies. Another illustration that appeared in a newspaper in 1899 is less menacing, partly because of its muted, lithographic qualities, but it includes an insertion that is based on an earlier image with specific overtones of threat. The scene in the engraving in Town and Country Journal is similarly situated in a desolate, rocky area with the prominent emblem of the dead tree (Figure 44). The insertion is a copy of H. C. Richter’s head of a male in John Gould’s The Mammals of Australia (Figure 24.1) with the same evil eye—described in many entries for the European wolf as “an obliquity in the position of the eye”.42 The text that surrounds the picture explains that the thylacine is “fast disappearing from the earth, and has been driven back from the Tasmanian settlements to the rocky fastnesses of the island”; a wolf-like appearance is reiterated; as is a propensity for killing 42

For example see Greenwood, Wild Sports, 271.

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Figure 44. Tasmanian Wolf in Town and Country Journal, 1899. Lithograph. Australian Museum Research Library.

sheep, which this text sees as confirming the likelihood of the species’ extermination.43 In newspaper illustrations and articles, then, the old story of the wolf is told again—this time close to the home of the thylacine and readily accessible to the hunters, shepherds, landowners and parliamentary representatives who were directly involved in passing bills and implementing them. As Paddle explains, the species was used coldly and conveniently to justify and substantiate losses in the sheep industry.44 With a government-sanctioned bounty now in operation, there was only one outcome for the thylacine. 43 44

Y. N. U., “Australian Mammals,” 29. Paddle, Last Tasmanian Tiger, chap. 6.

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Ideologically biased images and rhetoric about the thylacine in the second half of the nineteenth century was exacerbated by interpretations of Charles Darwin’s theories about the appearance and disappearance of species, as well as by the reaction of those opposing his ideas. Darwin’s revolutionary argument was that changes in species occur as a result of “natural selection”.45 That is, variations within species can be advantageous or disadvantageous, so that a selection process occurs which ensures only the survival of the fittest. In On the Origin of Species (1859) Darwin talks of “a struggle for existence” but stresses that this struggle is “not incessant, no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply”. His words give the impression of an almost imperceptible disappearance of species over time and they discouraged concern about or action to prevent extinctions. Although, in a section called “Extinction Caused by Natural Selection” he suggests that species that are rare can disappear quite suddenly: “any form represented by few individuals will, during fluctuations in seasons or in the numbers of its enemies, run a good chance of utter extinction”. He also celebrates diversity—“ever branching and beautiful ramifications”—that is the result of extinctions, which he likens to “thin straggling branch[es] springing from a fork low down in a tree”. That is, he suggests a paradox: diversity flourishes because of extinctions. Both the idea of slow and gradual extinctions or those apparently at the whim of the seasons, encouraged a lack of concern for the future of the thylacine of the sort expressed in Gould’s works. In his essay on the hermeneutics of extinction Joel Black considers that Darwin’s theory “tempered, domesticated and naturalised” the causes of extinction and in affect de-catastrophised the process. Black points out that the theory of natural selection relies on acceptance of the inevitability of extinctions and that they are “arguably the 45 Lynn Barbar points out that it was the idea of ‘natural selection’ that was revolutionary; the theory of evolution had been offered long before Darwin outlined his thoughts on the matter (Heyday of Natural History, 251–53). She also suggests that Georges Cuvier made sure his theory did not conflict with Christian beliefs by accommodating the appearance of more and more fossils and inventing more catastrophes to explain them (217–30). On the other hand, Joel Black remarks: “Cuvier … was so preoccupied with extinction that he failed to grasp the evolutionary implications suggested by fossils” (Black, “Hermeneutics of Extinction,” n.19).

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primary agency of natural selection itself”. He maintains that in discussion and perceptions of Darwin’s writing the idea of extinction has been repressed and, as a result, the idea of evolution has become dominant in scientific discourse.46 The tropes to be found in Darwin’s work are complex and have received a variety of readings. Gillian Beer sees On the Origin of Species as full of “clutter and profusion … a nature that surges onwards in hectic fecundity ... production, growth and decay are all equally needed for the continuance of life on earth”.47 In Darwin’s Worms Adam Phillips comments on the language of death and loss Darwin uses in his first reports of the Beagle journey: “the anxiety informing all Darwin’s detailed observations and conjectures is that everything disappears … what the resilience and abundance of lifeforms and fossils suggested, paradoxically, was how sheerly provisional life was”.48 In the second half of the nineteenth century, Darwin’s theory generated theological disapproval and vigorous public reaction and competing notions about the origins and diversity of life. However, the debates between Darwin’s supporters and creationists, and publications that reflected these views, often tacitly encouraged acceptance of the extinction of species. Where Darwin’s work was construed as saying that species gradually and inevitably disappear, creationists stressed that all events in the natural world were evidence of God’s divine will. In their writing, many scientists also demonstrated how evolutionary theory and traditional religion could be intertwined to produce forceful imagery. For instance, although Krefft is considered one of very few Australian scientists in the late nineteenth century who recognised “the compelling nature of Darwin’s arguments and found himself in opposition … to the church, Owen, Macleay and the gentry of Sydney”, he states in the Introduction to his Mammals of Australia: it is generally considered in conformity with the laws of the Creator, that the undue increase of prolific animals should be checked by beasts of prey, and this duty seems to have been assigned to a few small but very ferocious species, the remains of which occur in large quantities at the Wellington Caves. These Carnivores comprise the Thylacinus

46 Darwin, Origin of Species, 143, 162–77; Black, “Hermeneutics of Extinction,” 157–59. 47 Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 125. 48 Phillips, Darwin’s Worms, 45.

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chapter four and Sarcophilus … which are now completely extinct on the Australian mainland but still exist in Tasmania.49

This statement uses both traditional and new discourses to foreshadow ideas related to biodiversity and conservation that were to become an increasingly important part of scientific thinking in the twentieth century. Kathleen Dugan notes that the Australian scientific community remained largely anti-Darwinist “long after Darwinian evolution had achieved general acceptance among European scientists” and that the debate about evolutionary theory within the community was particularly heated, with the evidence provided by Australian marsupials and fossils used to refute Darwin’s ideas rather than support them.50 In light of this information, Krefft’s remarks imply that he was ‘sitting on the fence’. Meanwhile, Clergyman John Dunmore Lang interpreted the fossil vertebrates found in the Wellington Caves in New South Wales in 1830 as support for a catastrophist theory argued by Georges Cuvier and his follower, geologist William Buckland. Lang maintained that they contained the remains of animals destroyed by a divinely caused calamity, observing that “the tiger or hyena would have been a much more formidable enemy of the Bathurst settler than the despicable native dog [dingo]”. As Lang also mentions the remains of a hyena’s den that Buckland asserts he has found in England, it is unclear whether he is referring to the fossil bones of the thylacine or not, but it is the mention of these animals (with which the thylacine is constantly associated) as ‘enemies’ that is significant for my argument. Articulating attitudes to extermination in general, Lang adds: “and if the huge rhinoceros had inhabited the lagoons of Hunter’s River [in New South Wales], it might have been a much more serious work to displace him, than shoot the pelican or the emu”.51 Lang seems to be saying, ‘thank God for extinctions’ or even implying that God prepared the way for European settlement. After 1859 Darwin’s supporters further developed the theory of natural selection in response to Australian evidence and despite the religious beliefs of Australian scientists. The explanations of Searles Wood, Franz Unger, Thomas Huxley and Henry Barkly for the overwhelming presence of marsupials in the country was that isolation, 49 50 51

Strahan, Rare and Curious, 30; Krefft, Mammals of Australia [Facsimile], 2. Dugan, Zoological Exploration, 81–86; Mozely, Evolution and Opinion, 413–30. Dugan, Zoological Exploration, 81; Lang, “Account of Bone Caves,” 367–68.

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environmental stability and a resulting reduction in competition determined that these ‘primitive’ forms of life predominated.52 Their account of biological determinism explained why introduced species, diseases, modification of the environment and changes in human settlement in Tasmania could result in the extermination of animals such as the thylacine. Their interpretation of Darwin’s theories left little room for the development of concern about the conservation of species. Richard Owen expressed this more directly when he wrote about extinction—“that species should become extinct appears, from the abundant evidence of the fact of extinction, to be a law of their existence [my italics]”. He mentions “several instances of the extirpation of species, certainly, probably, or possibly due to the direct agency of man”, but avoids further discussion about the matter because “it does not help us in the explanation of the majority of extinctions”.53 Owen was more interested in the big picture supplied by fossil evidence. The same view is presented in different terms in an immensely popular natural history work by Philip Gosse called The Romance of Natural History.54 Gosse begins the book with a chapter titled “The Extinct” and his pronouncements are worth quoting at length: For species have their appointed periods as well as individuals, viewed in the infinite mind of GOD, the Creator, from the standpoint of eternity, each form, each race, had its proper duration assigned to it … even within the last twenty years several animals have been taken … the sentence is gone forth against them; that their sands are running to the last grains, and that no effort of ours can materially prolong their existence.55

Darwin states in On the Origin of Species—“no fixed law seems to determine the length of time during which any species … endures”; but, he mentions rarity as a precursor to disappearance. The idea that extinctions occur by chance was as damaging to relatively rare species such as the thylacine as the notion that their loss was preor52

Dugan, ibid., 85. Owen, Classification and Distribution, 56. 54 Barbar notes that Gosse was the bestselling natural history writer of 1860 (Barbar, Heyday of Natural History, 286). 55 Gosse, Romance of Natural History, 1–2. The last chapter in Gosse’s Romance is titled “Parasites: Slavery among ants; Nigger-hunting”. The chilling text draws parallels between ants and humans, talks of red ants and Negro ants, and of their “original destinies” (385–86). For more about the representation of and connections between ants and humans in imperial literature see Sleigh, “Empire of Ants,” 33–71. 53

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dained, and Darwin’s citing of evidence from the study of fossils that shows “species and groups of species gradually disappear, one after another, first from one spot, then from another, and finally from the world”, did nothing to prevent needless or deliberate exterminations.56 Frequent references to time in texts about extinction at the turn of the century, when Darwin’s ideas were largely accepted, reflect the bourgeoning interest in palaeontology. His work stimulated curiosity about fossils because it employed the evidence they offered to support evolutionary theory, and by stressing the importance of the history and geographic distribution of animal species. Kathleen Dugan maintains that the marsupials of Australia provided important evidence for evolutionary theory and the Wellington Caves fossils helped Darwin formulate the “law of succession of types” that proposed that living animals are similar in form to those that are extinct.57 The effect of these discoveries can be seen in Extinct Animals published in 1905, where Ray Lankester seems overwhelmed by the size of the fossil record. He talks of “many thousands of kinds of extinct animals”, a world that is “always changing … cities where forests grew … animals which … have altogether gone” and a history that has been going on for “thousands and millions of years”. The difficulty of studying extinction is connected with “that clock” that moves so imperceptibly that “you will hardly notice any difference”.58 Like Krefft’s text, Lankester’s exemplifies how opposing views were reconciled—Darwin’s ideas about evolution are interwoven with references to Paley’s Natural Theology, producing a discourse that was accessible to both supporters and opponents of Darwin’s theories. But the discoveries of fossils by geologists opened what Buffon called “the dark abyss of time”,59 that in Lankester’s writing seems to consume the tidy assumptions of theologists. Comments about fossils and extinctions in natural history works at the turn of the century are replete with tropes relating to transformation and destiny that did nothing to encourage preservation of threatened species. For instance, 56

Darwin, Origin of Species, 292. Dugan, Zoological Exploration, 82. For Dugan’s account of how the findings in the Caves influenced Darwinian theory and the significance of Lang’s comments on the rhinoceros see “Darwin and Diprotodon.” 58 Lankester, Extinct Animals, 13. In an earlier work, Lankester states that Darwin’s theory was “continuously misrepresented and misunderstood”, drawing attention to the misconceptions that coloured recounting of his ideas and often gave rise to strident arguments against them (Lankester, Advancement of Science, 10). 59 Buffon, Les Époques de la Nature, 26. 57

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an article about the “Tasmanian Tiger-Wolfe” [sic] in Hobart’s Weekly Courier in 1903 comments on the survival of the thylacine and the Tasmanian devil in Tasmania “by virtue of isolation” and, in striking typographical arrangement, muses: What power, or complex set of powers, RINGING THEIR ENDLESS CHANGES, finally combined to sweep away those carnivorous forms from the Australian world of life we may perhaps never know, any more than we can state with certainty what left the bones of elephants and other animals in the strata of Egypt.60

Thus the notions propounded by Darwin and his followers filtered into popular spaces, were reinterpreted and influenced the ideas and practices of ordinary people. One of these ideas was the concept of ‘progress’ that merged with perceptions of Darwin’s theories to form social Darwinism—what Bernard Smith refers to as an “ethic of conquest”.61 *** By the mid-nineteenth century the probable disappearance of the thylacine was obvious, but Darwin’s theories and reactions to them later discouraged concern about the species. The imagetexts considered in this chapter show how representations could be so misleading, so inaccurate and so defamatory that they bore no resemblance to the actual animal at all. They also demonstrate, in a particularly brutal way, that both Darwinian and creationist discourses of extinction proclaimed that it was a part of a predetermined, inexorable, or ‘natural’ process. While many animal predators have been the subjects of human prejudice, Orlando Wilkerson points out that “a special measure of contempt” has been reserved for wolves. He points out that even William Hornaday, one of the first American conservationists of the early twentieth century whose work is discussed in chapter 6, called wolves the most “despicable of all animals in the North American continent” and felt it necessary to add that there “is no depth of meanness, treachery or cruelty to which they do not cheerfully descend”.62 It is not surprising, then, that the construction of a Tasmanian ‘wolf’ occurred around the same time as the implementation of a government bounty on the species, which resulted in 60 61 62

Scott, “Tasmanian Tiger-Wolfe,” n.p. Smith, Spectre of Truganini, 15. Wilkerson, “Human-Wildlife Interactions,” 323–26.

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a remorseless decrease in numbers of thylacines between 1888 and the removal of the bounty in 1909. The experience of the thylacine in Tasmania was not unique, and a brief outline of other extinctions reveals the extent of intolerance and the damning nature of wolf naming. For instance, in the latter part of the nineteenth century between one and two million wolves were shot, trapped and poisoned in North America. In Montana, wolves became “an object of pathological hatred” with the first bounty law against them passed in 1884. Barry Lopez reveals that when the law was repealed in 1887, newspaper editorials and widely circulated pamphlets made outrageous claims about damage to the cattle industry and then the sheep industry “blame[d] every downward economic trend on the wolf”, resulting in the bounty being reinstated. By 1933 the animal was virtually wiped out. These attitudes still exist in the twenty-first century—recent initiatives to reintroduce the wolf to Montana resulted in the display of banners with the caption: “The wolf is the Saddam Hussein of the Animal world. We don’t want Saddam in Montana!!” Jody Emel points out that wild animals have long been “the target for hatred, the same hatred that launched armies and lynch mobs against human ‘others’”.63 By linking the wolf with Saddam Hussein, the banners carried in Montana track the progress of orientalism that is apparent in representations of the thylacine in F. E. Géurin’s Dictionnaire Pittoresque d'Histoire Naturelle in the 1830s and John Gould’s The Mammals of Australia in 1851. The last Antarctic Wolf (or Warrah) to be seen was recorded in 1876. One of only two land animals on the Falkland Islands, the Warrah “came to present itself and approach [mariners and explorers] because it had never seen man”, but soon the species had a bounty put on it by the colonial government and the pelts became part of the American fur trade. David Day states that, similar to the case of the thylacine and wolf of Montana, as the numbers and threat of the Warrah decreased, tales of the species’ destructive powers increased, shepherds made unlikely claims of high sheep killings, and vampire associations surfaced. Many now extinct or endangered animals were given the name ‘wolf’ although they do not belong to that species at all; for instance, the South American Pampas Maned Wolf, 63

Lopez, Wolves and Men, 180–4; Knight, “Extinction of Japanese Wolf,” 153– 54; Emel, “Are you Man Enough?” 102.

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the Ethiopian or Abyssinian Wolf, the Antarctic Wolf and, what Day calls the “extraordinary” Tasmanian Marsupial Wolf.64 There are stories of wolf extinctions in many other places. The government of Newfoundland set a bounty on the White Wolf in 1842 until pursued to extinction and the miniature Japanese Wolf called Shamainu (a corruption of yamainu which literally means ‘mountain dog’) was hunted and trapped persistently until the species became extinct in 1905, although the official history maintains it succumbed to disease. The Ezo wolf of the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaido was poisoned on American advice and had disappeared by 1889. In myth and legend this animal was seen as a protector of humans, a watchdog or guardian of the traveller in the mountains. Since their extinction, there have been numerous reports of sightings or wolf-howls, usually at dusk, across the country.65 Similar reports of thylacine sightings persist in Tasmania. There were, however, alternative images of the thylacine circulating at the same time that the bounty was in force. Some of these depict a very different animal; many show the influence of Darwin’s theories about the importance of habitat and the interaction of species with the environment; others display vestiges of these wolf-like images either in their texts, or in the predominance of signifiers of predatory behaviour. Ironically, as thylacine numbers were radically reduced, these variations in images hint at a new, though by no means general, attitude toward the preservation of species that was not to reach useful proportions until it was far too late for the thylacine.

64 65

Flannery, Gap in Nature, 66; Day, Doomsday Book, 153–66. Day, Doomsday Book, 158–210; Knight, “Extinction of Japanese Wolf,” 130–46.

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VARIATIONS A natural history work published in Britain in 1877 remarks that “natural history is conveyed to the mind by a succession of pictures”.1 Cäsar Claude notes that toward the end of the nineteenth-century popular books “set out to show their readers not only portraits of animals, but even to awaken their interest with as lively pictures as possible and with action loaded images”. Illustrations of the thylacine that vary substantially from those discussed so far also emerged in the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s and very early twentieth century in a number of well-known and prolifically illustrated books running into multiple editions. Most of these were made by German artists working in Britain, or appeared in works originally in German. The thylacine is shown in dramatic situations: “no longer standing or sitting, but hunting prey [trans. Dagmar Nordberg]”.2 However, in the images in zoological and natural history literature discussed here, the prey is either explicitly or implicitly a native animal. The thylacine is muscular and robust, rarely menacing, and sometimes has a dog-like appearance. These illustrations are motivated by an interest in habitat, behaviour and the relationships between animals indigenous to a region. They aim to be ‘naturalistic’, rather than scientific or pictorial. These images also develop the complex poses, artistic techniques, and backgrounds occasionally apparent in zoological illustrations earlier in the nineteenth century, such as those of Joseph Wolf. Some of them display the characteristics of what is known as German Expressionism—a climate of thought, rather than a style—that affected many art forms in the newly unified state of Germany after 1871. Frederick Levine includes among its themes “a desire to return to the distant echoes of an animal past”. Expressionist works suggest sensation through ink marks, bold and intense contrasts in texture, and explore the power and harmony in nature.3 Through strong, decisive lines and almost obsessive detail in the body, some of the animals in the engravings discussed in this chapter are endowed with 1 2 3

Pouchet, Universe, iv. Claude, Beutelwolf, 57–58. Levine, Apocalyptic Vision, 3; Honour, World Art, 385–86.

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a vigour and presence that makes them appear to move on the page. Others bring the body of a figure close to the viewer, focusing on details of fur and flesh, and also have associations with a movement called ‘scientific materialism’ that emerged in Germany in the midnineteenth century. These examples of zoological illustration in the 1880s and 1890s, then, could be seen as an exploration of the relationship between animals and humans, including the “fragile” boundary between them,4 as well as part of a shift in the visual arts and science in Germany toward the material world of nature. Other aspects of the images, such as the depiction of the thylacine preying on an array of smaller and defenceless Australian species, reflect and participate in the increasing acceptance of Darwin’s theories, particularly those that relate to the interaction of animals with their environment. The factors mentioned above seem to come together in various combinations to produce vigorous engravings of thylacines living in a space of their own. Many of the illustrations, however, concentrate on the thylacine’s predatory behaviour and, as carnivores were regarded as “damaging animals, whose decimation and extinction was seen as not only desirable but was supported by state aid [trans. Dagmar Nordberg]”,5 encourage negative reactions to the species. In addition, the texts that accompany them often stress wolf-like characteristics that then promote a menacing interpretation of the attitude of the animal. As a whole, then, the illustrations discussed in this chapter present ambiguous impressions of the thylacine and many of them occur in German works not readily available in Australia. The Images The first of these variant images appears in four popular natural history works, Brehms Thierleben, The Standard Natural History, The Royal Natural History and The Riverside Natural History; as well as in a book of illustrations, Brehm’s Zoological Atlas, and the fourth edition of Meyers Konversations-Lexikon (Figure 45). The illustration of a pair of thylacines was drawn by G. Mützel and engraved on wood by C. Wendt. On its first appearance in 1877 in the second edition of Brehms Thierleben the two signatures are present on the printed 4 5

Lloyd, German Expressionism, 104–5. Claude, Beutelwolf, 58.

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Figure 45. Thylacinus cynocephalus in John Sterling Kingsley, The Riverside Natural History, 1888. Wood engraving.

engraving, while in other works all or part of the signatures has been removed.6 The image is also used in the Mammals volume of the third edition of Brehms Tierleben published in 1891. The models used for the illustration of the “Beutelwolf” are not discussed in any of the editions, although the text mentions the behaviour of thylacines in captivity. According to Moeller, the first thylacine arrived at the Berlin Zoo in 1864 and lived for only four months before it was mounted for the Museum für Naturkunde at Humboldt University in Berlin. Another male purchased by the Zoo in 1871 lived for two years.7 It is this latter animal that was the model for

6 This illustration in the 2nd edition of Brehms Thierleben replaced the wood engraving by Kretschmer in the first edition (Illustrirtes Thierleben, 1864), discussed in chapter 4. 7 Moeller, Beutelwolf, 143–44. Curiously, Moeller’s table of thylacines in zoos on page 158 does not include the 1871 specimen in Germany, or any other thylacines alive in Europe in the 1870s when this illustration first appeared.

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Mützel’s illustration but the position of the figures and their relation to each other seems to be derived from previous images.8 According to a catalogue in Palmer’s biography of the artist Joseph Wolf, there are a number of illustrations in Brehms Thierleben “copied from Wolf’s designs in The Proceedings of the Zoological Society” but that they have “in some cases been slightly altered, and other backgrounds and other accessories introduced”.9 This is exactly the relationship between Mützel’s wood engraving and Wolf’s lithograph of the pair of thylacines in the Proceedings (see Figure 26)—the positions of the animals are similar, but Mützel’s image has reversed them; both show figures on a bank, but the standing animal in Thierleben steps up rather than down; one animal is lying and in both images the other is standing, but in Thierleben the animal lying down sniffs at its body rather than gazing at the viewer as in Wolf’s illustration. In addition, Mützel’s pair is re-situated in a colonial environment with a background of grasstrees and rocks, rather than grasses and leaves. The bodies of the thylacines in Mützel’s illustration, however, are different from those that have appeared before. These are handsome, well-muscled animals with large, strong heads and bodies faintly reminiscent of the thylacines in Gould’s work. They also resemble German shepherd dogs and, like the other representations in Variations, they are presented in a naturalistic rather than pictorial style as they are placed in, rather than against, a background of foliage and rocks. They embody power and vigour in their easy, sensual bearing and the text in Thierleben reinforces this impression, stating that at night the thylacine is jaunty, spry and even wild and dangerous, and not afraid of fighting. Although the “decimation” of sheep flocks and poultry is mentioned, as is the confinement of the animal to “some mountainous parts”, it is asserted that “he” is “still found in large numbers”.10 Tropes of oppression creep into the description with the word “felsspalte” (rock crevice), which is used in relation to the retreat of members of the species to the mountains. The reader’s 8

Claude, Beutelwolf, 55; Opermann, “Tod und Wiedergeburt,” 65. Palmer, Life of Joseph Wolf, 291–328. 10 This statement contrasts with comments in works emanating from Britain and Australia, in which the thylacine is stated to be ‘rare’. For instance, in 1880 Wallace notes “it was formerly very abundant and destroyed great quantities of poultry and sheep, but having been persistently hunted and trapped, is now getting scarce in most districts” (Wallace, Australasia, 245) and in 1895 Metcalfe states that thylacines are only found in the remoter parts of the colony (Metcalfe, Australian Zoology, 34). 9

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view is thus directed to the threat the animal poses in a more subtle way than that projected in the previous edition of this work, where the species is compared to a wolf. At the end of the text, human domination and the captivity of the thylacine is epitomised in a paragraph on the Beutelwolf”s behaviour in captivity: “they run for hours up and down their cage without any obvious notice of the outside world, or they lie or sleep, apathetically, on the same spot. Their clear, dark brown eyes stare emptily towards the observer [trans. Cathi Greve]”.11 While the appearance of the thylacines in this illustration and the name “Beutelhund” mentioned in the first paragraph of Brehm’s text render the imagetext somewhat ambiguous, an English publication called The Royal Natural History, which also uses this image, states that “this creature is extraordinarily wolf-like”. The other major British reference that features this illustration, The Riverside Natural History, refers to the thylacine both as “zebra wolf” and as “the pouched dog”.12 In nineteenth century natural history books the dog is constructed as an invaluable companion to ‘man’ and the species as a whole is said to possess intelligence, courage and vivacity; to be a devoted friend and faithful servant; an “integral part of mankind”; and even to be “more docile than man, [and] more obedient than any other animal” in its domestic state. In a completely contrary description to that given for wolves, E. Percival Wright also states: “volumes might be written … relating all the extraordinary stories of which dogs are heroes”. But in another book he qualifies his remarks by suggesting that breeding is the key to keeping the dog “true”, while Goldsmith refers to dogs in “deserted and uncultivated countries” that “partake of the disposition of the wolf”. Being ‘wild’ and indigenous to what was considered an exotic, “uncultivated” location, the thylacine was unlikely ever to be elevated to the position occupied by a dog.13 The perceived strangeness of Australia’s animals appears to have stimulated the imagination of German writers and artists, with Brehm’s work suggesting that water-dwelling platypus were a part of the thylacine’s diet. This interesting supposition is articulated in an image that appeared in Cassell’s Natural History in 1883 and subse11

Brehm, Brehms Thierleben, 690–92. Lydekker, Royal Natural History, 269; Kingsley, Riverside Natural History, 43. 13 Wright, Mammalia, 409, Cassell’s Natural History, 98; Goldsmith, History of the Earth, 1855: 380–81. 12

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Figure 46. Dog-headed Thylacinus in P. Martin Duncan, Cassell’s Natural History, 1884. Wood engraving.

quent editions (Figure 46). Although the artist and engraver are not known, the style is typical of the German artists who are discussed in this chapter and shows either a very large platypus or a tiny thylacine wrestling on a riverbank. As in some other illustrations of German and French origin (but never in British images) the sexual organs of this male thylacine are prominent, and the text mentions the female’s pouch, implying virility and fertility (see Transformations for comments on the lack of a pouch in images). This illustration is the first so far discussed in which the thylacine is explicitly depicted engaged in a ‘natural’ act in relation to other indigenous species and it does not include plants such as fir trees that have significance in terms of European animals. The emphasis is placed, then, not on its predatory habits in relation to introduced animals, but its relationship with those for which it is a natural predator. However, while the figure is markedly different to wolf-like illustrations, the thylacine is described as having a “foxy head”, despite the heavy, relatively broad-muzzled head of the figure in the illustration, and earlier in the text the species

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Figure 47. Beutelwolf in Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon, 1884. Wood engraving.

is said to be “the size of a jackal”.14 These references activate coding for ‘vermin’, generate intertextual references to species native to Europe, and encourage unsympathetic attitudes toward the thylacine. This reading is reinforced by the fact that the platypus is usually considered a harmless and fascinating animal, particularly in the nineteenth century. The image in Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon 1884, an edition of a German encyclopedia first published in 1796 and the model for Britain’s Chambers’s Encyclopædia and Encyclopædia Americana, is the first of several that delineate fur and body in explicit detail (Figure 47). This illustration is also used in Dutch and Polish encyclopedias in the late nineteenth century. Moeller attributes the image to “Neumann”, but in fur detail and face and body characteristics it bears a great resemblance to an image by Friedrich Specht discussed below. The cat-like animal in this picture is hunched and withdrawn as if retreating from something and poised to run. It is not the fearful predator or snarling, defensive animal of chapter 2 and 4, but even a shy creature. This edition of Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon, as 14

Duncan, Cassell’s Natural History, 215–17.

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Figure 48. Tasmanian Wolf in Carl Vogt and Friedrich Specht, The Natural History of Animals in Word and Picture, 1887. Wood engraving.

well as the Dutch and Polish encyclopedias, was not found in Australian libraries, supporting my argument that sympathetic images were not readily available to readers whose direct influence might have been significant in the way the thylacine was treated. A similar image first appears in a large book called The Natural History of Animals; in Word and Picture by Carl Vogt and Friedrich Specht in 1887, translated into English by George Chisholm, and later in a French edition and in Brehm’s Life of Animals (Figure 48). Vogt was one of a group of scientists who adopted the metaphysical position of materialism (sometimes called ‘scientific naturalism’) that stressed the centrality of the body, maintained that science was based on “observable reality”, opposed traditional religious beliefs regarding the creation of the world and supported the theories of Darwin.15 Karl Marx, however, critiqued the ideas of the ‘father’ of the movement, Ludwig Feuerbach, on the grounds that “the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not 15

Gregory, Scientific Materialism, x–xi.

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subjectively”.16 Vogt was a major populariser of science in Germany, seeing his task to disseminate “the new knowledge of comparative anatomy, comparative physiology, natural history and zoological geography”.17 With their materialist focus, however, his books generated very different messages to most British works of the nineteenth century that stressed a link between God and nature. The wood engraving after Specht, shows a thylacine with a thick, slightly shaggy coat and a heavy body, but the raised paw and downcast eyes produce the impression of a timid animal, not at all consistent with the text that begins with the words “the jaws of the Tasmanian Wolf …”. The model for Specht’s drawing is not mentioned, but there were a number of mounts in museums and universities in Berlin, Munich, Halle, Heidelberg and Mainz in the 1880s that could have influenced this illustration, although none take this particular position in their taxidermy form; rather, they are in conventional standing positions.18 The attitude of the figure is relaxed but curious, and the denotation of fur is so convincing it almost demands touching. The darker hair that forms the stripes appears brushed onto the page; the shadows and guard hairs accentuate this compellingly tactile image. This animal is on the move, looking intently at an object below that is out of the viewer’s sight. The surrounding vegetation of broken branches or roots, stony ground and several grass clumps is a specific example of the species’ habitat. The brief text beneath this image makes much of the thylacine’s resemblance to a dog rather than a wolf, but it concludes with the terse observation “at the present day it is restricted to the mountainous districts of the interior, and is, in fact, nearly extinct. It is fierce, but stupid, and its pursuit and destruction are accordingly easy”.19 This image/text is therefore disjunctive, the soft fur and the brutal rhetoric fight for the viewer’s attention. The realism of the pelt arouses what Richard Leppert terms “the desire and pleasure—of looking”, or scopophilia. He maintains that still life paintings, for instance, evoke smell, taste, hearing, and touch and relate us to the material world. Leppert also suggests that in certain cases a picture in this genre may ‘ask’ a viewer to “condemn the very thing [the viewer] takes pleasure in” and comments that “an art that builds into its pro16 17 18 19

Marx, Theses on Feuerbach. Gregory, Scientific Materialism, 51–79. See International Thylacine Specimen Database. Vogt, Natural History of Animals, 202–3.

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gram a judgment about looking is a political art, one invested in long-standing debates about the connection of pleasure and desire to knowledge and power”. The text in this work invites the viewer to condemn the thylacine at the same time as the picture excites the senses, as do examples of orientalist art such as those discussed by Linda Nochlin in “The Imaginary Orient”, mentioned in chapter 3. Nochlin points out that on the “brink of destruction” remnants of disappearing ways of life in the East were reinterpreted as “subjects of aesthetic delectation”, as well as “irredeemably different … and culturally inferior” to that of those who constructed the picture.20 This engraving suggests that the practice Nochlin discusses in relation to European orientalist art has a parallel in zoological images. Claude’s statement that “in all illustrations from the end of the nineteenth century, the predatory aspect of the pouch-wolf is highlighted [trans. Dagmar Nordberg]” is somewhat compromised by the German images discussed so far; however, in a British natural history work, The World’s Inhabitants or, Mankind, Animals and Plants by G. T. Bettany that appeared in 1889, the thylacine’s resemblance to a dog is noted and the species is linked with sheep killing, while connections to the wolf exacerbate this suggestion of threat (Figure 49). This work is partly aimed at children and the preface comments on the “lavish” illustrations, noting: “pictures proverbially teach better than words”. The brief text about the thylacine states only “the thylacine, or Tasmanian Wolf, has many features of resemblance to a Dog, and will attack sheep at night. It lives in the highest mountains of Tasmania”. On a previous page dingos have been compared with wolves: “the Dingo hunts in packs, and is very like a wolf—treacherous, revengeful and cunning”. The dingos that are chasing emus in the illustration in this work look like wolves and the muscular thylacine in a stalking posture is also pictured looking toward a native animal. Despite the mention of sheep killing in respect of the thylacine, when both images are considered with their texts, the representation of the thylacine is slightly less derogatory. The powerful signifier of the wolf in the imagetext for the dingo is the strongest factor here, while the thylacine retains its difference from the European species. Compared to representations in German works, then, Claude’s refer-

20

Leppert, Art and Eye, 44–45; Nochlin, “Imaginary Orient,” 127.

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Figure 49. Tasmanian Wolf in G. T. Bettany, The World’s Inhabitants, or Mankind, Animals and Plants, 1889. Wood engraving.

ence to European attitudes and the bounty applies more to British representations.21 An illustration in a popular encyclopedia by C. Annandale published in Britain in the 1890s, with the thylacine definitively associated with wolves, once again supports the conclusion that representations in British literature were potentially far more damaging in the formation of attitudes toward the thylacine than those in German works (Figure 50). The thylacine is shown with an array of other Australian marsupials, monotremes, and edentates in an arrangement and positions that can be compared to earlier French illustrations (see Figure 3) and it also includes anatomical drawings, one inevitably showing the numerous young of a possum. In this picture the thylacine is depicted in a dominant relationship with the other animals illustrated, having prominently displayed sexual organs, a striding attitude and a confident demeanour rather than the awkward, half-crouch and backward-facing sitting position of the animal in the 1820 compilation of figures. The entry for the species is only found by locating the alphabetical listing for “Tasmanian Wolf” which then refers to the entry for “Wolf”. Under that heading there are brief comments on the “Common Wolf (Canis lupus) of Europe”, the “Black Wolf (C. occidentalis) of the New World”, the Prairie Wolf, the Coyote, the 21

Claude, Beutelwolf, 58; Bettany, World’s Inhabitants, iv, 9333–36.

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Figure 50. Tasmanian Wolf in C. Annandale ed., The Popular Encyclopedia; or Conversations Lexicon, c.1894. Wood engraving.

Aard Wolf of South Africa and the Tasmanian or Pouched Wolf that “commits much havoc among sheep, but has now been well-nigh exterminated by the colonists”.22 The thylacine is not mentioned at all under “Marsupalia”, although an Australian “hyena” is briefly listed. Another British work, The Concise Knowledge Natural History by Richard Lydekker and R. Bowdler-Sharpe et al., published in 1897, has a similarly disturbing text while the image that illustrates it has an ambivalent quality. One of the illustrators of the work is German and, although the signature is not clear, a ‘K’ perhaps for Keulemans, a well-known zoological illustrator, may indicate that German artistic influence was involved. According to the preface, the text was written by “distinguished authorities” in the “several departments of Zoological science” and “original drawings [were] made and reproduced expressly for the work”, which is for “busy people” and students. The small illustration of the thylacine has some similarity with 22

Annandale, Popular Encyclopedia, 334.

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Specht’s image in the position of its limbs, but it is not as highly detailed or finished and so does not attract the viewer with its sensuality. Unlike Figure 48, the animal has a slightly menacing expression that is reinforced by a text that compares thylacines with wolves. The first sentence of the entry encourages the viewer to look at the image: “its large size, generally wolf-like form, and striped body are sufficient to distinguish at a glance the thylacine or Tasmanian wolf (Thylacinus cynocephalus) from all its kindred”. The thylacine is also called “this ferocious animal” and the text states that “at the present day sheep are the chief prey of the thylacine, as these are both more numerous and easier to capture than the diprotodont marsupials on which it formerly lived”. The entry for the Tasmania devil that immediately follows is more damning, noting that this animal “is even more sanguinary and destructive” and that it kills sheep and fowls for “the mere pleasure of the slaughter, long after the appetite is satiated”.23 As can be seen from the discussion of images in chapters 2 and 4, this kind of text is common in British books designed for a general audience. In the climate of the late nineteenth century, “busy people” who did not take the time to read more widely or examine other sources could imagine that both the devil and the thylacine deserved to be exterminated. The words and image in volume 2 of the sixth edition of Meyers Konversations-Lexikon published in 1905 are a composite of old and new discourses and texts and show the representation of the thylacine in transition. A range of unusual fauna from Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea is displayed in a contrived environment, while the thylacine’s position in the hierarchy of species is made explicit (Figure 51). The taut sinuous body and predator’s gaze of the thylacine creeping onto a rock threatens an array of harmless animals in this highly coloured plate that displays advances in photographic and print reproduction in Germany in the late nineteenth century. The thylacine has the robust form apparent in other illustrations considered in this chapter, but encapsulates aspects of their texts in a new way. The place of the thylacine in the animal community of Australasia is made explicit and, as no introduced animals are shown, it implies the ecological balance that would be maintained by 23 Lydekker, Concise Natural History, preface, 207. The title page states that the 530 illustrations in this work are by J. Keulemans, F. H. Michel, Frank C. Aldworth and other artists.

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Figure 52. Tasmanian Wolf in Richard Lydekker et al., Harmsworth Natural History, 1910. Photolithograph.

the thylacine’s continued existence. In reality, despite the new discourse that stressed the inter-relations of native species, the thylacine was the victim of old beliefs and entrenched antagonism against dominant predators and, with the extermination of many predators in colonised countries, imbalances then occurred in the eco-systems of those regions.24 Finally, another illustration that falls into the category of what Claude refers to as showing the animal in his “way of living”, especially hunting prey,25 appears in Harmsworth Natural History: A Complete Survey of the Animal Kingdom in 1910 and Wildlife of the World: A Descriptive Survey of the Geographical Distribution of Animals, 1915 (Figure 52). Both works are by Richard Lydekker and the illustration is an example of photolithography—soon to become the most common medium in books, journals and newspapers—by the German illustrator W. Kuhnert. Because it is reproduced from a photograph of a watercolour and pencil drawing, the image has a softer effect than the printed engravings that have been, until this time, more prevalent in zoological works. The thylacine has head 24 25

Meyer, Grosses Konversations-Lexikon, vol. 2: 175. Claude, Beutelwolf, 57–58.

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down, sniffing the ground, and tail taut and extended in a typical hunting attitude. Similar to other images discussed in this chapter the form of the figure is thick, robust and well proportioned. The text in Harmsworth’s Natural History states that the thylacine is “universally known in Australia as the Tasmanian wolf, although in works on natural history frequently referred to as the thylacine”. It opts for the former designation by commenting, “in appearance it is extraordinarily wolf-like”, but then includes a long, informative and relatively objective comparison of the thylacine and the European wolf by zoologist, Sir Ray Lankester. However, much of this evenhandedness is undone in the last paragraph where Lankester is quoted as saying that “when one watches the Tasmanian wolf, one comes to the conclusion that it is stupid and of much lower intelligence than the common wolf. Its appearance, ways and movements suggest the fancy that it is a kangaroo masquerading as a wolf, and not very successful in the part”. The text in Wildlife of the World also concentrates on thylacine-wolf comparisons, but then fastens on the tail, claiming that due to its qualities “in this respect the Tasmanian wolf approximates to crocodiles and other reptiles” that are of a “low and primitive type”. At one stage, the young of the species are referred to as “little abortions” no bigger than young rats and, ultimately, the fact that they are “becoming comparatively scarce” is not viewed as surprising nor, apparently, as cause for concern.26 Despite the relative ‘naturalness’ of the image in these works, the text renders the animal strange, inadequate and unattractive. Descriptions like this use scientific discourse, rather than popular mythology, to make their point and combine different parts of the world in a metanarrative of the past. They transmit old ideas about animals in words that exploit the novelty of Darwin’s ideas, the results of global expansion, and what was perceived as the profound wisdom and authority emanating from new fields of knowledge. *** A picture book for children published in the 1880s, Routledge’s Imperial Natural History, encapsulates how little attitudes toward various animal species in Britain and her colonies had changed by the end of the nineteenth century, as well as the ambiguous notions 26

Lydekker, Harmsworth Natural History, 897; Lydekker, Wildlife of World, 217–18.

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that could be projected by images. Wolves are constructed as strong, as “cruel brutes”, as cowards and as cannibalistic. They were still perceived as a threat to domestic animals and their extermination was seen as necessary so that “there will be no savage beasts to kill sheep and kids, or to rob farmyards and hen-roosts”. Horses and dogs are represented as “docile, loving and useful”, as well as faithful companions if treated with care and kindness. Significantly, the pages that deal with these animals are headed “The Noble Hunter”. A section on birds, however, is titled “Cruel Sport” and raises issues about hunting that could be extended to other animals. It begins “it is sad to know that some of the sports by which people amuse themselves are cruel, and that animals are often made to suffer needless pain, that men may boast of their skill in shooting, driving, fishing, trapping, or training them”. The text goes on to decry the shooting of pigeons released only for sport, but perceives shooting wild birds and animals as acceptable because they are “in a state of freedom”, have “fair play” and are usually “brought down” by one good shot, as well as being “numerous”.27 Attitudes in Australia were similar. In an article in Town and Country Journal in 1870, a visitor to Hobart mentions the domestic pets that he “could see at a glance were legion, numbering horse, dog, cat, fowl and all living things”. He remarks on the Derwent River “slumber[ing] before us” and “a grand flight of peafowls, perhaps numbering a hundred” passing over his head; but the accompanying engraving is labelled “Wild Duck Shooting in Tasmania”. The results of conflicting attitudes for different categories of animals and ignorance of the possibility of extinctions and the need for maintaining biodiversity are revealed in subtle ways. For instance, the Handbook of Tasmania 1887 quotes “Mr. Krefft” (see Figure 30) who considered that the number of kangaroo species in Tasmania was “very small indeed” because they had been greatly reduced, chiefly by the ferocious tigers and devils. But in the next paragraph, the practice of shooting wallaby, kangaroo and wombat for their skins is condoned and then it is noted that stockowners find the greatest difficulty in keeping deer, rabbit and hare under control.28 In the meantime, thylacines were steadily being reduced in numbers. The government bounty scheme promised a month’s wages for 27 28

Routledge’s Natural History, 10, 16, 74. Anon., “My Holiday Trip,” 17; Just, Official Handbook, 91.

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“every full-grown Native tiger destroyed”. A circular by the Tasmanian Minister for Lands and Works informed trappers that “only snares made of hemp will retain the tiger when caught as the animal is so restless when in the snare, twisting round and round, that it breaks the wire and escapes”. Guiler and Godard note that the decision to implement the bounty was “based on wildly exaggerated claims [about thylacine predation], which in reality covered up bad farming practice”. Paddle’s extended research of contemporary evidence confirms this view. The imagetexts in British zoological and natural history works, and to a lesser extent those in German works during the time of the bounty, were complicit in the development and acceptance of these “wild claims”.29 Some of the representations discussed above may have enlightened viewers to the intrinsic worth of every animal and the need to ensure the survival of species native to Tasmania, but only one of the many works in which these images appear is held in a library collection in the State today. Meanwhile, an entirely different representational medium—photography—had been developed in the second half of the nineteenth century. The assumption of veracity that this new method evoked was a crucial element in how images were read. The ‘naturalism’ of German engravings prepared the viewer for less pictorial illustrations, for varied backgrounds, and for noticing the situation in which the thylacine was pictured. Photographs, however, present a novel set of processes, claims and limitations—some of which were overcome in surprising ways.

29

Braddon, Circular, n.p.; Guiler and Godard, Tasmanian Tiger, 122; Paddle, Last Tasmanian Tiger, 139–67.

Figure 2. Tyger Trap, Thomas Scott, 1823. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

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2

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Figure 4. Zebra or Dog-faced Dasyurus in Georges Cuvier, The Animal Kingdom, 1827. Wood engraving.

Figure 5. Das Hundsköpfige Beutelthiere in F. J. Bertuch, Bilderbuch für Kinder, 1821. Engraving.

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Figure 7. Harrisischer Beutelhund in H. R. Schinz, Naturgeschichte und Abbildungen de Säugethiere, 1827. Lithograph.

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Figure 12. Thylacine in F. E. Géurin-Méneville, Dictionnaire Pittoresque d’Histoire Naturelle et des Phénomènes de la Nature, 1839. Engraving. Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office.

Figure 13. Der Beutelhund in Traugott Bromme, Zonengemälde, 1846. Lithograph. State Library of New South Wales.

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Figure 14. Drawing by Edward Lear, 1833. Watercolour and pencil. Collection: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.

Figure 17. New South Wales Wolf in W. I. Bicknell, Scripture Natural History and Guide to General Zoology, 1835. Wood engraving.

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Figure 24. Thylacinus cynocephalus in John Gould, The Mammals of Australia, 1851. Lithograph.

Figure 24.1. “Head, of the size of life” in The Mammals of Australia, 1863.

Figure 25. Tasmanian Wolf. Preparatory drawing by H. C. Richter for lithograph in John Gould, The Mammals of Australia. Watercolour and pencil. Licence granted courtesy of The Right Hon. the Earl of Derby 2009.

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9

Figure 26. Thylacinus cynocephalus in Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London XXVIII, 1850. Lithograph. Zoological Society of London.

Figure 27. Tasmanian Wolf. Preparatory drawing by Joseph Wolf for lithograph in Proceedings of Zoological Society of London, 1850. Pencil on brown paper. Zoological Society of London.

Figure 29. The Thylacine in Philip Sclater, Zoological Sketches by Joseph Wolf, 1861. Lithograph. Australian Museum Research Library.

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Figure 32. Tasmanian Tiger in G. J. Broinowski, Birds and Mammals of Australia, 1884. Lithograph.

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Figure 37. De Buidelwolf in L. A. J. Burgersdijk, De Dieren, Afgebeeld, Beschreven en in Hunne Levenswijze Geschetst, 1864. Lithograph. Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office.

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Figure 51. Beutelwolf in Meyers Grosse Konversations-Lexikon, 1902–8. Chromolithograph. Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office.

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Figure 75. Advertisement for C. and J. Degraves’ Cascade Brewery Hobart, 1870. Chromolithograph. © Cascade Brewery Company Limited.

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Figure 76. Cascade Premium Lager advertisement (1998–2002). Courtesy of Cascade Brewery Company Pty Ltd.

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Figure 77. Cascade Premium Lager label (1985–2006). Courtesy of Cascade Brewery Company Pty Ltd.

Figure 79. Tasmanian coat of arms. Approved 1917, proclaimed 1919.

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CHAPTER FIVE

THE IMPACT OF PHOTOGRAPHY The medium of photography was, and still is, generally perceived as fundamentally different from engraving and lithography because it carries the impression of a closer relationship between signifier and referent. This affinity has been evoked in a number of ways. For instance, Ian Jeffrey states that photography was a discovery rather than an invention of “the capacity of nature to register its own images” and that while artists made illustrations, photographs were described as taken or captured. In a similar vein, Susan Sontag writes “the painter constructs, the photographer discloses”. Roland Barthes has famously pronounced photography to be “literally an emanation of the referent. From the real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here [my italics]”. He cites the Latin meaning of ‘photograph’—imago lucis opera expressa— “which is to say: image revealed, ‘extracted,’ ‘mounted,’ ‘expressed’ (like the juice of a lemon) by the action of light”. And, writing about what photography means, Sontag comments “photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it”.1 The authoritative impact of the photographs in this chapter emerges from interactions between the denotative claims of photography, the location of the animals in the pictures, and the assertions of the scientific frame in which they are found. However, all photographs of living thylacines were taken in zoos and so early images often include distracting or undesirable material. Later, such details were edited out and sometimes “composite pictures of preferred worlds” were constructed.2 For, while the institution of the zoo in the early twentieth century still projected appealing ideas about imperial power—demonstrating, as it does, human control over animals— contemporary readings of the photographs may have been compromised by a number of other factors. First, concerns about the 1 Jeffrey, Photography, 10; Sontag, On Photography, 93, 4–5; Barthes, Camera Lucida, 80–81. 2 Jeffrey, Photography, 15–18.

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treatment of animals and the disappearance of species were emerging; second, the messages that the images generate are often in conflict with their texts; and third, when the photographs in these works are considered in relation to previous illustrations of the thylacine they take on a particular significance. That is, photographs of the thylacine not only carry the claim of ‘truth’ inherent in the medium and the frame, but the way they picture the form, situation, attitude and behaviour of the thylacine challenges previous illustrations that demonised the animal. The rectangles of grey or sepia tones inserted in printed text in early twentieth century zoological literature are now showing signs of age, although their reproduction in a book, as Sontag points out, guarantees longevity to the fragile objects, as well as exposure to a wide audience. Most of the photographs mentioned in this chapter appear to be ‘captured moments’, although the effect of changes in size and amplification of detail from one publication to another can be significant. Framed by knowledge of the thylacine’s disappearance, these images of the animal in zoos around the world, the last of the species seen by humans in locations outside Tasmania, become charged with meaning, redolent with connotations. They are a documentation of the thylacine in captivity, a record of the process of extinction, and a momento mori of the species. As pictures of the few members that survived into the twentieth century, they epitomise the results of hostility towards the species and provide sad and fascinating subjects for analysis. The Open Door Two of the earliest photographs of the thylacine in natural history works show animals in their enclosure at the National Zoological Park in Washington DC in front of a doorway with large stone steps. One appears in 1904 in Nature: A Weekly Illustrated Journal of Science and the other in the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1904. The Washington Zoo received a female with three pouch-young in 1902. One of the young died nine days after arrival, another died in 1905. An adult male was purchased in July 1904 but died, along with the remaining female pouch-young, in 1909.3 The 3

Moeller contradicts this date (Beutelwolf, 150). He states that the male arrived at the zoo in 1904 but died “only several months later due to an infection of the

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publication date of the Report implies that the photograph shows the original female and one of her offspring, or two of the young animals brought to the zoo that had grown to early maturity. If the Report was published after July 1904, the photograph may show the female and a new male arrival. The National Zoological Park, founded in 1889, was situated on 167 acres of land near Washington, “beautifully diversified by hill and valley, forest and stream” and administered by the Smithsonian Institution. The Illustrated Guide Book to the National Zoological Park 1902 notes that many animals lived in “natural surroundings instead of being cooped in a narrow cage” and that the “slightest advantage in culture, housing and general environment [was] unhesitatingly adopted”.4 The five thylacines at Washington Zoo between 1902 and 1909 were kept in the Lion House or large enclosure for predators and, according to an article in the Washington Post, they were the “centre of attention” on their arrival.5 In comparison to photographs of the thylacine in other zoos, these photographs support the claims made by the Guide and indicate the elevated status given to the species—the enclosure is impressive; it looks clean and contains natural materials; the animals have glossy coats and their bodies seem to be in excellent condition. Contrary to most imagetexts produced in other mediums, they suggest the thylacine was an animal worth nurturing. The second of these photographs is also the clearest and most informative of any in zoological literature published in this period. The small image that appears in the journal Nature contains many of the elements found individually in other photographs of this period; for instance, a doorway, a log, a wall and hard, sparse floor. However, paradoxically, it is an anomaly because it contains all these elements and because of its balanced composition (Figure 53). It appears in the Notes section of the international journal, where each paragraph deals with one of a variety of subjects. The photograph is surrounded by an eight-line text and is the only picture on the page, so that the imagetext about the thylacine is isolated and its imporbowel/intestines [trans. Cathi Greve]”. However, Wemmer makes it clear that according to Washington Zoo records it was the male offspring that succumbed to “hemorrhagic enteritis” only two months after the original female’s demise (“Opportunities Lost,” 2). 4 Evans, Illustrated Guide, 5. 5 Wemmer, “Opportunities Lost,” 2; Moeller, Beutelwolf, 150–58.

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Figure 53. Tasmanian Wolf in Nature: A Weekly Illustrated Journal of Science, 1904. Photograph.

tance intensifies. The editor explains that Professor H. F. Osborn has sent the “interesting” photograph of the “Tasmanian wolf” to the journal. Osborn was a director of the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1904, and had been among the founders of the New York Zoological Society in 1895 from which the Wildlife Conservation Society traces its origin.6 It is not clear how this association influences the text, as it takes a purely scientific stance, objectifying the figure in the photograph and encouraging inspection of the body as a skeletal ‘system’. It states that the photographer, Mr. E. T. Keller, has observed that “in the resting position the stiff tail is used to support the animal” and interprets and explains for the reader the function and relevance of the position.7 This text is one of few considered so far that speaks directly and exclusively to the image it accompanies. The words guide and limit the viewer’s gaze by suggesting what is “interesting” about the picture but, compositionally, the dark space behind the figure, that implies an open door, is the focal point in this scene. The bare branch of the log that bends from the tip of the thylacine’s tail and protrudes 6 Gregg Mitman’s article “When Nature Is the Zoo” discusses concepts of ‘nature’, the exercise of power, and the vision of Osborn’s son Fairfield for the Bronx Zoo several decades later. The essay also provides useful insights about visual representations of animals, including photography and wildlife illustration. 7 Anon., “Notes: Resting Position,” 587.

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exactly parallel to its length is a powerful visual distracter away from the animal’s body. All but the most determinedly focused gaze could resist following this line of sight and it is the first of many photographs of the thylacine in zoos in which a doorway is a significant element. Jeffery comments that in a photograph called “The Open Door” in the first book of photographs ever published, The Pencil of Nature, elements in the scene constructed by William Talbot merely suggest and memory does the rest—“the doorway awaits an occupant”.8 Indeed, the doorway in Keller’s photograph of the captive thylacine suggests the possibility of escape, if only from the scrutiny of the spectator. This raises the subject of the viewer. Although natural history was still popular at the turn of the twentieth century, Nature contains articles about meteorology, geology, medicine and physics, and it may also have attracted readers on the periphery of scientific endeavour. So how many different ways can this photograph operate for its viewers? Did an un-disciplined reader’s gaze perceive the animal’s curious look toward something beyond the lower left edge of the picture? Would anyone have registered the possibility that the figure might disappear through the doorway? Or did readers only see Thylacinus cynocephalus in a “resting position”? While the small, carefully composed rectangular picture is imprisoned by printed words that attempt to focus and limit the viewer’s perception, it can generate multiple resonances for a wandering eye. The second photograph, in a report from the National Zoological Park, projects considerably different impressions, framed as it is by a publication and text closely associated with a national institution. It shows a pair of thylacines with their bodies at right angles to each other (Figure 54). From the point of view of zoological illustration this would seem the perfect image: it shows both profile and frontal views of the animal. But there is much more to this picture than is contained in a standard zoological image. The heavy vertical and horizontal stones that frame the closed door to the sleeping quarters of the Lion House have a monumental appearance that calls to mind Middle Eastern sites, particularly structures like the pyramids and other tombs that were such popular subjects in the early twentieth century. The heaviness of the massive stones is accentuated by a scattering of leaves in the foreground; the lines of the doorway mimic the 8

Jeffrey, Photography, 10, 21.

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Figure 54. Tasmanian “Zebra Wolf ” in Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution 1903, 1904. Photograph

animals’ positions, while the weight of the smooth stones contrasts with the densely furred coats of the thylacines, and their size dwarfs the animals.9 But at the same time, these structures invest the thylacines with dignity and importance as they gather the implications of common phrases associated with these architectural elements: for instance, ‘ancient world’, ‘timeless edifice’ and ‘King of the Beasts’. Along with the gloss on the fur and the figures’ dignified stance, an impression of noble animals is projected. In their book Zoo Culture, Mullan and Marvin include similar photographs of “exotic animals in exotic buildings” and point out that these buildings were designed to produce a sense of the exotic, rather than to benefit the animals they housed.10

9 A close-up of this photograph appears in a number of secondary sources. For instance, Paddle, Last Tasmanian Tiger, 52; Moeller, Beutelwolf, 166. Cropping plays down the impact of the structure behind the figures of the animals, but the effect of the massive blocks is even more obvious in a version of this photo that appears on page 172 of Guiler and Godard, Tasmanian Tiger. 10 Mullan and Marvin, Zoo Culture, 88–89.

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The text in the Report is brief, mentioning the “Tasmanian zebra wolf” among 140 other specimens that made up the “considerable additions” to the collection secured for the Park by the United States consul Dr. F. W. Gooding in Newcastle, New South Wales. The gift included a Tasmanian devil, a pair of black swans and a wedge-tailed eagle, but the zebra wolf is mentioned first, as if it was the most important of the “unusually interesting fauna” from Australia. An entry in the Illustrated Guide to the National Zoological Park 1902 calls the newly arrived Zebra Wolf “the rarest animal in the Zoo” and mentions that the female with young are “the only ones ever exhibited in this country”. It points out that, although this animal resembles a wolf “in appearance and habits”, the thylacine is a “true” marsupial that carries its young in a pouch like the kangaroo but owing to “destructiveness to sheep” the species will soon be “as extinct as the dodo”. Frank Baker, the superintendent of the Zoo and writer of its report for 1903, was not always so restrained in his comments about the thylacine. He is quoted in an article in the Washington Post in 1903 as saying that, because they had no competition and an abundance of food, Australian animals were the “stupidest animals in the world” which accounted for “their rapid extermination … by the British”. In the same article he calls the thylacine a “natural-born idiot”. The New York Herald described a thylacine in Washington Zoo as “a queer animal” that was really a wolf and “quite fierce”.11 The introduction to the Guide states that the Zoo was established largely by the efforts of William Hornaday “for the preservation of the native animals that were threatened with extermination”, and that its existence was opposed by subsequent Senators and Congressmen who were unable to see any benefits derived from preserving them. A later book in the Smithsonian series, called Wild Animals In and Out of the Zoo, reveals that the National Zoological Park had its genesis in a collection of living specimens brought to serve as models for taxidermists, including William Hornaday, at the Smithsonian Institution. These animals were afterwards killed or forwarded to the Philadelphia Zoo but, due to public interest in the animals, it was thought that a zoological park would “not only be the means of exhibiting animals to people who wanted to see them, but would also increase their interest in them, and the zoo itself might even be of 11

Baker, “Report of Superintendent,” 67–69; Evans, Illustrated Guide, 20; Baker, Washington Post, March 8, 1903; Anon., “Only Marsupial Wolf,” n.p.

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Figure 55. The Thylacine in P. Chalmers Mitchell, Illustrated Official Guide to the London Zoological Society’s Gardens, 1904. Photograph.

value in breeding and perpetuating some of the nearly gone species”.12 There is a discernible difference in attitudes toward animals in American publications when compared with most British and Australian works. The photographs discussed in the remainder of this chapter, apart from one, are of animals in London Zoo and some of them present an impression of the thylacine that is in striking contrast to images of individuals in American zoos. These different conceptualisations draw attention to the complexity and instability of historical ideas about the species.13 In London Zoo The photograph that appears in the Illustrated Official Guide to the London Zoological Society’s Gardens in Regent’s Park 1904 is replete with signifiers of confinement (Figure 55). Only a few animals are 12 13

Evans, Illustrated Guide, 20, 5; Mann, Wild Animals, 2–3. Brower, “Take Only Photographs,” n.p.

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illustrated in the Guide and photographs of the zebra, lion and tiger are well defined and show widely spaced bars behind the animals. On the other hand, the picture of the gaunt thylacine enclosed in a dingy space has every surface marked with barred lines. Bars shadow the brick wall behind the figure as a faint shaft of light descends to the floor of the enclosure; weak patches of light produce broad bands on the dusty ground; to the right of the animal the coarse chicken wire that covers the closely-barred wall and the stripes on the thylacine’s back, echo the repeated parallel lines once more. The five lines of text state that the thylacine resembles a Wolf or Wild Dog and is “very fierce”; that “as it does great damage to flocks it is being killed off by settlers”; and that it has dark stripes across the greater part of its back.14 This text underscores the notion of captivity and extends the idea of ‘barring’ to the animal’s body. Now the thylacine’s stripes seem to work with the bars and the wire to suggest that members of the species are marked for imprisonment and destruction. In 1904 thylacines were housed in a small shed in the northern corner of London Zoo near the much larger kangaroo sheds and paddock. This photograph draws attention to the regular, oblong shape of the bricks in the wall of the sleeping quarters. The heavy render between them imparts a feeling of impregnability to the building. In stark contrast to the illustration in Nature, the animal’s torso is positioned in front of a dark, closed door made of wide planks. Like the props in nineteenth-century photo-portraits that signify the social status of the human subject, this solid cage positions the thylacine as a dangerous animal. And there is no possibility of escaping the gaze of any of the 600,000 spectators who visited London Zoo in 1904. The thylacine is secured for scrutiny by the closed door, and then by the viewfinder of the camera and the play of light and shadow in the photograph. In response to the surroundings, the animal’s body seems to disintegrate; it has a papery, insubstantial quality, the light breaks the planes of its form, shadows create hollows and waste muscles. Sontag is concerned that the shock of photographed atrocities wears off after thirty years of saturation,15 but photographs such as this seem to gather poignancy with knowledge of the species’ extinction and represent the tragic loss of many thousands of individual animals and hundreds of species brought about by colonising nations. 14 15

Mitchell, Illustrated Guide, 94–95. Sontag, On Photography, 110.

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Figure 56. Thylacine or Tasmanian Wolf in Arthur Mee, Popular Science, 1912. Photograph.

As if to facilitate closer inspection of the figure, the photograph is enlarged and cropped in science and natural history books in the years after it appeared in this publication. Peter Wollen draws attention to the way photographs function in time—“their currency, their circulation and re-cycling”—and the way they can go through “a whole history of re-publication and re-contextualisation” that results in new perceptions of an image. This effect is particularly apparent in an indistinct, reversed version of this photograph, published in 1912 in volume III of a multi-volume work by Arthur Mee called Popular Science (Figure 56). Imperial ambitions and the confidence of a new century is communicated by the triumphant tone in volume I, where a picture opposite the contents page shows a man standing on a globe with arms stretched toward the sun and the caption “The conqueror of the earth—will he master the sun?”. In this reproduction of the photograph most of the cropping has taken place at the top of the photo, resulting in a wide, shallow, rectangular picture. The door to the inner enclosure is now barely discernible, the light is softer than in the previous version and, if the viewer’s eyes focus on the floor, the closer view now reveals debris. Here, a branch or large twig beneath the animal’s feet functions as a punctum. The twig and texture of the objects on the floor have a “metonymic expansion”—they seem to epitomise the abjection experienced by a thylacine in a zoo enclosure. Now neglect, deprivation,

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dirt and waste pulsate in every minute detail of the photograph and, like Wollen, “overwhelm the entirety of my reading”.16 The text that accompanies the image is found on the following page. The name “Tasmanian wolf” is prominent and the definitive description of the animal is: “stupidity and ferocity embodied”. It is noted that “in reality [the thylacine is] infinitely removed” from the “true wolf”, that it is rather like “a kangaroo masquerading as a wolf”, and that unless some sanctuary can be reserved for it the animal is “bound shortly to be exterminated”. Mee’s book is a popular, encyclopaedic work that was widely disseminated in the early twentieth century. Much of the text consists of highly dramatic, value-laden and wildly suggestive narrative. In the case of the thylacine, the entry implies that the animal in the cage deserves to be neglected. The section on pouched mammals in which the description of the thylacine is found, constantly reinforces what Paddle calls “placental chauvinism”. A sub-heading in Mee’s text explains that marsupials are “A Low Type of Small-Brained Animal Approaching the Reptile, and Developed Chiefly in Australia” and later adds that “all marsupials are non-placental; there is no connection between the developing embryo and the parent body, such as is found in the case of all the higher mammals”. The text concedes that “authorities differ as to whether the marsupial is excessively primitive or merely degenerate” and concludes that “the answer lies still hidden in the rocks”. Australasia is referred to as the marsupial’s “vast asylum” and, while mentioning how varied the members of the order are, it refers to the “hideous thylacine, or pouched wolf”.17 There is little in the picture to support this description. The form of the thylacine is dog-like and looks vulnerable rather than stupid or hideous, while the physical disjunction between image and text and the photograph of a snarling Tasmanian devil below this picture intensifies the thylacine’s timid appearance. And it is the photograph rather than the text that invites attention, patches of light encouraging a thorough inspection of each corner of the frame. On every page of this section of the book, the photographs of pouched mammals challenge traditional ideas about them in one way or another. In her work on photographs of war and disaster, Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag remarks that “photographs lay down routes of refer16 17

Woollen, “Fire and Ice” n.p.; Barthes, Camera Lucida, 49. Mee, Popular Science, 2014, 2007–9; Paddle, Last Tasmanian Tiger, passim.

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ence, and serve as totems of causes: sentiment is more likely to crystallise around a photograph than around a verbal slogan”. But it would be unwise to assume the effects of the image I am discussing when the text that frames it restates such a powerfully entrenched notion of colonial supremacy. At a time of both renewal and rethinking about the past, there is only a hint of ambivalence in one last line about the Tasmanian mammals, the thylacine and the Tasmanian devil: “unless steps are taken for their preservation, posterity will be deprived of these two brutally fascinating examples of carnivorous mammals at their lowest stage of development”. Perhaps this sentence exemplifies Sontag’s point that photographs of atrocities may give rise to opposing responses, among them, “a bemused awareness … that terrible things happen”, although the chief concern here seems to be the loss to science of a “fascinating” object of interest. 18 An Australian work called The Wonders of Animal Life, published 1928–29, recycles this photograph in a differently cropped and considerably enlarged version, but with no specific text about the thylacine. However, it takes a slightly kinder view of marsupials and includes a chapter on extinction, demonstrating the growth of concern about species’ extermination in the 1920s. Under the heading “A Land of Living Fossils” this text refers to Australia as “a sort of biological backwater”, an “almshouse for antiquated animals” and a refuge of the destitute. This use of the discourse of the Great Depression underway at the time, illustrates how narratives about animals are often used “to support the prevailing social and economic conditions”.19 The text is also heavily influenced by contemporary interpretations of evolutionary theory and names the thylacine and the Tasmanian devil as two of four animals “whose total extinction is only a matter of time”. It states, “so far as extinction is concerned, every race of animal, man included, has to fight against the danger of [extinction] and, in Nature, there is no mercy for the unfit”. In a defensive outline of extinctions that have already occurred, the disappearance of animal species is still mentioned in terms of doom, as if pre-ordained, although several cases of careless, even “ruthless” extermination by humans are cited.20 Although a concerned, rather than triumphant, attitude is detectable in this work, it also demon18 19 20

Sontag, Regarding the Pain, 76, 12; Mee, Popular Science, 2014. Turner, “Nostalgia for Primitive,” 63–66. Hammerton, Wonders of Animal Life, 965–76, 1203–217.

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Figure 57. Thylacine in Graham Renshaw, More Natural History Essays, 1905. Photograph.

strates how persistently the stock phrases of nineteenth-century scientific discourse about animals and extinction were used. While there is evidence of a change in perceptions about marsupials and extinction, a number of natural history works in the early twentieth century exhibit this ambivalent position. In this enlarged version of the photograph taken by Walter Dando, the closed door behind the thylacine is clearly distinguishable and it is interesting to note that, although the Tasmanian devil is also designated as “doomed”, the photograph of the species in this book shows an animal with a glossy coat and an alert expression sitting on a bed of straw. Photographs were a primary element in the disruption of traditional forms of representation and, in successive imagetexts, helped generate confusing messages. An even more disturbing image of a thylacine first appears with an unusual text in More Natural History Essays by Graham Renshaw in 1905 (Figure 57). The photograph by the writer of the essays shows the same male animal residing in the London Zoo from 1902 to 1906

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that appears in the previous set of images. However, now the figure is on the other side of the open doorway and a stone drinking-trough is included in the picture. The photo is also taken at a different time of day and light floods the cage in broad shafts, modifying the dark and dingy impression given by the earlier photo. The straw visible on the floor inside the dark gap of the doorway imparts a faintly comforting note, but the bent back of the thylacine, the positioning of the tail, the spare coldness of the trough and the distorted wire mesh through which the animal is gazing, have an overwhelmingly depressing effect. The thylacine in the picture begs for sympathy, particularly as the caption beneath the image says “note the curious resemblance to a dog”—positioning the animal as a potential friend rather than enemy. This appeal is intensified when the thylacine’s stripes are compared with fronds of ferns and said to be “protective”.21 These are several of a series of textual references, connotations and denotations that distinguish this imagetext from others of the era. The long and interesting essay by Renshaw that accompanies this image begins with the words “across the zoological history of the nineteenth century one may well write the word ‘extermination’; for as Omar destroyed the priceless treasures of the Alexandrian library so have others robbed the world forever of many beautiful and interesting animals”. The text continues that, hopefully, ‘preservation’ will eventually be the word inscribed on the history of the twentieth century, but admits that the protection of “destructive beasts” is a “difficult problem”. However, Renshaw does not exhibit the usual apathy, pointing out that such animals have their “due place in nature” and that “once gone are gone forever”. Although he exposes errors in scientific texts, he includes stories of the thylacine’s fondness for “live mutton” and refers to “a mountain, indeed alpine, species [my italics]”, as well as including several very obvious mistakes in relation to dates. Renshaw states that no other photographs have been found of thylacines in London Zoo, that this is one of several he has taken, and that “the value of such life studies is apparent in view of the many 21 Renshaw, More Essays, 215. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin writes about the withdrawal of a dog’s whole hindquarters and the resultant drawing of the tail inwards as a reaction to danger or discomfort. He also notices the reverse: that the tail is carried aloft when an animal trots with “high elastic steps”. Alternately, a crouching, submissive position attends the approach of a familiar human (51–53, 121–23). Many of Darwin’s observations were made when watching animals at London Zoo. See Moeller, Beutelwolf, 158 for a table of thylacine holdings at London Zoo.

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inaccuracies perpetrated on the tiger wolf by artists and taxidermists”.22 This statement is one of a number in zoological works at the time indicating that photographs were considered ‘truer’ representations of animals than images made by other means. The “inaccuracies perpetrated on the tiger wolf” mentioned in Renshaw’s text are those of form and do not include misleading representations of ‘character’ and behaviour that I have discussed, but even in trying to define the thylacine’s appearance, Renshaw falls into the trap of assuming that what he sees in London Zoo is typical of the species. For instance, while he points out that “rarity much militates against any European artist figuring it from life” he goes on to state that “the adult thylacine is really a snaky beast” with a “half-starved appearance”. This impression was obviously given by the confined and isolated animal in the zoo—the only situation in which a live animal was usually seen—and was not necessarily representative of the species as a whole. The essay also includes a discussion of the behaviour of the “Regent’s Park thylacine”, with the comment that it took “exercise” by running backwards and forwards between the “sleeping apartment” and the outer yard. The text refers to the photograph, interpreting the position of the figure as an abrupt pause in its motion, with head raised “as if to reconnoitre” and notes that the thylacine took little notice of an attendant and was unusually silent. Renshaw draws on “Mr. Gunn’s” remarks about the behaviour of the “wild thylacine” and notes that “this individual, at any rate” is silent. Unlike the comments regarding the animal’s form, he now acknowledges that this is an individual animal whose situation may affect behaviour. However, a reader’s tendency to extend notions of the particular to the general may be stronger when the thylacine’s attitude is compared with that of the Tasmanian devil in the adjacent cage. The text notes that the devil is “ever ready … to bite and to utter its ferocious, sobbing growl”.23 Here, a difference in the behaviour of the two species directly related to empirical observation is suggested, rather than the similar ferocity for both species usually expressed in traditional representations. This imagetext persistently undermines previous representations of the thylacine. Renshaw’s natural history essay is also significant because it is the earliest by far to mention specific measures for conservation in rela22 23

Renshaw, More Essays, 214–28. Ibid., 229–30.

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tion to the thylacine. Renshaw hopes that animals bred in Melbourne and Adelaide zoos will be the foundation of a “menagerie race” that will “stave off the day when the thylacine will vanish forever”. The text suggests that “certain of the wilder districts”, such as the central tableland of Tasmania, be set aside as animal reserves or that an uninhabited island be turned into a “natural sanctuary”.24 “Truly”, it states, the fate of the thylacine “hangs in the balance”. Read after the species’ extinction, this and other elements in the text do powerful work on the photographic image. By interpreting the remark of a naturalist that “I have seen one and shall never see another” as an omen, and by inscribing the captivity of the animal as a pause before the species’ final extermination, the fall of the shutter emerges as a moment in which the distorted, fragile, vulnerable figure is ‘captured’ for a second time.25 These ideas infuse the image with poignancy: it is now a rare and prec(ar)ious visualisation of a lost possibility—the ‘if only’ of the species’ history. But in 1905, a reading of the photograph would have been based on a different set of ideas and conventions. Thirty-three years later a close-up, cropped reprint of this photograph appears with a condensed version of Renshaw’s text in the Journal of the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire (Figure 58). The short article now calls the thylacine “almost extinct” and an edited view of the photograph has the same effect as the closeup of the photograph discussed above—it reveals and draws attention to textural details that are not discernible in the earlier image. The close-up emphasises the light slanting in broad shafts. It shines on the figure’s nose, highlights the fur under the eye and smudges the stripes on its back. Oddly, the picture is cropped on every side except the one that shows the open door. The effect of these contradictory motifs is to heighten pathos as the eye responds first to warmth, then pain; dark, then hope. It is a deeply disturbing image and, compounding the concern it generates, the text concentrates on the unique fea24 In Paddle, Last Tasmanian Tiger, 224–31 and 58, there is a discussion of attempts to breed thylacines in Australian zoos, including Melbourne Zoo, and a photograph of a female at Adelaide Zoo with young in her pouch. It was not until 1925 that a publication called Save Australia: A Plea for the Right use of our Flora and Fauna suggested that a breeding program for the thylacine at Healesville Wildlife Sanctuary in the state of Victoria, Australia (Barrett, Save Australia, 88) and not until 1938 that naturalist Michael Sharland mentioned the idea of a sanctuary for the thylacine in Tasmania (Sharland, “In Search,” 38). 25 Renshaw, More Essays, 231–32.

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Figure 58. Thylacine in Journal of the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire, 1938. Photograph.

tures of the animal, reinforced by the label “Thylacine” rather than Tasmanian or marsupial ‘wolf’, and demonstrates how it could be represented in a completely different way to constructions appearing in texts discussed so far. This revision is achieved by omitting many of the phrases repeated in earlier works, avoiding mention of sheepkilling, and implying that the species should be valued for the features that are not common in other animals.26 This text works with the light in the picture and the caption on the illustration to affect the way the figure is perceived. It constructs an animal worthy of the viewer’s sympathy and of preservation. Photographs of thylacines not only show the location of an animal, but also suggest the species’ situation and status in a specific zoo at a particular time. The background of the photographs is crucial to understanding how these images operate and the transformations that occur when the photographs are used in natural history works. The closed door and brick wall at London Zoo is a powerful, impenetrable backdrop in the next set of images. The first of these is a photograph by L. Medland of a thylacine with an open mouth in The Handy Natural History: Mammals published in 1909 by the Religious 26

Renshaw, “The Thylacine,” 47–49.

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Figure 59. Thylacine in Ernest Protheroe, The Handy Natural History: Mammals, 1909. Photograph.

Tract Society (Figure 59). The rear portion of the animal’s body is in such deep shadow that the legs are barely visible, but this lack of clarity only serves to draw attention to the jaws that become as potent a symbol of threat as the use of wolf imagery. The relationship of the door to the animal is changed with each photographic representation—in this image the thylacine seems to be guarding the door or voicing its opposition to the (en)closure. Pictures of the thylacine with open mouth have received considerable attention; they seem to inspire macabre fascination and have been constantly recycled in the late twentieth century. Paddle writes of a threat-yawn where the thylacine faces the object of concern and emits a hiss. The thylacine in this photograph was obviously not facing the photographer, so was either threatening something else or merely yawning, but the subtleties of behaviour and situation may be irrelevant to many readers conditioned to equate the sight of a predator’s teeth with attack. The first line of the text—“the Thylacine, or Tasmanian Wolf, is the largest of the carnivorous mammals”— encourages this view, although the remainder of the entry contains references to marsupials (“a true marsupial … a well developed pouch”) and the dog (“very dog-like … clean-limbed … hunting by scent”).27 Whenever the interpretation of photographs can be easily 27

Paddle, Last Tasmanian Tiger, 67; Protheroe, Handy Natural History, 445.

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Figure 60. The Tasmanian Wolf in P. Chalmers Mitchell, Official Guide to the Gardens of the Zoological Society of London, 1911. Photograph.

directed to support the perceived aggressive nature of the animal, it becomes the centre of visual and verbal texts in natural history works. In this case, the brick walls and the door contain the suggested violence and the fortress-like structure is implicitly justified. This is also an example of a photograph that is ‘posed’, in that the photographer chose to close the shutter when the animal opened his or her mouth. It would be interesting to know why this picture was chosen for the book, whether the writer or publisher of the work accepted this image rather than another, or whether words or image were selected first. In direct contrast with the images in London Zoo discussed so far, photography also ‘captured’ the thylacine in the kinds of attitudes that German artists attempted to illustrate late in the nineteenth century. One of the most spirited of these is a picture of a young female animal that was temporarily located in the Lemur House on the north side of the Zoo and photographed by W. S. Berridge circa 1909.28 The figure is in front of a low wall and wire fence in the Official Guide to the Gardens of the Zoological Society of London 1911 and Brehms Tierleben in 1912 (Figure 60), but in The Book of the 28

Edwards, London Zoo, 195.

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Animal Kingdom by William Westall in 1910 and Animal Life of the World by Crossland and Parrish in 1934, the photograph has substantial areas of the background removed. According to the Guide, the Lemur House was erected in 1908 “partly to prepare for the Australian Exhibition of that year, and partly to provide Reception Houses where newly arrived animals could be placed under observation and kept in a kind of quarantine”. Later, however, due to “rearrangements in the Gardens”, the two artificially heated houses, each over a hundred feet long, were chiefly used for lemurs and animals “temporarily dislodged from their quarters”. These included the CatBear, a Tamandua Ant-eater and the Thylacine or Tasmanian wolf, that is very fierce, “a lithe and active creature” with a curious wheezing cry that shows its affinity with the kangaroo in “its stupidity and the shape of its hind quarters”. On the other hand, Westall expresses concern about the situation of the species when he notes the increasing rarity of “such an interesting animal as the Thylacine” and includes the ironic comment that “science demands … [it] should not become a mere memory or be represented only by skulls and stuffed skins in the museums of the world”. But, typical of many works published in this era, linguistic biases in the use of words such as “lair”, “ferocity” and references to sheep-killing also appear in the text, so that the old mythological discourse competes with ideas about preservation.29 On the whole, the photographs in the Guide do nothing to support its discriminative text. Indeed, they encapsulate the timidity, vulnerability and attractiveness of a number of different species and illustrate the self-possessed charm that animals often exhibit. The figure of the young thylacine with its tail elevated is reminiscent of the images engraved by Indigenous Australians on the rocks on Angel Island that are discussed in the introduction to this book. The photograph indicates that the actions of an animal caught by the camera could, indeed, erase the European stereotype of the thylacine. In the confines of London Zoo, this young animal is recorded exhibiting the behaviour Aboriginal people often observed in the wild. The slippage between image and text is exacerbated by their separation from each other and the brevity of the description, but the ideational disjunction is forced in a different direction by the photograph of a hairy armadillo on the same page and diagonally opposite the picture of a 29

Michell, Official Guide, 89–90; Westall, Animal Kingdom, 207.

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thylacine. The armadillo’s hard leathery shell and large claws contrast unfavourably with the fur and flexibility of the thylacine’s body, and it is described as one of a number of similar animals that “like most creatures that in the history of life on the world have resorted to protection, are extinct, having been beaten in the struggle for existence by more active and intelligent forms”.30 This statement challenges the likelihood of the thylacine’s extermination because the species is described earlier as “active” and the photograph shows a lively animal. The picture, indeed, dominates the text and the animal’s agency overrides the words. Unlike the zoo backdrops in other photographs, the rocks, low wall and dense vegetation behind the figure increase the effectiveness of this image because they suggest a garden, rather than a cage, and constitute a powerful statement about the way in which the environment of the zoo may effect the feelings and actions of animals. This picture also speaks volumes about how species can maintain natural behaviour even in confined spaces. Predictably, the edition of the Guide in which this image appears is not held in any Tasmanian library. Another photograph of a thylacine in a 1913 work called Highways and Byways of the Zoological Gardens, visually distances the figure from the brick wall in the background, while the text explicitly draws attention to the idea of confinement and the enclosures at London Zoo (Figure 61). This thylacine has a closed mouth and there are no specific comments about the species but there is a pertinent chapter about wolves, dogs, foxes and zoos. Constance Pocock is one of very few female writers of a zoological work and she expresses intense interest and involvement with the animals in London Zoo. The words she uses are ‘sentimental’ in contrast to the ‘objective’ language expected from scientific discourse and they demonstrate how animals can be represented in very different ways to those in most works discussed so far.31 For instance, Pocock asks “who, as a lover of dogs, could fail to be attracted by a dingo mother nursing a litter of pups”; she writes of the “universal debt owed by man to the dog tribe” and about the wolf at the zoo who was inconsolable and refused food after 30

Mitchell, Official Guide, 93. The word ‘sentimental’ implies that a speaker or writer is expressing sentiments—thoughts influenced by feelings or emotions. See Armstrong, “Cetaceans and Sentiment,” in Freeman et al., Considering Animals, forthcoming, on the conceptualisation of “structures of feeling”—such as sentiment—in relation to nonhuman animals in the modern period. 31

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Figure 61. Tasmanian Wolf in Constance Pocock, Highways and Byways of the Zoological Gardens, 1913. Photograph.

the death of her mate Lobo. She mentions that wolves in small cages never look happy, especially “with the advent of rain, and closing in of day” when they seem “painfully reminded of restraint”. In the style of nineteenth century romantic writing, Pocock includes a poem about the wolves at Regent’s Park in which she imagines life in the Zoo from an animal’s point of view: “Doomed with tortuous tread to wander / In a ten-foot world and Ponder?—/ Caged wolves—/ Of the plaintive, piteous protest / In the voices of the wolves”. She adds the footnote that since these lines were written, the wolves’ dens at London Zoo had undergone improvement, indicating that the cage the thylacine lived in was not the only one in need of attention. In fact, a 1901 news bulletin of the New York Zoological Society reports a “long and severe attack” on the conditions in London Zoo in a pamphlet written by Edmund Selous. The anonymous American writer suggests the extension of the Zoo grounds into the “fifty acres of useless ground” that made up Regent’s Park, noting that the current secretary of the London Zoological Society, William Sclater, has had no success with attempts to obtain

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the area. It is noted: “clearly, it is impossible for the London Zoo to become a Zoological Park, with abundant room for all the animals”.32 Few illustrations and texts in zoological works are so decisive in their suggestions as those in Pocock’s work and the New York Zoological Society bulletin. Volume I of The Living Animals of the World: A Popular Natural History 1913 shows how contradictory messages can be produced when more than one image is used (Figure 62). The upper picture of the thylacine in this work is a head and neck cropping of Figure 59 with the caption “Tasmanian Wolf” and “this photograph shows the great width of gape of this ferocious animal”.33 The lower photograph shows a thylacine sniffing the floor of the enclosure in front of the same door before which the animal in Figure 55 is positioned. Because it is so ordinary, the image has entirely different connotations from the photograph above it. The sun is flooding the figure with light, and its thin form gives the impression of a gaunt, even emaciated animal. As in Figure 61 and the wood engravings of German artists, the quality of the animal’s fur becomes the focus of the picture especially, in this case, where the sun highlights it. The prominent sinews in the thin bent hind legs give the figure a defenceless appearance and, despite the harsh surfaces of wire, brick and concrete, the bowed head and intent attitude suggest an animal at ease and an undetected spectator. This picture is inserted within the text for the Tasmanian devil and it is only by reading the small print underneath it that a distinction between the two species is made. It says, “in this photograph are shown nearly all the chief characteristic points of the Tasmanian wolf”.34 It is a caption more appropriate to the illustration discussed above, for this picture shows much more than the “characteristic points” of this particular animal: it illustrates the distressing results of conditions in London Zoo for most thylacines in the early twentieth century. The text that accompanies the two photographs multiplies the mixed messages projected by the images. It emphasises threatening aspects of the thylacine’s behaviour, notes that it is confined to inaccessible mountainous districts, and describes European settlement as “compassing” the animal’s extermination. But the entry also includes the information that the “very fine young male specimen” then at 32

Pocock, Highways and Byways, 71–76; Anon., “Criticism,” 43. This photograph will be discussed in more detail in chapter 6 under “Cropping the Figure”. 34 Cornish, Living Animals, 373. 33

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Figure 62. Tasmanian wolf in C. J. Cornish ed., The Living Animals of the World: A Popular Natural History, 1913. Photograph.

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Regent’s Park was quickly on very good terms with its keeper although it “snaps rather promiscuously at those attempting to cultivate its close acquaintanceship”. These lines are directly beside the image of the open mouth; however, the text refers to the “successful yawning pose photograph [my italics]” and does not attribute the actions of the thylacine to ferocity, as the photo’s caption implies, but to “its somewhat imperfect sense of vision during the daytime”.35 The two images now seem to illustrate different parts of the text. In terms of the imagetext as a whole, the lower picture, in particular, shows how photographs destabilise the representational control previously exercised in works of this type; they allow for a complex play of meanings, as stereotypes are diverted, displaced, undermined and challenged. A very similar picture of a thylacine at Regent’s Park Zoo, this time positioned in front of the brick wall, is included in Wonders of Animal Life by W. S. Berridge published in 1915, but framing strategies change the messages that the image produces (Figure 63). The thylacine appears with the Tasmanian devil, kea parrot and “kaola” [sic] in a chapter on animals verging on extinction, the inclusion of which is a feature of early twentieth-century zoological works. The text focuses on the kea’s propensity for sheep-killing and asserts that “it will be a time for rejoicing amongst sheep-farmers in New Zealand (but not amongst naturalists) when they are completely exterminated”. This explicit distinction between the interests of naturalists and sheep-farmers is unusual in natural history works and indicates that naturalists were beginning to break away from an ideology that furthered the interests of a specific section of the human population. However, the figure of the thylacine in this relatively small photograph appears even smaller because the picture shares the page with a larger figure of a devil. Meyer Shapiro notes that size is a function of value and that “the sizes of things in a picture express a conception that requires no knowledge of a rule for its understanding”: it is already given in language, for example ‘greatest’ and ‘highest’. Shapiro also observes that the rectangular page, as well as the border or “continuous isolating frame” around an image, is an artificial field 35 Ibid., 372–73. The title of Cornish’s book, Living Animals of the World, indicates an awareness of the scope of extinction and the need to distinguish between those that presently survived and those that had not. It was a concept that differentiated this subject matter from works that developed out of the enthusiasm for dinosaurs and fossils in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

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Figure 63. Tasmanian Wolf in W. S. Berrridge, Wonders of Animal Life, 1915. Photograph. State Library of New South Wales.

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or margin. These frames have become so ‘natural’ that their function and the way they operate on a picture is often ignored. He points out that frames belong to the space of the observer rather than the “illusory, three-dimensional world disclosed within and behind. It is a finding and focusing device placed between the observer and the image”.36 In the case of these illustrations, the frames act with their captions to enclose and secure the figures inside them like the bars of the zoo cage and they create an impression of depth in the picture that distances the animal from the viewer. A criss-cross pattern in light and shadow created by the wire on the cage covers the entire photograph of the thylacine in Berridge’s work, connoting a dangerous animal and accentuating the words beneath the picture that pronounce “The Tasmanian Wolf which preys on sheep”. The New York Zoological Society Bulletin 1904 makes the point that “good photographs of animals” can only be secured by entering the enclosures of “wild animals” and that “poor pictures are worse than none, for they repel interest instead of attracting it”.37 The open mouth of the devil performs the same function as the shadow of the bars when combined with the words beneath its frame—“The Tasmanian Devil is of a very savage disposition”.38 These photographs exemplify the way the framing and positioning of a picture on a page, as well as the position of the photographer, can shift the values and change the messages a photograph projects just as much as a text can. The final photograph from London Zoo is also by photographer W. S. Berridge and shows a thylacine in the classic zoological profile that probably required considerable patience to ‘capture’ (Figure 64). Berridge writes about taking photographs of animals in a chapter called “Round the Zoo with a Camera” in Every Boy’s Book of the Zoo, 1911. He calls photographs “pictorial records”, stresses the need for patience in photographing animals and recommends the new Reflex camera, a ‘reflecting’ camera in which “the image passes through the lens and falls on a mirror and from this is reflected onto a glass screen, which is shaded by a hood, and down which the photographer looks”. The advantage of the Reflex was that the image was focussed and, unlike earlier cameras, because the result was seen by 36 37 38

Shapiro, “ On Semiotics,” 212–19. Anon., “Wild Animal Photography,” 133. Berridge, Wonders of Animal Life, 241–44.

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Figure 64. Tasmanian Wolf in Charles Regan Tate ed., Natural History, 1936. Photograph.

looking down the hood there was no guesswork; then, taking the picture only involved pressing a lever to release the shutter “so that the rays of light … pass unimpeded to the sensitised plate”. Berridge stresses the importance of conditions of light in photographing animals in a zoo so that the shadow of the bars does not fall on their bodies, and urges that the “expression of the sitters” and their various moods be given attention. To ensure the zoo environment is minimised, he suggests: “wait your opportunity and place your lens between” the bars.39 Berridge’s careful photographic technique is displayed in the picture reproduced in Natural History (1936), a book edited by the director of the British Museum (Natural History) Charles Regan. It shows the primary elements of an animal’s form, as the traditional zoological illustrations of the early nineteenth century attempted to do; there is no particular behaviour or characteristic displayed, and the background is signified as irrelevant or neutral. However, responses to this conventional zoological figure are compromised by 39

Berridge, Every Boy’s Zoo, 125–32.

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Figure 65. Thylacinus cynocephalus (Tasmanian Wolf) in The Australian Naturalist, 1918. Photograph.

the detail on the body of the animal, which is similar to that seen in the more adeptly engraved naturalistic images. That is, the photograph shows a pelt that is thick and rough, the stripes wave with the muscles, and the soft skin of the ear is palpable. The sensuous body is evoked, rather than a form or skeletal system, it intensifies the harsh austerity of the brick wall and supports feelings of concern conveyed in the text. In all the pictures in this chapter that display this conventional pose, however, the doors and the brick wall of an enclosure are distracting details that place the figure in an ambiguous space, for the zoo has both scientific and popular associations.40 While this picture encourages close observation, objective examination, and a comparison of the thylacine’s form with that of other animals, it also generates complex and unstable readings. Tasmanian Captives One of only two photographs of thylacines taken at a zoo in Tasmania to appear in a natural history work shows four animals in a straw 40 Regan, Natural History, 614. The three images, Figures 59, 60, and 61, were taken by three of London Zoo’s official photographers: Lewis Medland, W. S. Berridge, and David Seth-Smith (Edwards, London Zoo, 14).

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covered enclosure with the caption “The Only Family Ever Reared in Captivity” (Figure 65). It is placed opposite an article about a visit to Beaumaris Zoo, Hobart, by Isabel Busby in volume 4, number 1 of Australian Naturalist (1918) and was also published in the Sun newspaper in 1923. The energetic Mary Roberts established Beaumaris Zoo in 1895 and was associated with it for the next twenty-six years. Eric Guiler’s history of the Zoo notes that Roberts delivered a lecture to the Royal Society of Tasmania on the fauna of the island and moved a motion to protect native animals. He also quotes a woman who had accompanied Mrs. Roberts to the Zoo cages as a young girl and who stated that the thylacines “always seemed so tame to me, and never were ferocious and always looked sad”.41 These responses to the thylacine and, indeed, animals in general, are consistent with those of female writers of zoological works—they show sensitivity to captive creatures and do not see them primarily as a threat, or as a challenge to their professional ambitions as photographers or scientists. In the time Roberts managed Beaumaris Zoo she exchanged a large number of animals with dealers and zoos around the world, London Zoo being the main recipient.42 Three thylacines held there between 1909 and 1914 came from Mary Roberts—some of them are the animals in the photographs I have discussed in the previous paragraphs. Busby’s essay describes the thylacines in the picture as “four fine specimens” and “beautifully striped animals in good condition”. She records that on the morning of her visit a photographer called to take a photo of them, “which he only succeeded in doing after the expenditure of a good deal of time and patience, owing to their restlessness”.43 This “restlessness” is apparent in the positions of the animals in the cramped space shown in the photograph and in the close contact they have with each other. Unfortunately, the presence of this candid photograph of a family of thylacines and its sympathetic text in an Australian journal did not encourage protection for members of the species; many more expressions of interest and concern were required before measures that gave consideration to the thylacine’s survival were implemented in Tasmania.

41 42 43

Guiler, “Beaumaris Zoo,” 153. Ibid., 131; Edwards, London Zoo, 2. Busby, “Visit to Zoo,” 3.

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To illustrate this point, an article published in a Melbourne newspaper in 1923 includes the image under the banner “Fossil Wealth: Australia’s Animals a National Asset”. Australia is called a “museum of living fossils” and the text points out how valuable marsupials are to museums in other parts of the world and that they are neglected and ignored in Australia. The work of Colin Mackenzie appears to have inspired the report, which goes on to stress not only the scientific value of animals, but also their market value as skins and furs, and urges the establishment of a regulated fur industry. It also reports Mackenzie’s comments on the likelihood of more extinctions occurring, but points out that while sheep farmers paid £1 a head for thylacines, “now a good ‘tiger’ is worth £50, and the price is going up”.44 This is the value of a “good specimen” to a museum or zoo and the preservation of the species in the wild is not mentioned. In this essay, the messages generated by the imagetext are completely different from those projected in Busby’s essay—the family crowded into the small space of the enclosure now seem to suggest that an abundance of valuable ‘specimens’ are available in Tasmania: now they are commodities in “good condition” and economic assets that provide boundless opportunities for gain. *** This close analysis of photographs of the thylacine enacts what Matthew Brower refers to as a “denaturalization” of wildlife photography. It demonstrates how photographs operated with cultural institutions, processes and practices to construct multiple subject positions for the species and produce a variety of social relations between human and animal. The framing of images by photographers, writers, publishers or scientific institutions contributed to ideas about the thylacine that influenced outcomes and affected the survival of the species. For the general reader in the early twentieth century, assumptions about the veracity of photography implied that these images disclosed the essential character of the thylacine and informed the public about the situation of the species. Compared to engravings and lithographs, photographs had immediacy and authority that might have overridden written accounts of a species still labeled ‘a vicious predator’ at a time when few individuals were left in Tasmania and sentiments favoring preservation began to appear 44

Dunbabin, “Fossil Wealth,” n.p.

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in American and Australian publications. Photographs did not show a ferocious sheep-killer or a wolf-like beast but an inoffensive, handsome, or spirited caged animal and sometimes agency is expressed when a figure destabilises or resists the rhetorical categorization that is so often apparent in the various contexts of the photograph.45 Photographs, then, were a primary element in the disruption of traditional messages about the thylacine. But, as Steve Baker points out, they do not and cannot “simply represent the ‘real’ animal”.46 Texts are still crucial in interpreting an image; in many cases photographs dominate a text, but when more than one photograph was used in a work, representational control flounders and stereotypes are disabled. In the physical and discursive frame of the zoological work there was an opportunity to make these photographs meaningful in terms of the species’ survival. That is, to “incite a phantasy, take on a meaning, and exercise an effect”.47 But while some texts exploit the potential of photography to work with other factors, such as the rising awareness of extinctions and the loss of species, others send contradictory messages and conflicting implications arise. Often, however, the photographs themselves were simply manipulated in some way or another to reassert traditional stereotypes. This revision, staging, or fabrication of an image meant that the ‘truth’ associated with the medium was further compromised. The fact that these adjustments often remain unrecognised by readers suggests that photographers and publishers were aware of the possibility of deception. And it testifies to a potential and power of photographs that is often ignored.

45

Philo and Wilbert mention the need to avoid the “impression that animals are merely passive surfaces on to which human groups inscribe imaginings and orderings of all kinds” (Beastly Spaces, 5). Philip Armstrong’s review “The Postcolonial Animal” discusses the way agency, rather than fatalism, now has an important role in postcolonial studies, but acknowledges that agency has “material impacts in particular times and places”. He adds: “encountering the postcolonial animal means learning to listen to the voices of all kinds of ‘other’ without either ventriloquising them or assigning to them accents so foreign that they never can be understood” (15–18). 46 Baker, “Guest Editor’s Introduction,” 193. 47 Brower, “Take Only Photographs,” n.p.; Tagg, Burden of Representation, 4.

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CHAPTER SIX

THE THYLACINE REFIGURED While truth claims may have dominated readings of a photograph, they are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings. As Susan Sontag notes, despite the presumption of reliability that gives photographs authority and appeal, the work that photographers do is not immune to the “usually shady commerce between art and truth”.1 Strategic transformations of photographs of animals in zoos soon produced new impressions of the species. Photographs that appeared in zoological literature were adjusted to suggest the thylacine’s natural habitat, to resemble a conventional zoological figure, to accentuate a particular feature of the animal, or to re-generate suggestions of threat that characterised nineteenthcentury constructions. The thylacine was ‘posed’, the background of some photographs was replaced, outlines were enhanced and images transformed by the application of painted objects and composite photographs were assembled. Finally, a dead specimen stood in for a living animal. The techniques used to achieve these alterations were not unusual. Retouched photographs were first exhibited at the Paris World Fair in 1855 and Sadakichi Hartmann’s 1904 article railed against the tendency to apply paint or ink to photographs for the purpose of “individual expression”. Re-arranging the natural world to comply with pictorial conventions was also a common practice in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Trees were removed and figures and objects placed in the foreground of landscapes by British photographer Samuel Bourne, Eadweard Muybridge in the USA, and J. W. Beattie and Morton Allport in Tasmania. Elaborate reconstructions of scenes and figures at the level of photographic process were also common. In 1910 Frank Hurley combined photographs of stags in various positions at Sydney Zoo into a ‘family setting’ by printing several negatives together.2 1

Sontag, On Photography, 6–7. MacQuire, Visions of Modernity, 144; Newhall, Photography: Essays and Images, 185; Bonyhady, Colonial Earth, 192–217; Bickel, In Search of Hurley, 62. 2

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In all the photographs discussed in this chapter, however, the truth claims of photography still operated. Both implicitly, as earlier versions of a photograph were lost or forgotten and images circulated in successive temporal and spatial zones; or explicitly, in captions and texts. Even today, responses to the accuracy of images of thylacines have often been determined not so much by the circumstances in which a picture was made, but by contemporary ideas about the species, what a viewer expects to see, or the authority an image has gathered over the years. As Matthew Brower discovers, photography is a “privileged site in the construction and maintenance of the contemporary conception of the animal”.3 It is vital, then, to consider the history of these artefacts. For in the political act of blanking out irrelevant detail, retouching the photograph and re-situating an animal, a revision that characterises the representation of the thylacine in European culture was carried out yet again. Posing the Animal Some photographers used technical methods to focus attention on an animal’s body, while other images demonstrate how effective photographs could be when an animal was simply ‘posed’ and how a visual signifier could tap into a host of popular mythologies and intertextual references. Two photographs that demonstrate these latter strategies show a figure in a position in which the stripes on its back are the most prominent element in the visual field and in positions and attitudes unlike those in any engraving or lithograph. They are among the most visually compelling zoological illustrations. As visual culture historian W. J. T. Mitchell points out, the most indelible texts within images are there when “they are most completely absent, invisible or inaudible”.4 Research on the history of the stripe by Michel Pastoureau suggests that stripes present a “rhythmic, dynamic, narrative surface that indicates action” and that “the spectator’s eye cannot not be drawn to a striped surface” and “in any image, the striped element is always the one seen first”. In medieval Europe surface structure was seen in binary terms: plain on one side and everything that was not plain— spotted, striped, divided—on the other. Stripes and their counter3 4

Brower, “Take Only Photographs,” 20. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 98.

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parts “convey varying degrees of the same state: that of transgression”. Animals with striped or spotted coats were seen as something to fear; they could be “cruel and bloodthirsty like the tiger, hyena or leopard … thieves like the trout or the magpie, sly like the snake or the wasp, diabolical like the snake or the dragon. Even the zebra … passes for dangerous at the end of the Middle Ages”. Pastoureau maintains that this mistrust of striped animals has left “an enduring mark on the Western imagination”, so that even today when the tiger’s stripes are admired, it remains the symbol of “a fascinating kind of cruelty”. There is also the case of the “beast of Gévaudan”, “a gigantic wolf with wide stripes on its back”, a legendary creature that spread terror in several provinces of France, right up until the middle of the nineteenth century.5 The breadth and strength of this mythology indicates that potent intertextual associations may be in operation when a viewer’s unconscious gaze is arrested by prominently displayed stripes in photographs of the thylacine. In scientific works at the turn of the century, stripes were described as recessive or primitive. These authoritative ideas worked with popular perceptions about stripes to reinforce notions of the thylacine’s inferiority. A 1903 book, Mostly Mammals: Zoological Essays by Richard Lydekker, mentions the conclusions of Professor Eimer of Tübingen on the colour-markings of animals. His “law of colouration” defines a striping sequence that consists of longitudinal stripes (which are primitive) then stripes breaking into spots, then the spots coalescing into transverse stripes, and finally, “all markings disappeared, so as to produce uniform coloration of the whole coat”. The desirability of the final result is obvious from the emphasis placed on the words “uniform” and “whole”. On the other hand, after a long discussion about camouflage, the text concludes: “transverse stripes cannot be made to accord with Prof. Eimer’s theory, since … they exist in some of the most primitive of all mammals”.6 So, rather than raising the status of animals with transverse stripes, the theory is dismissed because it places animals like the thylacine too high on the evolutionary ladder. The thylacine at New York Zoo in one of the photographs in which stripes predominate has its forefeet on what appears to be a white sheet that covers the wooden boards of the floor it sits on (Figure 66). 5 6

Pastoureau, Devil’s Cloth, 21–26. Lydekker, Mostly Mammals, 32–38.

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Figure 66. Tasmanian Wolf in Ernest Ingersoll, The Life of Animals: The Mammals, 1906. Photograph.

The cloth functions like a prop in a studio portrait, its pristine whiteness contrasting with and emphasising both the stripes and the difference between the whiteness and the strange alterity signified by the dark stripes. Surrounded by printed words and separated from them by a fine black frame, this image resembles a portrait, especially when compared with the hand-drawn anteater on the opposite page that has no frame at all. The framing works with the claims of photography to portray a ‘likeness’ and the drawing on the opposite page suddenly looks like a mere ‘artist’s impression’. The punctum in this picture is the line in the middle ground, which seems to be a tear or

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fold in the sheet. The viewer’s eye is arrested and dwells on the thin, dark cleft just below the head and nose of the figure. Lying as it does on the whiteness of the sheet, and mimicking the shape of the stripes, this tear both distracts from the animal and draws attention to the dark patterning. A quotation in the front of Ernest Ingersoll’s The Life of Animals: The Mammals that published this photograph in 1906, describes the approach the work takes and why this particular photograph was used. It states “it is possible to make natural history entertaining and attractive as well as instructive, with no loss of scientific precision” and notes the relation of this tactic to the book’s widest possible diffusion. It is apparent that the transformation of photographs was often undertaken to ensure scientific works appealed to a wide audience. The text in this book refers to the Tasmanian “zebra wolf” and calls it “a much-dreaded beast … with the look of an ancient creodont and the manners of a modern wolf”. But rather than directing attention to the stripes dominating the body of the animal in the photograph, the text refers to the animal’s head (large), its jaw (powerful), the gape of its mouth (“extending back behind the eye”, although this is not apparent in the picture) and the prominent, dark eye that is, in fact, quite disarming. A distinction between the thylacine and “our” carnivores is established and then the text refers to the “16 transverse stripes”, a liking for sheep and a “dull-witted nature”. This text, then, returns to the predictable content of most nineteenthcentury descriptions and reinforces the perception of danger associated with stripes.7 A similar image appears in a 1912 edition of Brehms Tierleben and in More Wild Animals and the Camera (1913), where Walter Dando, first official photographer for the Zoological Society of London and stage manager of the Palace Theatre, has written descriptions to accompany his photographs of animals in London Zoo (Figure 67). In his first book, Wild Animals and the Camera, Dando uses the sporting terms and hunting metaphors often employed when referring to photography—such as “firing” the camera and “capturing” an image—and writes of studying an animal’s behaviour, just as many sportsmen do, before “shooting” the film. He also remarks that photography “secures the most reliable and permanent souvenirs of wild

7

Ingersoll, Life of Animals, 511–13.

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Figure 67. The Tasmanian Wolf in Walter P. Dando, More Wild Animals and the Camera, 1913. Photograph.

Nature” without hurting or killing the animal. However, as Tim Bonyhady points out in an exposé of nature photography in practice, the shift from one type of shooting to another was neither simple nor swift. Collectors had to work hard to persuade themselves that it was better to have a photograph than a stuffed bird or a blown egg. Instead of cameras replacing guns, the two coexisted for many years.8

8

Bonyhady, Colonial Earth, 212.

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The detached enthusiasm with which Dando approached photographing many of the animals pictured in his books suggests there was little difference between the attitudes that motivated the two practices in the early twentieth century. Indeed, in her book On Photography, Sontag perceives “something predatory in the act of taking a picture” and sees a potential in portraits to turn people into “objects that can be symbolically possessed”. If the camera is a sublimation of the gun, as Dando’s metaphors suggest, then photography becomes what she refers to as “sublimated murder—a soft murder”. Cultural critic Donna Haraway makes similar observations about the camera in her paper on taxidermy at the American Museum of Natural History—“so superior to the gun for the possession, production, preservation, consumption, surveillance, appreciation, and control of nature”.9 In More Wild Animals, the thylacine is grouped with wolves. While constantly producing contradictory statements, the text also concentrates on the species’ similarities to a tiger and hyena. Most of the animals in this section of the book appear in typical zoological profile positions. Only the thylacine is shown in this unusual upright stance at the closed door that is dominant in so many photographs taken in London Zoo. London Zoo from Old Photographs includes a reproduction of this photograph with the comment that Dando “recorded that he had to wait a long time before the animal took up this position”.10 With the regularity of the brick’s patterning on one side, the planks of the door on the other, and the alternately dark and light arcs that straddle the thylacine’s back, there is a sense in which this picture becomes a piece of photographic art. It is also a reminder that there is rarely an un-posed picture: the photographer decides to open and close the shutter when an animal is framed in a particular way. Waiting is a form of non-interventional posing. As John Szarkowski puts it, “photography … is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one’s core of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time … it is a matter of choosing among given possibilities”.11 Although all photographs of the thylacine may be regarded as exhibiting this phenomenon, the photographs discussed above provide particularly effective indications of this form of pos9

Sontag, 14–15; Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy,” 42. Edwards, London Zoo, 194. 11 Quoted in Sontag, On Photography, 192. 10

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ing, while at the same time appearing to ‘capture’ an attitude or position by chance. To some extent, the photograph of the striped “Tasmanian wolf” standing on hind legs at the door of the sleeping quarters in the enclosure at London Zoo overrides the pain and pathos of previous photographs taken at this site. The animal’s stance—on two legs, like a human—and positioning at the point where door and brick wall meet, as if attempting to open the door, expresses desire and opportunism. Drawing on Renshaw’s comments about the relentless movement of a caged thylacine quoted in the previous chapter, this is a photographic moment in the life of an animal that did not exhibit the behaviour visitors to zoos wanted to see. This thylacine did not ‘entertain’ viewers; she/he just wanted to gain entry to the sleeping quarters behind that door. In a chapter about thylacines in zoos in Der Beutelwolf: Thylacinus Cynocephalus, Heinz Moeller mentions the species’ unsuitability as a zoo exhibit, partly because, as nocturnal creatures, they rested for long periods during daylight hours. Another German zoologist, B. Grzimek, notes what he calls “sluggish” and “bored” behaviour.12 Robert Paddle, in conversation with former zoo attendant, Alison Reid, reveals that the door of the inner enclosure at Hobart Zoo in Tasmania was often shut during the day to prevent the thylacine from escaping the spectators’ gaze. The death of the last thylacine in captivity is attributed to the failure to open the door during an unusually hot day and cold night.13 The closed door in photos of the thylacine in zoos is therefore a compelling emblem of the species’ demise. Cropping the Image While posing the thylacine was often a time-consuming activity, cropping a photograph was a particularly quick, efficient way to accentuate a particular feature of the animal. As discussed above, the picture of a thylacine’s head at the top of page 754 in the 1913 work The Living Animals of the World: A Popular Natural History by C. J. Cornish (see Figure 62) is cropped from the photo Figure 59. With the caption, “this photograph shows the great width of gape of this ferocious animal”, the image shows how cropping can be used 12 13

Moeller, Der Beutelwolf, 163; Grzimek, Grzimek’s Animal Encyclopedia, 83–88. Paddle, Last Tasmanian Tiger, 191–95.

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not only to draw attention to, but intensify, the meanings an image generates. What is also interesting about this photograph when compared to its predecessor is that a tooth or hair on the upper jaw in the original image has been extended to suggest a large, carnivorous fang similar to that often seen in images of the extinct sabre-toothed tiger. This cropping and retouching re-generates the suggestion of threat that characterised earlier constructions of the thylacine, while adding the strong dimension of ‘truth’ provided by photography. When this image of the thylacine’s head is considered in relation to another on the same page of the book, mixed messages are produced. But if the picture is considered alone in relation to the text, a reader may well select statements that refer to “ferocity”. They include the assertion that the Tasmanian Wolf is a “flesh-eater” of “considerable size”; “its dimensions equal those of a wolf or mastiff”; “the thylacine hunts its prey by scent”; and that “Tasmanian ‘tigers’ possess immense staying power”. The text also states that in London Zoo “it was apt to snap somewhat promiscuously at those attempting to cultivate its close acquaintanceship” and “a bite from its formidable teeth is not to be lightly risked”. Although this imagery is undercut by a reference to “the successful yawning pose photograph secured by Mr. Medland”, the imagination of a child or a reader’s desire for sensation and excitement may cause this comment to be overlooked.14 The cropped and retouched image of a thylacine’s head demonstrates that attempts were made to compensate for the disclosures photographs made and to reassert control over the process of image making. It confirms that, despite the advent of photography, the politics of representing the thylacine had barely shifted. New Backgrounds The first evidence of attempts to adjust a photograph of the species appears in a photograph of an animal in New York Zoological Park published in July 1903. The removal of the zoo background in this and other early photographs indicate that the site was perceived as a problem—for photographs were retouched to resemble conventional zoological images, or to comply with or reinforce a text that mentioned the species’ native habitat. The original version of this 14

Cornish, Living Animals, 373.

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Figure 68. Tasmanian Wolf, Marsupial Wolf in Zoologica; Scientific Contributions of the New York Zoological Society, 1919. Retouched photograph.

image held by the New York Zoological Society Archives shows the animal gazing through the wire mesh of a cage.15 A new backdrop, seen in reproductions of this photograph in the News Bulletin of the Zoological Society, Zoologica: Scientific Contributions of the New York Zoological Society, and Our Vanishing Wildlife: Its Extermination and Preservation, has been painted in none too carefully as paint marks are readily apparent on the animal’s rump and tail (Figure 68). A text by W. H. Le Souëf, Director of Melbourne Zoo, with the appearance of this image in Zoologica in 1919 explains why the natural elements in the amended picture have been selected: “during the day [thylacines] generally sleep in hollow logs, holes, under rocks”. Considering the objectives of the Society—to provide spacious, natural environments for its animals—it must have been prominent in the minds of the authorities that elements such as logs and rocks should be foregrounded. The revision certainly improves the photograph as the original image shows the wire of the cage, with the animal’s nose against it, intruding untidily into the scene. The way this picture is used in the book Our Vanishing Wildlife, however, makes the painted background seems stark and unnatural. 15

This photograph is reproduced in Moeller, Der Beutelwolf, 150.

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Written by the New York Zoo’s director William Hornaday and published in 1913, this is one of the first books to deal specifically with the need for conservation of animal species. There was no attempt to change the photographs or hide their origin in his work—the picture of the thylacine takes its place amongst those of a West Indian seal in the New York Aquarium, Californian elephant seals “photographed on Guadalupe Island”, the bodies of nineteen sandhill cranes killed as ‘game’ by three gunners, and watercolour paintings of extinct birds. A similar situation occurs in relation to a blurry photograph of a thylacine in Melbourne Zoo. When it is used with a very brief text in The Animals of Australia by A. H. S. Lucas and W. H. Le Souëf in 1909, the boards and metal door of the zoo enclosure are included, as they are in Sir James Barrett’s conservation work Save Australia: A Plea for the Right Use of our Flora and Fauna that appeared in 1925. Works such this and Our Vanishing Wildlife made their point by exposing the conditions in which animals were housed, or the ways they were mistreated. But in the popular work by Edward Vidler, Wonder Animals of Australia, the entire zoo site has been removed and only a shadow is left on the ground beneath the thylacine to indicate that he or she occupies space. In another version of this image, the wire and concrete of a cage is replaced with painted trees and leaf litter. This picture appeared in 1929 in the second of two articles titled “Strange Animals of the Island Continent” by H. C. Raven in volume 29, number 3/4 of Natural History, the magazine of the American Museum of Natural History in New York (Figure 69). The text supplies details of Raven’s visit to Tasmania in 1923, illustrated with photographs of a thylacine, a Tasmanian devil and a wombat. In all these photos the zoo locations are obliterated and new environments with trees, ferns and foliage predominating are painted behind the animals. These lush new sites are consistent with the Museum’s reputation for elaborate reconstructions of animals and their habitats, particularly dinosaurs, in dioramas in its imposing new building erected in the early twentieth century. Donna Haraway discusses “the commerce of power and knowledge in white and male supremacist capitalism” in relation to the Museum’s African Hall, where taxidermists constructed nature as “mystery and resource” and manipulated the exhibits to tell “the story of a fierce and savage Africa”.16 Paintings with similar themes 16

Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy,” 21–22.

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Figure 69. Tasmanian Wolf in Natural History, 1929. Retouched photograph.

also circulated in the Museum’s brochures, children’s books, in teaching aids and on the covers of Scientific American. This commercialisation of scientific representation is also apparent in the appealing images, preferred environments and idealised representations in the American Museum’s magazine, Natural History. Following their lead, museums in other countries established magazines that appealed to the public. The Australian Museum was one of them. A note in Australian Museum Magazine in April 1923, relates that American zoologist M. Raven had just returned from Tasmania after obtaining a fine collection of Australian mammals for “anatomical purposes and for display in the projected Australian Hall in the New York Museum”. This information follows the Magazine’s editorial in which the right of “our American cousins” to collect Australia’s native animals or “share our heritage”, as it is phrased, is defended. It justifies the collection of specimens by museums, particularly when animals were threatened with extinction. The editorial was written in response to those who noted the irony in museums collecting specimens at the same time as they recommended the preservation of species.17 The impact of changing both the background of a photograph and its framing can be seen in the 1913 and 1937 editions of an American publication, A History of Land Mammals in the Western Hemisphere 17

Anderson, “Australian Fauna,” 223–24.

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Figure 70. Thylacine or Tasmanian Wolf in William Berryman Scott, A History of Land Mammals in the Western Hemisphere, 1913. Retouched photograph.

(Figure 70), where a new environment was painted around a thylacine instead of the zoo setting that appears in the lower photograph in plate 55. On the title page of the 1937 edition, the artists Charles Knight and R. Bruce Horsfall are credited with the illustrations, but no signature is apparent on the black and white picture of the thylacine on page 633. Knight became famous for his three-dimensional dinosaur reconstructions for the American Museum and has since been blamed for “fixing the stereotype of slow, stupid, clumsy giants headed for extinction”. In his book on dinosaurs in popular culture, W. J. T. Mitchell writes of Knight: “his dinosaurs may drag their tails on the ground [behaviour associated with ‘primitive’ forms of life] but they stand erect on their hind legs”.18 Coincidently (or perhaps not) the tail of the thylacine in the photograph in A History of Land Mammals is dragging on the ground, but the zoo background has disappeared and an artist has painted tree branches overhanging the thylacine in the style of a Japanese pen and ink drawing. The animal’s body seems to have been touched-up to remove the faint shadow of the bars on the fur and an exceptionally fine linear frame surrounds the image. The effect of removing the wire shadow, the thick frame, the brick wall and the caption from the original photograph and replacing them with these elements and the 18

Mitchell, Last Dinosaur Book, 141.

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title “Thylacine” (advocated because it is “less confusing” than ‘wolf’) transforms the image. The emaciated form of the thylacine is naturalised by the new surroundings and the whole scene conveys tranquillity and ease. But the majority of the text, however, contradicts the picture as it concentrates on the species’ “wolf-like appearance and habits”, especially its destructive behaviour towards sheep.19 Nevertheless, the power of the visual message tends to override the old narrative. This ambivalence we see within the imagetext is a consistent feature in representations of the thylacine in works published in the early twentieth century where old stories were juxtaposed with the new medium. Removing the Backdrop The removal of a background entirely had a radical effect on the impressions produced by an image. The following three illustrations are examples of a background that was not replaced, so that the thylacine stands against a blank or minimal backdrop. The first of these appears in Scientific Australian in 1917 and then in Wild Animals of the World; Being a Popular Guide to Taronga Zoological Park in 1919 (Figure 71). This very indistinct profile image of a pair of thylacines is a version of a photograph taken of animals in a wirecovered outdoor enclosure, which appears in numerous publications in the 1990s. These later reproductions often mention circa 1930 as a date for the image and cite Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart as the location of the photographs, but this print of the photograph first appears on the cover of the 1917 publication with a very brief note inside the issue that reveals only that it is “a photograph recently taken at Hobart”. Almost all the other illustrations in the Guide to Taronga Zoo are drawings of animals in their native habitats, so that this blurry photograph of thylacines, with no internal rectangular frame, backdrop, or colour surrounding it, appears to float off the page. Meyer Shapiro mentions a similar effect when elements of an image burst through the frame or when the frame follows the outline of an object. It results in the “independence and energy” of the subjects being asserted in

19

Scott, History of Land Mammals, 632–33.

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Figure 71. Thylacine in Charles Hedley, Wild Animals of the World; Being a Popular Guide to Taronga Zoological Park, 1919. Retouched photograph.

the “detours forced upon the frame by the image”.20 This adjusted picture gives the impression of animals that could not only escape the paraphernalia of the zoo, but also break free from the page. Notional frames associated with the book’s production and dissemination also have the potential to play on the reading of an image in multiple and complex ways. The extremely brief text that accompanies this photograph states that the thylacine is now so rare as to be on the point of extinction, but other parts of the 1919 Guide to Taronga Zoo are particularly interesting for the attitudes they project about animals in general. For instance, while it is explicit about the role of the zoo—to display the power of “man” over nature—the Guide also acknowledges that humans are part of nature and implies that they share some of the basic attributes of animals. The preface cites ancient “instincts” that it refers to as “the Call of the Wild”, which result in a “craving” for nature among “modern men and women” that can be satisfied by a visit to Taronga Park. This zoo is perceived as an alternative to the city, a place of entertainment and education and one supplying inspiration for the artist and providing the solution to abstract scientific problems. 20

Shapiro, “Some Problems in Semiotics,” 213.

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Unlike the journal of the American Museum, however, the Guide does not advocate the preservation of animals or environment. Instead, it emphasises the triumphal discourse of British imperialism and constructs the zoo as a place where remnants of a quest for dominion are proudly housed and exhibited. It tells a metanarrative about a time when animals ruled the world, until man wrested the continent from them. Now he fights for the whole world, a battle that “cannot stop until the last wild beast has been shot”. The text contends that the last fortresses of wild animals are presently being stormed and “in a few generations all the wild beasts will have gone” from their last refuges. The writer of the Guide, Charles Hedley, was principal curator of the collections at the Australian Museum in 1921 and his attitude can be compared with that exhibited by W. H. Le Souëf, Director of the Melbourne Zoo, in the introduction to an article on Australian mammals in Zoologica: Scientific Contributions of the New York Zoological Society published in the same year. Le Souëf comments (perhaps defensively) on the problems of preserving indigenous animals in Australia, citing the size of the country as posing a difficulty in enforcing “game laws” and controlling foxes, cats, rabbits and other introduced animals. He cites drought and the destruction of vegetation caused by sheep and cattle as factors in denuding the country and mentions a number of animals certain to become extinct, stating vaguely that the only way they can be preserved is to “form Reserves in various types of country”. Later, speaking of Tasmania and the thylacine, he maintains, “the government has lately established a large Reserve for [the thylacine] near Hobart”.21 In a 1913 book, Our Vanishing Wildlife, Hornaday names the location of this reserve as Freycinet Peninsula, but there is no record of any moves to establish a reserve for the thylacine, or for any other Tasmanian animals, at that time. Taronga Zoo was one of many Australian institutions that did little to address the plight of native animals in the early twentieth century. On the contrary, photographs in zoological books were perceived as an inventory of biological forms that were expected to become extinct. And photography did, in an important sense, document disappearing species. Susan Sontag sees the photograph as a testament to “time’s relentless melt” and notes the remark of Fox 21

Le Souëf, “Mammals in the Zoological Park,” 119–201.

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Figure 72. Tasmanian Wolf in Frank Finn et al., Hutchinson’s Animals of all Countries: The Living Animals of the World in Picture and Story, 1924. Retouched photograph.

Talbot, a major contributor to the development of photographic process, about the camera’s special aptitude for recording “the injuries of time”. Haraway writes of the camera: “to make an exact image is to insure against disappearance, to cannibalise life until it is safely and permanently a secular image, a ghost. It arrested decay”.22 In the image of the thylacines in the Guide to Taronga Zoo, the removal of the cage in which they were photographed is a profound denial of the species’ situation. Given the suggestions of its text about the imperial quest for control, it would have been apposite to include a photograph of the ‘nearly extinct’ thylacine that did include the wire of the enclosure. A second photograph where the background is removed appears in a book by Frank Finn et al. called Hutchinson’s Animals of all Countries: Living Animals of the World in Picture and Story published in 1924, a very similar publication to Living Animals of the World discussed in chapter 5, but this edition has an additional full-page photograph of a thylacine with head down, forefeet extended, tail in a horizontal position and pouch clearly visible (Figure 72). The background of the photograph has been dissolved into a dark plane with only the suggestion of ground and so it is difficult to guess where the 22

Sontag, On Photography, 15, 69; Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy,” 42.

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picture was taken, but as two of the contributors are associated with the Zoological Society of London and the other photographs in the book are of animals located there, Regent’s Park Zoo is the probable site. There are indications that the photograph has been touched up. For instance, the lack of elements in the background and the crisp, linear outline that suggest that the figure has been defined with a paintbrush when the new background has been filled in; but the position of the animal’s body implies that it is stretching or playing. The representation of the Tasmanian devil in this work makes an interesting comparison to the thylacine picture. Two photographs on pages 752–53 show a sedate devil sitting on its haunches. One has a foreground of sticks or straw, while the other has a blank background. The text calls the species destructive and ferocious, killing sheep “for the mere pleasure of slaughter” and blames its scarcity on its “misdeeds”. Judging by the texts in early twentieth-century British publications, it is clear that traditional representations of violence and threat still persisted and were probably popular with readers. The difference in the representation of thylacines and devils in many other works show that both species are constructed as ferocious and the devil as savage as well but, while photographs of thylacines rarely support this designation, photographs of devils usually show snarling animals. Removing the zoo background from a photograph could be carried out for a number of reasons and the resulting image was often used in many different types of work. Sometimes the photograph did not necessarily satisfy the demands of the text. This image/text disjunction is exemplified in an enlarged version of the photograph by W. S. Berridge (Figure 64) that was reproduced in an article by G. W. Morey published in the British newspaper Field, the Country Newspaper in 1931, with the heading “A Prehistoric Beast Still Living” (Figure 73). There are obvious retouching marks around the thylacine’s ears and the animal’s body is suspended in what appears to be a void. But the picture takes on a surreal quality when read with the text that stresses the extraordinary nature of the species, its relation to “animals of the past”, and the information that there are few left in zoos. The article also perceives a similarity between the thylacine and the wolf, tiger, jackal and hyena, but comments on the species’ tail and pouch, and describes a propensity to eat only the liver and kidneys of

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Figure 73. The Tasmanian Wolf or Thylacine in Field, the Country Newspaper, November 1931. Retouched photograph.

prey and travel long distances, as well as an ability to “rise up on its hind legs and jump like a kangaroo”. At the bottom of the page there is a painting by Charles Knight of a scene in Patagonia showing a Prothylacine, “believed by many to have been closely akin to the ancestor of the Tasmanian wolf”. This adds an extra exotic touch to the representation. The institutional brick wall of Regent’s Park Zoo would not have been an appropriate backdrop for such a strange, archaic beast, but the sterile background that replaces it does not match the complexities of the wide-ranging text. For the article opens with the words “unless something is done, and done quickly, one of the most interesting survivals from the past still living on this earth will speedily follow the quagga into extinction” and includes the observation “there are many who believe that it is already too late to save the Thylacine from extinction”.23

23

Morey, “Prehistoric Beast,” 822.

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Many photographs demonstrate the tendency to change, adjust, or revise photographs to produce connotations of danger and threat that were so persistent in engraved and lithographed images in the nineteenth century. The last photograph I consider carries this tendency to its logical conclusion. It constitutes a refusal to allow photography to change earlier perceptions of the thylacine, exploits the veracity accorded to the medium and illustrates the persistence with which scientific publications accepted and circulated misleading and harmful representations. Embedded in the history of this image are indications of the power, prestige and influence of the scientific community in Australia, as well as traces of humour. The photograph first appeared in 1921 with a four-line caption on the inside cover of volume 1, number 3 of Australian Museum Magazine and the misleading credit “copyright photo from life—H. Burrell” (Figure 74). But the picture was much more widely disseminated when re-used in the 1926 publication The Wild Animals of Australasia by A. S. Le Souëf, at that time curator of Taronga Park Zoo Sydney, Henry (Harry) Burrell, amateur naturalist, and with a chapter on bats by Ellis Troughton, a zoologist at the Australian Museum. The viewer is led to believe that this is a picture of a thylacine caught robbing a henhouse or, perhaps, a thylacine in captivity that has just been fed a live hen. Both scenarios have been accepted in scientific and popular discourse since the photograph was first published, with the latter being currently in vogue.24 However, a print of the original photograph by Burrell, from which this cropped version is taken, is contained in an album that is part of the Norman Laird collection in the Archives Office of Tasmania. Beneath a carefully cut flap of black card, on which there is a typewritten message with the heading “Rare and Precious Photograph”, a larger view of the image is displayed. It shows a wire fence behind the thylacine and a building resembling a shed or outhouse to the right of the animal. These features have been cropped from the image that appears in 24 Brower, “Take Only Photographs,” quotes Miles Orvell who notes a gap between contemporary and Victorian viewers’ perceptions that may make us misread nineteenth century photographs (15). This photo, however, is not only published at a later date, but it is framed by notions of scientific empiricism and its caption directs the viewer to a specific interpretation.

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Figure 74. Tasmanian Tiger or Wolf in Australian Museum Magazine, 1921. Photograph.

both Australian Museum Magazine and The Wild Animals of Australasia. Laird, a photographer and associate of Burrell’s at the now defunct Institute of Anatomy in Canberra, Australia, noted that the photograph in The Wild Animals of Australasia had been widely pirated. Then, toward the end of the album, he includes a typewritten note, beneath a particularly close-up version of the image in a newspaper article from 1972, claiming that Harry Burrell gave him glass plate negatives of this and another photograph in 1931–32. Then Laird states that the figure in the photo is not a living animal at all— “it is a stuffed specimen placed against a bush background”.25 The most significant problem with the photograph is that it fabricates the idea that the thylacine was a threat to poultry and, by extension, sustains the notion that it was a threat to sheep and human endeavour in general. In his book, The Last Tasmanian Tiger, Robert Paddle interrogates claims of the thylacine’s predation on poultry, finds very few substantiated reports and points out that this behav25

Laird, Tasmanian Tiger Records, NS 1143/1.

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iour has been referred to in publications so many times that it has been accepted in scientific literature and that the claims have been magnified in a way similar to allegations of sheep predation. In chapter 4, “A Predatory Entertainment”, Paddle details published representations of the thylacine as a predator of poultry in both the nineteenth and twentieth century, naming this photograph as one of the chief causes of a “blossoming of the construction” since the thylacine’s extinction. He expresses no reservations about the power of representations and comments on the way the photograph has been cropped to disguise the caged environment and suggest that the thylacine is actually raiding a henhouse.26 The first appearance of the photograph a little more than a decade after the end of the devastating government bounty on thylacines, when few members of the species survived, did nothing to support the idea that protection and preservation of the species was crucial. Brower suggests that photographs such as this are in part “a trophy shot … a form of still life; a Nature Morte”: an appropriate description for this image.27 It is difficult to find evidence of touching-up on the photograph, but there are a number of signs that the animal shown is a specimen. For instance, the body is unrealistically rigid, the stripes and the fur in general have a lifeless quality, the torso is flat, even concave, and the legs appear uniform and stick-like. Any animal with a flapping chicken in its mouth is unlikely to be so stiff and motionless. The clarity of the thylacine in contrast to the out-of-focus foreground, the blurry bracken in the background, and the apparent movement of the chicken’s wing indicate immobility. It is unclear which part of the chicken’s body the thylacine is holding and it is unlikely an animal could maintain a grip on the delicate wing ends of a live bird. Technical advice suggests that the specimen was probably photographed in situ with a dead chicken tied to its mouth that was jerked with a string to resemble a flapping bird.28 According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Burrell was a former vaudeville comedian with “a keen analytical mind” and pos26

Paddle, Last Tasmanian Tiger, 84–89. Brower, “Take Only Photographs,” 19. 28 This advice included suggestions from Gale Spring, a specialist in biomedical and forensic photography at the Scientific and Industrial Photography Unit, RMIT University, Melbourne and from Peter Morse, formerly of the Digital Imaging Unit, University of Melbourne: http://www.petermorse.com.au/cms/about 27

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sessed a highly developed sense of humour. If Burrell had been adept in early twentieth-century photographic techniques, he could also have taken a photograph of a specimen in a museum and meticulously superimposed it on a photo of the bush background, then added an image of a flapping chicken near the animal’s nose and mouth and made a new print. There are two other photographs by Burrell of a thylacine and a chicken with the same background in which these methods may have been used. One is on the cover of Australian Museum Magazine volume XII, number II, 1958 and two materialise in writing about the thylacine later in the century. Another is reproduced in a book for general readers about searches for the thylacine, while Paddle mentions articles in Zoonoos in 1983 and in Australasian Post in 1979 that also perpetuate the idea that the photograph shows a thylacine raiding a henhouse.29 A hoax photograph falsifies reality because assumptions of ‘truth’ are made about photography that are not made in relation to other media such as painting. When it was published in a magazine associated with a national scientific institution and stated as depicting a living animal, Burrell’s photograph carried specific assertions of veracity. Indeed, there is a suggestion in the preface to his seminal work on the platypus that Burrell was worried his deception might compromise the reception of this important publication. Especially as he was not a qualified zoologist and had not received “official sanction to work as a private collector”, resulting in his field work practically stopping. While it may not be unusual to state, “all my descriptions have been written from living specimens or from material freshly collected; museum specimens and records have been deliberately ignored”, it sounds unduly defensive to also note “none of the photographs reproduced have been touched up in any way”.30 In the first issue of the Australian Museum Magazine in April 1921, it is stated that the publication is part of the Museum’s “increased effort to reach a wider public”, particularly children, and that it is “intended for those who have no special knowledge of the 29 See Moeller, Der Beutelwolf, 89, 153; Beresford and Bailey, Search for Tasmanian Tiger, 30; Joines and Veitch cited in Paddle, Last Tasmanian Tiger, 87. For a detailed analysis of this series of photographs by Burrell see Freeman, “Is This Picture worth a Thousand Words?” and “On Seeing the Big Picture”—her reply to a challenge by Paddle. 30 Burrell, Platypus, preface.

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technical details of natural history”. There is also a note that “surely an animal is more interesting when it is presented, not as a mere dead thing, but as a living, breathing creature”. Did the staff or the editor of the magazine realise the Museum was publishing a photograph of a specimen? Did they knowingly mislead readers of their publication? Ironically, the leading article in volume 1, number 3 is by W. K. Gregory, a visiting American zoologist and the Curator of Comparative Anatomy at the American Museum of Natural History. It is entitled “Australian Mammals and why they should be protected”, explains why Australian animals are “the most uncommon, and perhaps the most interesting in the world” and states that extinction “is neither necessary nor inevitable”. It is illustrated by a sequence of photographs of animals against ‘natural’ backgrounds, most of which are specimens in the museum dioramas, and concludes with the bracketed note that “the photographs in this article, when not taken from life, are from specimens in the Australian Museum”.31 As using specimens was a common practice in the magazine, why was it not admitted in reference to the photograph of the thylacine? While I can find no evidence of a conspiracy, the objectives of the publication suggest that attempts to titillate readers’ sensitivities, gain wider readership and encourage the public to take an interest in zoology and visit the Museum resulted in a lack of adequate scrutiny of the photograph. This image, then, reinforces the findings in relation to other works in the early twentieth century. As photographs became the common representational medium in zoological works and science became increasingly commercialised, accuracy was abandoned in favour of popular appeal. The thylacine was the victim of a desire for sensationalism and the perception of photographs as ‘truthful’. Predictably, the texts that are published with this image reinforce notions of ferocious predation. In the Australian Museum Magazine, for instance, the caption states “the thylacine is the most powerful of the flesh-eating marsupials” and “in its evolution it has closely paralleled the European wolf … its teeth in particular being similarly modified for rending flesh”. The power of the text—the violent asso31 Gregory, “Australian Mammals,” 65–74. See Ryan, “Hunting with Camera” for the association between taxidermy and photography, particularly stuffed animals “posed as if photographed in the wild”, and their relation to the colonial “manifestation of a desire to possess and control nature” (206–7, 214).

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ciation of the words “rending” and “teeth”—with the visual impact of the soft, white, insubstantial feathers and the suggestion of delicate tissue, produce a highly emotive effect. The linguistic biases of the text in Wild Animals of Australasia interact with the photograph in an even more brutal way. It concentrates on the thylacine’s hunting and feeding behaviour, is littered with words like “carcass” and “victim” and contains searing images like the “one sharp fox-like bite” that tears a dog’s skull off. The following paragraph relates a story about the discovery of a female and two young “wolves” in a dry fern-bed under the “drooping and still attached dead fronds of a treefern”. The description cross-references the dry bracken behind the thylacine, which now seems to illustrate the narrative, particularly when the word “camouflage” is also mentioned.32 While references to less aggressive behaviour are included, the proclivity of images to invoke intertexts is consistently exploited in this work through the use of violent and exciting connotations. This tendency is exemplified in the last sentence of the entry when the propensity of inhabitants of Tasmania to kill the thylacine is mentioned: “indeed, some will even smash the wolf to pulp afterward, thus depriving science of the skeleton and skin”. As if to metaphorically confirm this remark, the picture is missing from the State Library of Tasmania’s copy of The Wild Animals of Australasia. When the book was reviewed on page 20 of Australian Museum Magazine volume 3, it was welcomed as an important step in the completion of a survey of the mammals of Australia and it was noted, “it is the illustrations, however, which make the strong popular appeal”. The title of the book also suggests that it was aimed at a popular audience and the remark about the images is an indictment of the objectivity traditionally claimed to be an essential part of scientific discourse. These revised photographs of the thylacine, particularly the picture in the Australian Museum Magazine, confirm that the species was persistently misrepresented in zoological and natural history works until the last moment of its existence. More than a hundred years after Europeans first sighted a member of the species, an image of the thylacine had little value except as a means of producing vicarious excitement. This animal was no longer an embodiment of colonists’ 32

Le Souëf, Wild Animals, 318–19.

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fears, but a symbol of the desire for scientific success and economic affluence that was offered even as the species teetered on the edge of extinction. These modified photographs show how the extermination of the thylacine was consistently encouraged in zoological works. Together with earlier illustrations, they finally and effectively ‘image’ the species’ extinction.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

FORGETTING AND REMEMBERING Visual representations of thylacines over 200 years are a microcosm of evolving ideas about animal species, as well as new methods of image production. In the second half of the twentieth century and in the twenty-first century, modern and postmodern versions of the figure appear that demystify the species, empty its form of many disparaging connotations and construct new, although often no less distorted, ideas. These images reshape the figure of the thylacine again and again, until they carry only vestiges of the elements that characterised illustrations in the nineteenth century. They arise against a background of attempts by zoological societies, government institutions, and individuals to change perceptions about animals. However, in the State of Tasmania, transformations in images and moves toward conservation were rarely aligned. Ambivalent attitudes toward the species were expressed through the disinclination to provide protection while, at the same time, thylacines are emblazoned on the State’s coat of arms and the label of a local beer. Moves toward Conservation Paradoxically, the loudest voices calling for conservation of Australia’s animals came from America. Some of the first personalities and institutions involved in pressuring for sanctuaries to be set up, campaigning successfully for wildlife statutes to be passed, and implementing international treaties have been mentioned in chapters 5 and 6. As early as 1895 the New York Zoological Society was formed to advance wildlife conservation and promote the study of zoology. Founder Henry Osborn and director William Hornaday were key figures in efforts to protect the animals of North America and promote these values internationally. Osborn’s work, Preservation of the Wild Animals of North America, published in 1904, was followed by an article in the American Museum Journal on the “Preservation of the World’s Animal Life” in 1912, where he remarks that “the conservation sentiment, feeble in its inception a few decades ago, becomes

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daily more powerful”. He attributes this transformation in attitude to the work of nature writers such as John Muir; the direct efforts of associations like the Audubon Society; the substitution of the camera for the gun; and the work of zoologists and biologists. He maintains that “in every part of the English-speaking world the principle of conservation is taking firmer hold on public opinion, as shown both in expression in literature and action in legislation”. But he also notes the strength of “commercial interests” that oppose these sentiments. Osborn lists the countries that had enacted laws to protect wildlife, limit the use of weapons and preserve forests and animal life. Australia is not among them.1 Hornaday, however, in an outspoken and influential work called Our Vanishing Wildlife published the following year, included a photograph and entry for the thylacine in a chapter on “Extinct and Nearly Extinct Species” with comments by W. H. Le Souëf, director of the Melbourne Zoo and Mary Roberts of Beaumaris Zoo, that “sheep-owners and herdsmen” were systematically exterminating the remnants of the species. Meanwhile, a collecting and exchange trip to Australia by American biologists W. K. Gregory and H. C. Raven for the American Museum of Natural History created considerable consternation among members of the Victorian and South Australian Museum communities, who felt that the scope and extent of collection for export purposes should be limited. This reaction occurred despite or perhaps even because of the fact that, under instructions from Osborn, the pair “lost no opportunity to impress upon Australians the necessity for protecting their unique and fast disappearing mammalian fauna”. An editorial in a 1923 Australian Museum Magazine “deprecated” the desire to curtail the operations of scientific collectors and urged the control of trade in wild animals that has no object “but mere gain”. In a corollary to this firm denunciation of protests against American activities the editor, C. Anderson, maintained that “if … our marsupials are doomed to extinction, surely it is advisable that scientific institutions should be allowed to obtain the relatively few specimens necessary to exhibit to posterity the characteristics of these interesting animals” and that “surely our American cousins have the right to share our heritage”.2 The interstate and 1

Osborn, “Preservation of Animal Life,” 123–24. Hornaday, Vanishing Wildlife, 38; Anon., “Mecca for Zoologists,” 10; Anon., “Fauna for Export,” n.p.; Gregory, “Australian Mammals,” 65; Anderson, “Australian Fauna,” 223–24. 2

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international politics of museums obviously created conflict on this issue, while the requirements of animals became secondary to the needs of scientific, national, individual and institutional aspirations. Wildlife Conservation in Theory and Practice by William Hornaday, published in 1914, was responsible for establishing two of the key tenets of conservation movements internationally—“Human conquest of nature carries moral responsibly for the perpetuation of other life forms” and “Wanton consumption and merciless slaughter of wildlife is uncivilised”.3 Later, as director of the New York Zoological Society—the origin of the Wildlife Conservation Society— Hornaday carried out surveys of species in the United States and Alaska and on the basis of these surveys he led the campaign for new laws to protect wildlife. His extensive essay on the fur trade in the Zoological Society Bulletin in 1921 included figures for skins of Australian animals, such as the Tasmanian possum, the koala and kangaroos. In a section headed “The Tragedy of the Koala”, he revealed that 32,376 koala skins had been sold in five auction sales in the United States and Canada, listed as “wombat skins”. He appealed to Australian authorities to stop the destruction because “no fauna on earth can withstand the strain that has been put upon the mammals of the Antarctic continent”. Hornaday suggested reforms and education to implement the conservation of species and, the following year, Osborn published a similar article under the banner “Can We Save the Mammals?” in the Journal of the American Museum volume 22, number 6. In 1923, the Report of the Museum noted that “the fur trade is making terrible inroads in Australia: this explains the urgency of our expedition, initiated by Dr. Gregory and conducted by Mr. Raven, which is securing superb collections”.4 These urgent and well publicised appeals by the leading United States zoological institutions seemed to have an effect, for in the following years published reports and comments were also made in Australia. One of the most extensive of these appeals was contained in James Barrett’s book Save Australia: A Plea for the Right Use of Our Flora and Fauna, published in 1925. Barrett stresses, as the Americans had, the unique qualities of Australian animals—the result of their early isolation—and on page 2 he quotes the American Museum of Natural 3 4

Jepson, “Values-Led Conservation,” 272. Hornady, “Fur Trade,” 34–36; Harding, Vanishing Wildlife, 12.

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History Annual Report 1921 on vanishing wildlife, noting that many collecting expeditions and private collectors were inundating Australia to obtain specimens before they were exterminated. In the chapter “The Mammals of Australia” the thylacine is described as “extremely rare” and the establishment of a breeding and experimental reservation by Colin Mackenzie at Healesville, in Victoria, is urged. Mackenzie wrote extensively on the medical importance of animals, as discussed in chapter 2 of this volume, set up a National Institute of Anatomy and was at the forefront of research into disease and the ‘lessons’ the bodies of animals could offer to the study of human health.5 In the following years the Australian media ran newspaper reports on the destruction of possums (Argus, July 17, 1926), the open season on the koala and possum in Queensland (Age, September 1, 1927 and Herald, September 14, 1927) and the need for federal protection of native species tabled with the Constitution Commission (Morning Post, October 19, 1927). Meanwhile, The Royal Society of Tasmania protested against the proposal by the Tasmanian Inland Fisheries Commission to remove protection currently existing for the platypus (Herald, August 10, 1927) and in 1928, Clive Lord proclaimed the conservation of Tasmania’s fauna “disastrous” in an article in Hobart’s Mercury newspaper that, again, quotes the Annual Report of the American Museum of Natural History’s 1921 comments on the vanishing wildlife of Australia at its head: We are approaching the close of the age of mammals all over the world, but in no continent has the devastation been more rapid that in that of Australia, owing to three reasons: Deforestation, an enormous fur trade, and an increasing leather trade.6

Lord adds “in no other part of the Commonwealth in the past five years has the destruction of our fauna been more pronounced than in Tasmania”. He maintains that fees were paid for four million wallaby and possum skins and that the government received ₤66,717 in royalties and licences, implying that “the collection of licence fees for destruction is more important than conservation”. He notes that in the past, the cry has been that open seasons are necessary to relieve unemployment, but questions the expertise of “the average unemployed man” to successfully engage in trapping. He mentions Colin 5 6

Anon., “Sherbrooke Sanctuary,” n.p. Lord, “Vanishing Wildlife,” n.p.

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MacKenzie and the foundation of a “great zoological research station” in Canberra and that Tasmania possesses fauna “even more unique than the mainland, but very little has been done to preserve it”. Lord also mentions that in Tasmania the advice from the Commonwealth Fauna Advisory Board has been “systematically disregarded as far as open seasons are concerned” and that little attention has been paid to the protests of scientific societies. He cites one hundred sanctuaries established in Queensland and more than fifty in Western Australia, but only one (Mount Field) set aside in Tasmania.7 The British Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire was rather slower to give their concern and support to the thylacine. In 1927 they do not list the species among those animals “at present … in grave danger of early extermination through human agency”, although dugongs and right whales are included; and it is not until after the protection of the species by Tasmania’s Fauna Board that queries about the viability of the thylacine population appears. In 1938, a letter from the Society to the Animals and Birds Protection Board in Hobart, following press reports of sightings of the thylacine in the wild, generated this response: “the Animals and Birds Protection Board, in every way possible, is endeavouring to preserve the remaining specimens of the Tasmanian Native Tiger for as long a period as is possible”. The Board’s secretary, E. P. Andrewartha, mentions the existence of laws preventing the taking of, the possession of, or the sending away of specimens and searches conducted to discover the location of remaining thylacines. When the current search was completed, the Board intended to request approval for a Sanctuary under the Animals and Birds Protection Act.8 In the following year, as mentioned in chapter 5, a shortened version of Graham Renshaw’s essay in More Natural History Essays and then two brief reports on the search expeditions of 1937, 1938 and 1939 appear in the British Society’s journal. A report by Michael Sharland, a Tasmanian naturalist involved in one of these trips, appeared in the Bulletin of the New York Zoological Society in 1941 and in an even longer form in the Proceedings of the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales 1938–39. These expeditions, which visited the Franklin district between the centre of Tasmania and the Gordon River at Macquarie Harbour on the western coast of the island, found considerable evidence that the species 7 8

Ibid. Quoted in Anon., “The Tasmanian Tiger,” 87.

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existed in viable numbers. The recommendations in all these journals included that the Tasmanian government reserve a large section of the western part of the State as a faunal sanctuary where thylacines, together with Tasmanian devils (Sarcophilus) and smaller game would be free from molestation by trappers and casual shooters, to whom the construction of a new road to the west coast had opened up game country, mineral lands and rich hardwood forests which were hitherto inaccessible.9 Although he did not specifically mention thylacines, as early as 1906 local photographer J. W. Beattie had put forward the idea of a reserve on Schouten Peninsula on the island’s eastern coast, citing the large number of skins emanating from the Swansea district as exemplifying the need for such protection. Suggestions such as this and those made in 1919 by Mary Roberts, proprietor of Beaumaris Zoo, in regard to the urgent need for an amendment of the Game Protection Act10 were small but essential moves toward the preservation of native animals generally. But as Robert Paddle points out, in the early years of the twentieth century groups within Tasmania like the Royal Society, the Field Naturalist’s Club, the Scenery Preservation Board and the Animal’s and Birds Protection Board, as well as individuals, publicised to little avail the likely extinction of the thylacine and pressured for protective measures to be taken.11 It took persistent action by institutions and individuals in other parts of the world to add to their chorus before any moves were made, and then they were ‘too little, too late’. Protection came only fifty-nine days before the last thylacine definitely known to exist died in Hobart Zoo.12 Emblems and Brands The first commercial image of the thylacine appeared on a poster in 1870. This marked the beginning of the use of the species in advertising and on labels that continues into the twenty-first century (Figure 75). The Tasmanian manufacturing company Cascade Brewery began operation in 1832 and, positioned below Mount Wellington, soon became an integral part of the southern Tasmanian landscape. The 9

Sharland, “Tasmania’s Rare Tiger,” 88. Guiler, “Beaumaris Zoo,” 26. 11 Paddle, Last Tasmanian Tiger, 173–84. 12 See ibid., 163–84. 10

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success of the enterprise was related to the abundant, fresh, mountain water of the cascades on Hobart Rivulet at the edge of Hobart Town, still “a constant source of the purest and sweetest water in the world” and associated with the ‘purity’ of the wilderness environment nearby that later became an invaluable selling point for the beer. The Brewery supplied the fifty-five hotels in colonial Hobart in 1832 with what was considered very fine ale at the Intercolonial Exhibition in Melbourne in 1866–67 and the Sydney Exhibition in 1879.13 The thylacine on the advertisement for Degraves’ brewery is a vessel for the projection of qualities Tasmania was believed to possess in the nineteenth century and today—a healthy, exotic and wild environment. Colonial artist William Piguenit who painted the poster included a label design with a thylacine figure on the bottom left hand corner. Today, the label of Cascade Premium Lager—a relatively expensive brew designed for sophisticated consumers—still features a thylacine. A version of H. C. Richter’s pair from Gould’s The Mammals of Australia complete with narrowed eyes and prominent stripes that, erroneously, continue down the length of their tails was used on the label from 1998 to 2002 (Figure 77).14 Another early example of the appropriation of the figure of the thylacine by the Company can be observed on top of a Cascade barrel, sculpted in the 1870s, that adorns the rooftop of what was the company’s office in Collins Street, Hobart. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, reflecting a new awareness of the extinction of the species and radical changes in attitudes toward animals and the environment, huge advertisements for Cascade’s products in Australian airport lounges show a striped dog-like creature drinking from a secluded waterhole surrounded by ferns and thick vegetation (Figure 76). This image of a ‘pristine’ environment segues into the idea of Tasmania as a wilderness tourism destination. Ironically, the rugged mountains, wild rivers, and mysterious forests used in such advertisements are the very elements that were utilised in the construction of the thylacine as a dangerous, 13

Bingham, Cascade, 24–112. See http://www.fosters.com.au/enjoy/beer/cascade_premium.htm for three new Cascade beer labels featuring a thylacine walking towards the viewer, probably derived from one of the many photographs taken at Beaumaris Zoo, Hobart in the early twentieth century. The Cascade Blonde promotion states: “Established in 1824, when the Tasmanian Tiger was still roaming the Wellington Foothills, Cascade is Australia’s oldest brewery”. 14

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wolf-like animal that was a threat to settlers. The advertisement encapsulates both stable and shifting meanings for the species and for the landscape. The diffused ferns and the trusting closeness of the drinking thylacine gesture toward Eden and prelapsarian innocence, a remnant of the inhospitable place revealed to early settlers such as George Prideaux Harris.15 The purpose of Cascade’s 1998 “Out of the Wilderness” promotion is made explicit in the Company’s campaign material—the idea of a wild environment is foregrounded and the words “unique” and “pure” each appear three times in the short text, with concern about pollution and “product purity” explicitly noted. There is long history of a link between the thylacine, Tasmania and qualities of difference: the thylacine was “the world's largest carnivorous marsupial” and Tasmania is now one of “the last great unspoilt wilderness areas of the world”. But in its present context, the figure of the animal is a container for various messages and ideas about tourism, commerce and state identity, rather than the natural world. The figure emerges from the wilderness and the extinction of the species is almost forgotten in the possibility of a sighting, in the stylising of form, and in the erasure of resemblance to the living animal. The more rare living thylacines became in Tasmania, the more visible were their representations. A lithograph drawn from a photograph on a membership certificate issued by the Tasmanian Field Naturalist’s Club in 1910 also implies that the thylacine linked ideas about the Tasmanian environment with perceptions of place and identity (Figure 78). The figure at the base of a tree trunk is a copy of one of the thylacines in Figure 65, transposed from the straw-covered zoo enclosure to an idealised natural setting that includes an owl and tree ferms. It is, indeed, a beautiful representation that shows that an artist can produce an image that is both naturalistic and sympathetic. This animal’s position is believable; the figure seems about to raise its head and look the viewer in the eye and the anticipation of the thylacine’s imagined gaze enlivens the image. As Heidrun Ludwig comments on the effect of Joseph Wolf’s illustrations of birds that “use the eye of the subject to powerfully engage the onlooker”, every possibility of engagement heightens the awareness of the viewer.16 The 15 See Goss, “Souvenir and Sacrifice,” 56–71 on how images similar to these operated in a marketing campaign for Hawaii. 16 Schulze-Hagen, Joseph Wolf, 81.

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Figure 78. Tasmanian Field Naturalist’s Club Membership certificate, 1910. Lithograph. Archives Office of Tasmania.

stance of the figure is not unlike that seen in line drawings of thylacines in Aboriginal rock engravings and it also resembles the highly successful dog-like image that connects with the viewer in advertisements for Cascade lager (see Figure 76). Part of the appeal of the illustration derives from the capacities of its photographic source: it captures a momentary movement, a simple turn of the body that encapsulates an important aspect of animal behaviour—the figure is at once lithe, observant and relaxed. However, any concern for the species that this image may have inspired was not matched by actions. Executed by Charles T. Harrisson, a founding member of the Club, the image appeared on a certificate issued in response to late membership fees paid by the organisation’s participants just two years after the bounty on the thylacine was lifted. Janet Fenton’s history of the Club reveals that the plants and animals on the certificate were regarded as “typical Tasmanian subjects”. Formed in 1904, the Club included among its members many prominent Tasmanian biologists, botanists, zoologists, ornithologists and geologists and, as Fenton points out, with

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natural history still a subject of considerable interest much of the flora and fauna of the island was still waiting to be recorded and classified. Fenton states that thylacines were often the subject of interest, noting reports of sightings and David Elliot’s “plea” for areas to be “set aside, wherein the thylacine may hunt sufficient game for the maintainance [sic] of full breeding conditions and well-being” and recommending the island’s Florentine Valley as an appropriate site.17 However, this plea was not made until 1949—too late to be of value even if it had been acted upon, although reports of thylacine sightings continued to be made in the Club’s minutes in 1953 and 1959. No specific conservation recommendations regarding the species appear to have been made between 1904 and the 1930s—years that were crucial to the species’ survival. The identification of the thylacine with the State of Tasmania was formalised with the approval in 1917 and proclamation in 1919 of a new State coat of arms, a mere 10 years after a government bounty on the species ended in 1909 (Figure 79). It is, perhaps, the ultimate irony that two thylacines hold the shield on which symbols of the State’s prosperity are arranged—hops, relating to beer; a thunderbolt representing electricity; a ‘garb’ signifying agriculture; and, in the centre of the shield, a ram standing for the pastoral industry. A British lion with pick-axe and spade stands above the shield; the thylacines take the role of ‘supporters’. In one sense, the elevation of the thylacine to the coat of arms and the species’ role as supporter of the industries pictured is entirely appropriate: indeed, members of the species carried the burden of European imagination and aspirations until their demise. To fulfil their emblematic function on the coat of arms, the form of the thylacines is manipulated to convey a power and authority they never held after European settlement of the island. Now they are dog-like creatures again, but with deep chests, strong legs and confident expressions. They take on the pose, attitude and even the shape of the shield-bearing animals that traditionally appear on many coats of arm; they are comparable to the emu, kangaroo and lion on Australian and British ensigns that suggest the qualities of the State. The smooth outline of their bodies gives the images a symbolic distance from the real animal and their dignified form disguises the failure of the State to protect the species.

17

Fenton, Century Afield, 1–19, 66.

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It has been suggested that remorse motivated the choice of the thylacine for the coat of arms, but the way the animals are represented is a little like hanging a corpse from a tree for public display: their presence signifies the State’s power to exterminate species. Traditionally, heraldic figures have been chosen for political, rather than emotional reasons: their purpose is to establish and project a strong and distinct identity. The arms signify the final death of the thylacine as a living animal or a representation with any integrity. As Steve Baker says of later twentieth-century animal representations, “such meanings as there are operate largely independently of the living animal even if they once derived from it or even now apply to it”.18 The stereotype of the species is transformed on the emblem; only the distinctiveness of the form remains to function as a paradox, a gaping loss and an embarrassment. And as memories of the real animal fade away the figures on the arms become strange, contorted, misunderstood signs. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century dozens of logos and emblems in Tasmania use the figure of the thylacine. The State government deploys a stylised image of a ‘tiger’ emerging from a bank of grass that began its life in the department of Tourism as a letterhead, on car licence plates, frosting the glass doors to its departmental offices, and heading job advertisements. The dominant idea in this image is conveyed by the break in the pattern of long grass: there is a sense of emergence—mirrored in the Cascade advertisement—as if a thylacine may suddenly appear and look the viewer in the eye. A thylacine also adorns the coat of arms of Launceston City Council in the north of the State, appears on the logo for a bus line, a football team and the Tasmanian Cricket Association as well as on stamps, on potato bags and, of course, on tourist brochures. The species also features as a bronze foursome on the University of Tasmania’s ornate mace used at graduation ceremonies and other formal occasions. These figures have a very similar form to the thylacines on the State coat of arms. A note in the University Records Office states that, while the mace is traditionally “an aggressive weapon and an authority symbol”, efforts were made to reduce the elements of power and authority by substituting an object that “carries its own authority as an artwork, as sculpture”. This work is perceived primarily as a testimonial to the considerable skills of the 18

Baker, Picturing the Beast, 28.

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Tasmanian artists who designed and made it, while “familiar and everyday” materials were deliberately used in its construction, rather than gold, silver and gemstones.19 However, again stressing the identification of the species with uniqueness, the University’s mission statement refers to the production of scholarship that is international in scope, but which also reflects the distinctiveness of Tasmania.20 It is significant that the dominant common name for the species’ today is ‘tiger’: it has associations with strength, ferocity, aggression, beauty and exoticism and is equally appropriate for a football team, a political body, or an authoritative institution. While emblematic images such as these keep some idea of the thylacine in the visual field, they do nothing to confront or appease the loss of the species. Idols, Fetishes and Totems So what is the function of commercial and emblematic images and how do they operate? Michael Fried suggests that images want mastery over the viewer—to attract, arrest and enthrall. The Cascade advertisement showing a drinking thylacine uses the large round eyes of the animal to directly address the beholder. It is an example of many pictures that “get what they want by not seeming to want anything, having everything they need” and it is this self-sufficiency that so entices the viewer, who wants then to observe/consume/tour the subject. According to W. J. T. Mitchell in his essay “What Do Pictures Want?” images such as these make the kind of demands traditionally associated with idolatry, fetishism and totemism. Mitchell defines idols as images that want the worship of the masses, they are sublime “exhibitionists who want an adoring public, a gathered body of spectators whose experience is multiplied and reinforced by its sense of belonging to a collective gaze focused on a single object”.21 Many thylacine images used by institutions belong in this category: the shape, the form and the stripe is designed to identify, attract, focus and sustain attention. The animal links a government or corporate body with the idea of strength; inappropriate ideas such as ‘extinction’ or ‘oppression’ are suppressed. Unless it is closely analysed, the 19

University of Tasmania Records, “Ceremonial Mace,” 1990. University of Tasmania, Graduation Program, back cover. 21 Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 92; Mitchell, “What Do Pictures Want?” 215–32. 20

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visual objects makes a simple statement and there is little confusion or ambivalence obvious to their large audience. Mitchell maintains that fetishes, on the other hand, want only one beholder, “a voyeur cloistered in a private space, observing without being observed. They are lost parts of the beholder’s body that want to come home. They don’t want to be beheld so much as held”. Souvenirs exemplify Mitchell’s definition of fetishes. They become personal possessions that encapsulate a prominent twenty-first century yearning—to escape big cities. The thylacine souvenirs sold in dozens of tourist shops in Tasmania arrest time, proclaim both material displacement and a nostalgic desire for what is felt to be lost: they embody the ‘spirit of place’ and the culture of tourism.22 In the context of the State, thylacine souvenirs can be a relic of the death of the natural and speak to visitors with what Susan Stewart refers to as “the language of longing”. It is by means of their material relation to a particular location that they acquire their significance.23 Outside Tasmania the thylacine is an Australian icon, a symbol of extinction, or a reminder of the fragile state of the environment; a figure that evokes feelings of sadness, curiosity and concern. Mitchell defines totems as companionable, objects of “playful wonder that leave the beholder transformed, enlightened, initiated into a community of understanding, or interpellated into a collective ideology”. They are not to be worshipped as gods like the idol, nor hoarded as a private possession like the fetish, but “greeted and enjoyed”. Some manifestations of the thylacine produced by Cascade brewery fit this description perfectly. The thylacine on the beer label becomes that lost part of the Tasmanian psyche, the past recalled as a time when the wild areas of the state were untrodden except by trappers, forests were intact, and few tourists visited the State. Thylacine totems have existed for over a century and their association with Tasmania as a place is instantly recognised as an expression of the island’s chief characteristic—difference from the mainland states of Australia and from the populous places of the world. Although, as Baker points out, there is “no consistent and reliable relation between the animal depicted and the meanings conveyed or even intended”. The power of the image “rests on a most fragile foundation”. The animal figure 22 23

Goss, “Souvenir and Sacrifice,” 56–60. Stewart, On Longing, 135.

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is used in this way simply because it is available out there in the culture; its animality is overlooked.24 In the case of the thylacine the causes of the species’ extinction are denied or concealed. The animal’s history is invisible; the image becomes simply a symbol of something else entirely. Sealed with a Thylacine The seal and medal for the Royal Society of Tasmania (Figure 80) designed in 1927 by Colbron Pearse embodies the failure of Tasmanian scientific institutions to mount a timely response to the plight of the species. Formed in 1843, the Society was the first outside the United Kingdom and this design, replacing the British-inspired logo of lion and crown, features a thylacine on a map of Tasmania with a crown above it. Pearse was a young staff member at the Tasmanian Museum in Hobart and the medal was to be awarded for eminence in research to recipients born or resident in Tasmania and who had contributed to the community over a long period of time. No details of the discussion concerning the design of the medal are recorded; the Society’s minutes merely state “a discussion took place” and that a sub-committee was formed to draft a design and report to the next meeting.25 But some of the attitudes of the general community are indicated by the response to a very similar animal design that appeared on the first Australian stamp issued in 1913 and a number of stamps that followed. The desire of Postmaster-General Frazer was that “something emblematic of Australia” appeared on the stamp, rather than the King’s head. The “kangaroo and map” stamp was intended to be an advertisement for the nation and many other draft designs featured animals. When the first one-penny stamp was finally released, newspapers mocked the stamp, feeling that the “dejected” kangaroo perched on the continent of Australia was a “grotesque and ridiculous” choice as a national symbol, and the simplicity of the design atypical of stamps at that time. The Sydney Daily Telegraph considered the design “against good taste” and “against the canons of art”. On the appointment of a new Postmaster the 24 25

Baker, Picturing the Beast, 43. Royal Society, Minutes Special Meeting, May 9, 1927.

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Figure 80. Design for Royal Society of Tasmania medal and seal. Adopted 1927.

following year, the kangaroo and map stamps were abolished and replaced with a king’s head design, although the two-shilling version continued to be produced until 1948. Narelle Jubelin, a contemporary stamp designer, considers the stark appearance of the kangaroo and map stamp as “radical for its time” and “startling in its break with tradition”; she considers that the “misplaced” kangaroo begs the key national question of what Australia’s identity actually is, when so many of its inhabitants are, in fact, dis-placed from European [and Asian] cultures.26

26 Breckon, Kangaroo and Map, 8–19. The earliest known version of this design by Blamire Young omitted Tasmania from the map of Australia.

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The Royal Society of Tasmania’s medal and seal may well have been influenced by the “kangaroo and map” stamp design and in this respect could also be considered “radical” in its use of an animal such as the thylacine starkly outlined against the map of Tasmania. That drawing attention to the species in this way was deliberate is supported by evidence that Clive Lord, the secretary of the Society and Director of the Tasmanian Museum in 1927 when the medal was established, was particularly active in attempts to protect the species. For instance, his article “Existing Tasmanian Marsupials”, published in the 1926 edition of the Proceedings of the Society, reported on scientific conferences in Australia that stressed the importance of native animals and “the need for a better system of conservation, for, with the advance of settlement, many forms of animal life are being reduced in numbers”. He continues our fauna consists, to a very large extent of archaic types, which, when brought into sudden contact with more advanced forms, rapidly decline. In addition to man, in the ordinary process of settlement, the native fauna has to contend with numerous introduced species, which latter almost invariably tend to displace the indigenous forms previously existing.

Lord laments the lack of a systematic biological survey of Australian animals, as pointed out by visiting American observers, and sees his brief résumé of Tasmanian Marsupalia as a contribution to amending this lack. In relation to the thylacine, Lord notes that the species is now “confined practically to the rugged western portion of the island” where it is being further reduced because it is said they interfere with the trappers’ snares. He explains that “as a result, powerful ‘springer’ snares are set often in the vicinity of skinning yards which are situated every quarter of a mile or so along the lines of snares”. He adds that thylacines caught in these snares were often too severely injured to be kept alive. Lord then suggests that, as “the shy animal” is unlikely to breed in the confines of a Zoo, it is in the interests of science that a reserve be set aside and netted in order to prevent the total extermination of the species. However, five years later, in “Notes for Members of the Council in reference to a proposed deputation to the Government” written not long before his sudden death, Lord merely outlines the need for scientific study of the natural assets of a country and notes their importance to “prosperity”. He does not mention conservation imperatives, nor take the opportunity to lobby

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for the establishment of the reserves he considered so important several years earlier.27 *** So, to return to the questions posed in the introduction to this book. Why did artists, writers, publishers and scientists represent the thylacine in the way that they did? They were influenced by ancient fears, motivated by imperialist ambitions, guided by scientific conventions and fired by economic impulses. The visual and textual images circulating in Britain and Australia in the nineteenth and early twentieth century transformed Tasmania’s environment and fauna—just as recent industrial development in Western Australia has changed the country in the remote Pilbara region in the interests of Australia’s prosperity. And exactly how did these images impact on the lives of the animals depicted? The way the thylacine was figured and defined—what was presented as that species, rather than another—was not only an expression of the values and beliefs of European scientists, artists and publishers, but produced and intensified negative attitudes towards this rarely-seen animal. For instance, many images that construct the subject position of the species as dangerous to human interests, as an animal to be feared and destroyed, either precede or correspond with significant events in the process of extinction. The representation of the species as vermin, so effectively introduced by the illustration in The Naturalist’s Library, supported the mass destruction of thylacines instigated by the Van Diemen’s Land Company bounty in 1830. Wolf-like images and naming constitute another peak in the production of negative visualisations and they precede and parallel the implementation of the Tasmanian government bounty in 1888. These images anticipate the species’ extinction in the form the animal takes, in the signifiers contained in them, in the situation of the models, in the discourses associated with the illustrations, and in the narratives that frame them. It is particularly significant that the few images that engender feelings of sympathy or admiration (or merely an absence of hostility) 27 Lord, “Existing Tasmanian Marsupials,” 17–22; Lord, Notes for Members, 1. However, Lord, who was himself the recipient of a Royal Society medal in 1930, did more to prevent the extermination of the thylacine than almost any other individual in Tasmania. See Paddle, Last Tasmanian Tiger, 173–88 for his attempts to gain official protection for the species.

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appear in scientific journals with limited circulation, such as the Transactions of the Linnean Society, and French and German literature that was unlikely to be accessed by English readers; or limited edition books such as Joseph Wolf’s Zoological Sketches and Broinowski’s work; or were published at the very beginning of European settlement, or when only a small number of thylacines survived. Few of these publications are currently held in Australian libraries, and fewer were or are held in Tasmanian collections. In addition, photographic images that show a docile creature and may have inspired concern were often retouched to support existing stereotypes, despite or perhaps because the first moves toward conservation began to be voiced. It is also important to note that the most negative images frequently emanated from Britain, where investors and landowners had an interest in exterminating the thylacine. The most extreme of these images are in works held in multiple copies by libraries in Tasmania—an indication that they were readily available and influential. The views embodied in well-known and popular images and texts soon consolidated into a discourse—that is, “a delimitation of a field of objects, the definition of a legitimate perspective for the agent of knowledge, and the fixing of norms for the elaboration of concepts and theories … outside which it is almost impossible to think”—and evolved into a stereotype that appeared in newspapers and magazines and spread the idea of a ferocious animal into the popular domain.28 These ideas had the capacity to move independently, taking diverse trajectories and travelling by word of mouth over considerable distances. The notions expressed by these images were part of a climate of opinion about the thylacine that had its beginnings long before European settlement. The relation between images and extinction has a complex, circular effect where pictures reflected, reinforced, shaped and encouraged destructive attitudes and actions toward the species. This was also the case in many other parts of the world where countless indigenous animals disappeared during colonial settlement. The rate of extinctions continues to accelerate today. This book raises 28 Young, Untying the Text, 48. For a discussion of the processes through which two different cultures shape ideas about the same animal—“criminalising or sanctifying them, making them objects of disgust and contempt or concern and protection, in accordance with changing priorities”—see Milton, “Possum Magic, Possum Menace: Wildlife Control and the Demonization of Cuteness” in Freeman et al., Considering Animals, forthcoming.

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questions not only about how nonhuman animals are represented, but also how extinct species should be remembered. Mitchell maintains that modern idolatry is constructed in an act of double forgetting. First, we forget that consciousness and desire has been projected so far into an image that it, in turn, demands things. Second, we forget that in the initial act of projection we have endowed the image with independent life and agency. He adds that, as far as the postmodern image is concerned, superstition has not been overcome: images still possess a “deep magic”. This book has offered a perspective on the role of images in the destruction of species and revealed the persistence and power of visual signifiers and subtexts and how they combine with words to silently and effectively infiltrate perceptions. As with illustrations of the dodo (chapter 3, note 14), images of the thylacine that circulate in influential spaces still determine beliefs about the species and erroneous representations continue to exist for centuries. Helen Tiffin suggests that because of the complex relationship between “our self-definition as humans against (non-human) animals, and because of our ambivalent attitudes to other predators” alteration of public opinion about sharks, for instance, requires more than scientific facts: “what is needed is an understanding of the history of the ways in which we have projected, and still project our fears of death, the unknown, and the malign onto the shark, and the often complex and convoluted reasons for these projections”.29 The proliferation of visual information and its global dissemination in mass media, including electronic sources such as the World Wide Web, accelerates the potential for images to make both positive and negative impacts and to change history for better or worse. If the past is to impact on the welfare of animals today, the histories of animals that have disappeared must be foregrounded, not forgotten. And, as Erica Fudge suggests, these histories cannot just tell us what humans thought, they must “intervene”—make us think again about our past, even if this is confronting. “The histories of animals can only work at the expense of the human”.30 Reassessing the story of the thylacine is particularly important as so many species now face extinction. Another Tasmanian marsupial carnivore, the Tasmanian devil, has recently been placed on the 29 30

Mitchell, “What do Pictures Want?” 225; Tiffin, “Shadow of Shark,” 120. Fudge, “Left-Handed Blow,” 15.

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endangered list in accordance with the Tasmanian Threatened Species Protection Act 1995, due to the effects of a virulent form of cancer. Possible triggers suggested for the disease are pesticides used in agriculture, toxins sprayed on roads and poisons used to kill animals that the devils eat.31 Like the thylacine, the devil has been and often still is represented as a vicious, ugly animal. In an article about a recent documentary film on the devil, Brian Courtis writes “it's difficult to understand how anyone could find the snarling, scavenging, blood-chilling Tasmanian devil loveable”. However, zoologist Menna Jones, who has researched devils in the wild for many years, sees a different creature—a highly intelligent animal that has a busy, albeit noisy, family life and young that are infinitely interesting and appealing.32 Yet the majority of images that still appear on websites, brochures, a popular Warner Brothers cartoon series and in scientific works, show devils with snarling faces and open mouths—a depiction that is unlikely to encourage the generous sentiments, cooperation and financial contributions that are required to save them from extinction. Images of the devil in formats designed for mass audiences, such as films and television documentaries, are particularly inclined to play on violent aspects of this animal’s daily life.33 Writing of representations of animals in general, Baker posits “whether and how things might be changed—to the advantage of animals—through the constructive use of representations”. He suggests “at the very least, it should be possible to outline the conditions under which we might usefully speak of ‘strategic images for animal rights’”. Among the strategies for change he offers are resisting the production of stereotypes, casting doubt on what it is that is being seen, avoiding objectifying the image of the animal, and contesting the meanings images might carry—that is, productive realignments 31 See http://www.dpiwe.tas.gov.au/inter.nsf/WebPages/LBUN-5QF86G?open for current information about the progress of the disease and efforts to save the Tasmanian devil; Owen and Pemberton, Tasmanian Devil, 182–86. 32 Courtis, “Sympathy for the Devil,” 1; Jones, pers. comm., October 10, 2006. 33 A documentary film about the Tasmanian devil by David Parer and Elizabeth Parer-Cook is called Terrors of Tasmania. It is billed as “a story that will change your attitude to these extraordinary animals”, but at a screening of the film at the University of Tasmania in 2005, Parer admitted that it balances science, education and entertainment; that the documentary film industry is “driven by money” and that “good science is extremely creative”. Despite Parer’s apparent good intentions, the film exploits the ‘devilish’ associations of the species to attract and entertain audiences and perhaps prevents them from caring about the species’ fate.

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in “the politics of animal picturing”. A most important strategy is the continual reassessment of the histories of extinct animal species, especially as global warming, invasive species, loss of habitat and water and air pollution continue to impact on populations in every part of the world. Tiffin points out “as scientists increasingly acknowledge, public perceptions and opinions are crucial to the success or failure of conservation projects. From the preservation of entire river systems … or the shoring up of wetland habitats, to the protection of endangered animal and plant species or ecosystems, enforceable legislation is dependent on public support, and thus, whatever the force of scientific data, on popular images and beliefs”. In 2007 a symposium “Envisioning Animals: Animals in Visual Culture and Contemporary Human-Animal Relations” at York University in Toronto, posed questions relating to animal agency and subjectivity that are now being discussed in Human-Animal Studies contexts: “What [are] the possibilities for considering animal’s perspectives within debates about representation? Do animals have any agency within animal imagery? Should academics be responsible for considering individual animal’s experiences? Can the visual bias of our own culture be interrogated in light of the multisensory experiences of animals, including ourselves?”34 Research that involves new analytical and critical readings of animal related material produces outcomes, raises awareness, explores possibilities and takes steps toward understanding the many ways in which subjects, situations and ideas operate. The tendency to sensationalism that is apparent in scientific works in the nineteenth century still exists today in a much wider variety of media. Wildlife documentaries with enormous budgets and sophisticated capacities to fabricate situations and events are the popular zoological works of the twenty-first century. The need for scepticism in viewing pictures and moving film of animals, especially when they are used as evidence of activities considered undesirable, should be advised. Questions viewers should be encouraged to ask include: Does this picture supply reliable, unsensational evidence of the form, behaviour, or activities of the animal? Do the text/narrative and images match with each other? Is one aspect of behaviour constantly shown, rather than others? If so, why does this occur? What messages are the 34

Baker, Picturing the Beast, 187–89, 217–32; Tiffin, “Shadow of Shark,” 117; Warkentin et al., “Envisioning Animals.”

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images and actions of the animal conveying and what might he or she be feeling and thinking? Responsible representation of nonhuman species, especially those threatened with extinction, should not be an unreasonable expectation and this is now beginning to occur. In 2009 the BBC Natural History Unit’s documentary series Big Cat Week provided links to local communities and conservation projects in the Masai Mara in Kenya through an interactive website and onsite blogs that potentially involve the audience in positive intervention in the future of cheetahs, lions, and leopards in the Mara Conservancy. While weekly episodes are still somewhat artificial narratives carefully constructed from selected film footage, spin-off series Big Cat Live and Big Cat Raw expose filmmaking strategies and feature twenty-four hour webcams that show the lives of some of the animals in the series in real time.35 With the effects of climate change presenting new challenges, and given that one of the most effective ways in which attempts at conservation have been undermined is through anthropocentric or negative representations of animal species, further investigation of books, films, advertisements and every other medium in which images appear is urgently needed.

35

For details and videos see http://www.bbc.co.uk/bigcat/

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Engraving after drawing by George Prideaux Harris (1806) in Transactions of the Linnean Society of London 9 (1808). By permission of the Linnean Society of London. . . . . . . . . 2. Pencil and watercolour “Sketch of a Tyger Trap intended for Mount Morriston” by Thomas Scott, 1823. Sketches Van Diemen’s Land, 1822–47. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales (PXB 216). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . following 3. Wood engraving by Jean Antoine Pierron after drawing by Jacques Eustache de Sève, inscribed “d’apres les Trans Linn” in Anselme Gaëtan Desmarest, Mammalogie ou Description des Espèces de Mammifères [Supplement to Encyclopédia Méthodique], Paris, 1820. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. Wood engraving by James Basire in Georges Cuvier, The Animal Kingdom; with supplementary additions to each order by Edward Griffith et al., London, 1827–35 (vol. 3, Mammalia, 1827). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . following 5. Engraving (creators unknown) in F. J. Bertuch, Bilderbuch für Kinder, Weimar, 1798–1830 (vol. 10, 1821). Print held by Gerard Willems Antique Prints and Maps, Hobart. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . following 6. Wood engraving (creators unknown) in History of the Mammalia, Sketches in Natural History, London, 1849 (vol. I, Order Carnivora: Families Felidae and Ursinae. Order Marsupalia); The Pictorial Museum of Animated Nature, London, c.1850 (vol. I); and Charles Knight ed., The English Cyclopædia: A New Dictionary of Universal Knowledge, London, 1855 (vol. 3, Natural History). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7. Lithograph by K. J. Brodtmann in H. R. Schinz, Naturgeschichte und Abbildungen de Säugethiere, Zurich, 1824–27 (plate volume, 1827). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . following 8. Male thylacine taxidermy specimen in Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris. Claimed to have come from the cabinet of King Louis XVI and dated pre-1789. International Thylacine Specimen Database, 2006. (MNHN 2000– 153). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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34

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9. Engraving by Jean Louis Coutant after drawing by Jean Gabriel Prêtre, in René Primevère Lesson, Centurie Zoologique, ou Choix d’Animaux Rares, Nouveaux ou Imparfaitement Connus … , Paris, 1830–32 and M. Paul Gervais, Atlas de Zoologie ou Collection de 100 Planches, Paris, 1844. Print held by Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 10. Lithograph by J. Honegger in H. R. Schinz, Naturgeschichte und Abbildungen der Menschen und der Säugethiere, nach den neuesten Entdeckungen und vorzüglichsten Originalien 2nd ed., Zurich, 1840. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 11. Engraving H. Fournier (1837) after drawing by François Roulin from specimen in “la galerie du Museum” in Georges Cuvier, Le Règne Animal Distribué d’après son Organisation, pour Servir de Base a l’Histoire Naturelle des Animaux 3rd ed. (Disciples), Paris, 1836–49 (vol. 2). Rare Books Collection, State Library of Victoria. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 12. Engraving by Amédée Varin after drawing by Félix Edouard Géurin-Méneville in F. E. Géurin-Méneville, Dictionnaire Pittoresque d'Histoire Naturelle et des Phénomènes de la Nature, Paris, 1833–39 (plate 690). Print held by Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . following 166 13. Lithograph by E. Hochdanz in Traugott Bromme, Zonengemälde. Naturgeschichte und Volkerkunde in Wort und Bild, Stuttgart, 1846. State Library of New South Wales. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . following 166 14. Edward Lear, 1833, watercolour and pencil sketch that may have been preparatory drawing for William Jardine, The Natural History of Felinae, Edinburgh, 1834. Collection: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. . . . . . . . . . . following 166 15. Pencil drawing by George Augustus Robinson in his Journal, Van Diemen's Land 1829–34, George Augustus Robinson Papers 1818–34. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales (A7031). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 16. Wood engraving (creators unknown) in Hugh Murray, Encyclopædia of Geography, London, 1834, 1839 and 1840. National Library of Scotland. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 17. Wood engraving (creators unknown) in W. I. Bicknell, Scripture Natural History and Guide to General Zoology,

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19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

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London [London Printing and Publishing Company], 1835 and The Natural History of the Sacred Scriptures, and Guide to General Zoology, London/New York [Tallis], c.1851. Print held by Gerard Willems Antique Prints and Maps, Hobart. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . following 166 Engraving by William Home Lizars after a drawing by William Dickes, in G. R. Waterhouse, Marsupialia or Pouched Animals (vol. X1 Mammalia, vol. XXIV The Naturalist's Library), Edinburgh, 1841; R. Lydekker, Phases of Animal Life Past and Present, London, 1892; Richard Lydekker, A Handbook to the Marsupalia and Monotremata, ed. R. Bowdler Sharpe, London, 1894 and Richard Lydekker, A Handbook to the Marsupalia and Monotremata, London, 1896.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Thylacine taxidermy mount, Otago Museum New Zealand, date unknown—from animal whose sex is unknown. International Thylacine Specimen Database, 2006 (VT2607). . . . 64 Wood engraving after drawing by W. H. Freeman, in Cassell’s Popular Natural History, London, 1863 (vol. 2 Mammalia), c.1870, 1896; M. Paul Gervais, Histoire Naturelle des Mammifères avec l’Indication de Leurs Moeurs … , Paris, 1855; and a close copy by Redman Kenny Engravers in S. G. Goodrich and A. Winchell, Johnson’s Natural History, Comprehensive, Scientific and Popular, Illustrating the Animal Kingdom, with its Wonders and Curiosities … , Ann Arbor/New York, 1879, 1885, 1889. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Engraving (creators unknown) in Dr Chenu, Encyclopédie d’Histoire Naturelle ou Traité Complet de Cette Science, Paris, 1856. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Wood engraving (signature indecipherable) in Thomas Rymer Jones, The Animal Creation; a Popular Introduction to Zoology, London, 1865, 1872. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Wood engraving inscribed ‘C R’ and ‘C F A’ in Illustrated Sydney News, April 16, 1866. National Library of Australia (PIC 079.44 ILL 440095). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 & 24.1. Lithographs by Henry Richter, 1851 in John Gould, The Mammals of Australia, London, 1845–63 (pt. 3) and 1863 (vol. 1). The pattern or key plates for these lithographs are held in the National Library of Australia (PIC/8549 nla. pci-vn3075907). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . following 166

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25. Watercolour and pencil drawing by Henry Richter for John Gould, The Mammals of Australia, 1845–63. Reproduction licence granted courtesy of The Right Hon. the Earl of Derby 2009. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . following 26. Lithograph by Joseph Wolf in Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London XXVIII, 1850. Zoological Society of London Library. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . following 27. Pencil on brown paper by Joseph Wolf. Preparatory drawing for lithograph in Proceedings of Zoological Society of London, 1850. Zoological Society of London Library. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . following 28. Wood engraving (possibly from drawing by Joseph Smit) in H. Schlegel, De Dierentuin van het Koninklijk Zoologisch Genootschap Natura Artis Magistra te Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 1872. Photo © The British Library Board (7205.g.8). 29. Lithograph by Vincent Brookes (according to title page) after drawing by Joseph Wolf, in Philip Sclater ed., Zoological Sketches by Joseph Wolf, London, 1861. Australian Museum Research Library. The Australian Museum received their 2-volume set in 1885 from London booksellers Trubner and Co. for £22. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . following 30. Lithograph by Harriet Scott after a photograph by Victor E. Prout in Gerard Krefft, The Mammals of Australia, Sydney, 1869–71. This lithograph was one of a set originally printed in 1864 for the New South Wales Council of Eduction. 31. Lithographic copy by Louisa Meredith of an illustration in Gould’s The Mammals of Australia. In Louisa Anne Meredith, Our Island Home: A Tasmanian Sketchbook, Hobart, 1879 and Tasmanian Friends and Foes, London, 1881. . . . . 32. Lithograph “drawn and executed” by Gracius Broinowski in G. J. Broinowski, Birds and Mammals of Australia, Sydney, 1884–85. Production and distribution of this book was stopped by London publishers Henry Sotheran and only 3 complete copies of the book are presently held in Australian libraries—The Royal Society of Tasmania Library, University of Tasmania Library; National Library of Australia; and State Library of South Australia. . . . . . . . . . . . following 33. Lithograph from a composite drawing by P. J. Bayzand in Geoffrey Smith, A Naturalist in Tasmania, 1909. Smith

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34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

writes that the illustration is “partly after Gould and partly my own suggestions”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . & 34.1. Lithographs from pen and ink drawings (creator[s] unknown) in Clive Lord and H. H. Scott, A Synopsis of the Vertebrate Animals of Tasmania, Hobart, 1924. Figure 34.1 is a close copy of “Head, of the size of life” from Gould’s The Mammals of Australia, 1863. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Detail of wood engraving on a map of Tasmania by J. Rogers after a drawing by H. Warren, in R. Montgomery Martin, The Illustrated Atlas and Modern History of the World, London, 1851. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wood engraving by L. C. Martin after a drawing by Joseph Wolf, in Excelsior: Helps to Progress in Religion, Science and Literature, 1855. W L Crowther Library, Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office. Also on contents page of Richard Lydekker, Royal Natural History, London, 1894–95. . . . . . . Lithograph by unknown artist (possibly Joseph Smit) in L. A. J. Burgersdijk, De Dieren, Afgebeeld, Beschreven en in Hunne Levenswijze Geschetst, Leiden, 1864 (vol. 1). Print held by Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office. . . . . . . . . . . . . . following Wood engraving by W. F. Coleman engraved by Brothers Daziel in John George Wood, The Illustrated Natural History, London, 1863–67 (vol. 2 1865), 1872, 1874, 1876; Routledge’s Popular Natural History, London, 1867; and The New Illustrated Natural History, London, 1874. This version was copied from an earlier engraving by Robert Kretschmer in Alfred Edmund Brehm, Illustrirtes Thierleben: Eine Allgemeine Kunde des Thierreichs, Hilburghausen, 1864–69 (vol. 1–2 Die Säugethiere, 1864–65), the 1st edition of the publication that later became Brehms Thierleben. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wood engraving after W. H. Freeman, with engraver’s signature indecipherable, in Arthur Mangin, The Desert World; or the Scenery, Animal, Vegetable life, and Physical character of the Wilderness and Waste places of the Earth, London/Edinburgh/New York, 1869, 1872. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wood engraving signed A. Mesnel in Louis Figuier, Mammalia: Their Various Forms and Habits, London, 1870 and Mammalia: Popularly Described by Typical Species

251

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41.

42.

43.

44. 45.

46.

47.

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list of illustrations in Numerous Anecdotes, London, 1870; Fr. Christmann, Australien: Das Neue Buch der Reisen und Entdeckungen, Leipzig, 1870; E. H. Giglioli, I Tasmaniani: Cenni Storici ed Etnologici di un Popolo e Stinto, Milano, 1874; and [signed ‘B’] in E. Percival Wright, Mammalia, Their Various Forms and Habits, London, 1875, 1887, 1892 and Cassell’s Concise Natural History: Being a Complete Series of Descriptions of Animal Life, London, 1892. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wood engraving (signature indecipherable, creators unknown) in Meyers Konversations-Lexikon 5th ed., Leipzig/ Wien, 1893–97. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wood engraving signed ‘R H’ in Australian Graphic: An Illustrated Intercolonial Newspaper, March 22, 1884. State Library of New South Wales. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wood engraving by Samuel Calvert in Illustrated Australian News, December 19, 1885. Latrobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lithograph signed ‘E L B’ in Town and Country Journal, February 18, 1899. Australian Museum Research Library. Engraving by C. Wendt after a drawing by Gustav Mutzel in Alfred C. Brehm, Brehms Thierleben. Allgemeine Kunde des Tierreichs 2nd ed., Leipzig/Vienna, 1876–79 [reprinted 1882–84], 3rd ed. 1891–1900 (vol. 3 Die Säugethiere, 1891) and Brehm’s Zoological Atlas Classified in 55 Sheets, London, c.1891. Also [with attribution ‘G. Mutzel’ removed and only ‘C. Wendt’ remaining] in John Sterling Kingsley, The Standard Natural History, Boston, 1884 (vol. 5); Meyers Konversations-Lexicon 4th ed., Leipzig and Wien, 1885–90; and [with ‘GM’ in left corner and C Wendt partially removed] in John Sterling Kingsley, The Riverside Natural History, London, 1888 (vol. 5) and Richard Lydekker ed., The Royal Natural History, London, 1894 (vol. 3). . . . . . . . . Wood engraving (creators unknown) in P. Martin Duncan, Cassell’s Natural History, London/Paris/Melbourne, 1883, 1884 (vol. 3), 1896. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wood engraving [after?] Paul Neumann in Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon 13th ed., Leipzig, 1884. Print held by Gerard Willems Antique Prints and Maps, Hobart. . . . . Wood engraving [after?] Friedrich Specht in Carl Vogt and Friedrich Specht, The Natural History of Animals in Word

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list of illustrations and Picture, London, 1887; Carl Vogt, Les Mammifères, Paris, 1884; and Alfred Edmund Brehm, Brehm’s Life of Animals, Chicago, 1895. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49. Wood engraving (creators unknown) in G. T. Bettany, The World’s Inhabitants, or Mankind, Animals and Plants, London, 1889. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50. Wood engraving (creators unknown) in C. Annandale ed., The Popular Encyclopedia; or Conversations Lexicon, London, c.1894. Print held by Gerard Willems Antique Prints and Maps, Hobart. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51. Chromolithograph by Gustav Mutzel in Meyers Grosse Konversations-Lexikon 6th ed. 1902–8 (4th ed. has Mutzel’s engraving from Brehms Tierleben—see 45). Print held by Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . following 52. Photolithograph after W. Kuhnert in Richard Lydekker et al., Harmsworth Natural History, London, 1910 and Richard Lydekker, Wildlife of the World: A Descriptive Survey of the Geographical Distribution of Animals, London, 1915. 53. Photograph by E. T. Keller of thylacine at Washington Zoo in Anon., “Notes: Resting Position of the Thylacine” in Nature: A Weekly Illustrated Journal of Science LXIX, November 21, 1904. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54. Photograph of thylacine (photographer unknown) at Washington Zoo in Frank Baker, for Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution 1903, Washington, 1904. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55. Photograph by Walter Pfeffer Dando of thylacine at London Zoo in P. Chalmers Mitchell, Illustrated Official Guide to the London Zoological Society’s Gardens in Regent’s Park, London, 1904. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56. Photograph by Walter Pfeffer Dando (cropped and reversed version of photo above) in Arthur Mee, Popular Science [also called Harmsworth Popular Science], London, 1912 (vol. 3). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57. Photograph by Graham Renshaw of same thylacine as above at London Zoo in Graham Renshaw, More Natural History Essays, London, 1905. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Photograph by Graham Renshaw (cropped, close-up version of photo above) in Graham Renshaw, Journal of the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire 35 (1938).

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64. 65.

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list of illustrations The photo’s caption states “one of four imported by Carl Hagenbeck in 1902.” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Photograph by Lewis Medland of thylacine at London Zoo in Ernest Protheroe, The Handy Natural History: Mammals, London, 1909. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Photograph by W. S. Berridge of thylacine at London Zoo in William Percival Westall, The Book of the Animal Kingdom, London, 1910; P. Chalmers Mitchell, Official Guide to the Gardens of the Zoological Society of London, London, 1911; Alfred Edmund Brehm, Brehms Tierleben: Allemeine Kunde des Tierreichs 4th ed., Leipzig/Wien, 1911–1921 (vol. 10–13 Die Säugetiere, 1912–15); and John R. Crossland and J. M. Parris eds., Animal Life of the World, London, 1934. . Photograph by D. Seth-Smith of thylacine at London Zoo in Constance Innes Pocock, Highways and Byways of the Zoological Gardens, London, 1913. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Photographs by Lewis Medland of thylacine at London Zoo (one cropped and retouched) in C. J. Cornish ed., The Living Animals of the World: A Popular Natural History, London, 1913 (vol. 1) and Frank Finn et al., Hutchinson’s Animals of all Countries: The Living Animals of the World in Picture and Story, London, c.1924. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Photograph by W. S. Berridge of thylacine at London Zoo in W. S. Berridge, Wonders of Animal Life, London, 1915. State Library of New South Wales. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Photograph by W. S. Berridge of thylacine at London Zoo, in Charles Regan Tate ed. Natural History, London, 1936. Photo of thylacine family (photographer unknown) at Beaumaris Zoo, Hobart, in The Australian Naturalist 4, no.1 (1918). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Photograph by E. R. Sanborn of thylacine at Bronx Zoo, New York in Ernest Ingersoll, The Life of Animals: The Mammals, New York, 1906. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Photograph by Walter P. Dando of thylacine at London Zoo standing on hind legs in his book More Wild Animals and the Camera, 1913 and Alfred Edmund Brehm, Brehms Tierleben: Allemeine Kunde des Tierreichs 4th ed., Leipzig/ Wien, 1911–1916 (vol. 10–13 Die Säugetiere, 1912–15). . . . Photograph by E. R. Sanborn of thylacine at New York Zoo (retouched) in News Bulletin of the [New York] Zoologi-

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69.

70.

71.

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cal Society 10 (1903); William Hornaday, Our Vanishing Wildlife: Its Extermination and Preservation, New York, 1913; and W. H. D. Le Souëf, “Mammals of Australia in the Zoological Park,” Zoologica; Scientific Contributions of the New York Zoological Society 11, no. 6 (1919). . . . . . . . . Retouched photo (same as above with different background) in H. C. Raven, “Strange Animals of the Island Continent,” Natural History 29, no. 3/4 (1929). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Photograph by W. S. Berridge with background painting by Bruce Horsfall in William Berryman Scott, A History of Land Mammals in the Western Hemisphere, New York, 1913, 1937. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Photograph (photographer unknown, retouched) of thylacines at Beaumaris Zoo, Hobart in Anon., “Tasmanian Tigers,” Scientific Australian 22, no. 3 (1917) and Charles Hedley, Wild Animals of the World; Being a Popular Guide to Taronga Zoological Park, Sydney, 1919. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Photograph by H. Cox (retouched) of thylacine at unknown location in Frank Finn et al., Hutchinson’s Animals of all Countries: The Living Animals of the World in Picture and Story, London, c.1924. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Photograph by W. S. Berridge (retouched) of thylacine at London Zoo in “A Prehistoric Beast Still Living,” Field, the Country Newspaper, November 28, 1931. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Photograph by Harry Burrell of thylacine specimen at unknown location in Australian Museum Magazine 1, no. 3 (1921) and A. S. Le Souëf and Harry Burrell, The Wild Animals of Australasia, London, 1926. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chromolithograph from drawing by W. C. Piguenit (probably lithographed by A. Randall) advertising C. and J. Degraves’ Cascade Brewery, Hobart, 1870. This was one of the first examples of chromolithography executed in Tasmania (see Mercury, January 8, 1870, p. 2 regarding others from drawings by Piguenit). Poster © Cascade Brewery Company Limited. Presently held at Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . following Advertisement for Cascade Premium Lager that was used 1998–2002. Courtesy of Cascade Brewery Company Pty Ltd. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . following

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77. Label used on Cascade Premium Lager bottles 1985–2006. Courtesy of Cascade Brewery Company Pty Ltd. following 78. Lithograph executed by Charles T. Harrisson for Tasmanian Field Naturalist’s Club. Membership certificate made out to J. W. Beattie, a well-known Hobart photographer, dated November 11, 1910. Previously published in Janet Fenton, A Century Afield: A History of the Tasmanian Field Naturalists’ Club, Hobart, 2004. Certificate held in Archives Office of Tasmania and reproduced courtesy of the Tasmanian Field Naturalist’s Club. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79. Coat of arms of the State of Tasmania, Australia. Design approved 1917; arms proclaimed 1919. The motto, Ubertas et Fidelitas means Fertility and Faithfulness. . . . . following 80. Design by D. Colbron Pearse for Royal Society of Tasmania medal and seal, adopted November 1927 (Royal Society Archives: RSA/D5, minute dated November 3, 1927). Reproduced courtesy Royal Society of Tasmania. . . . . . . . . . . .

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277

INDEX Page numbers in bold refer to illustrations Aborigines, Australian rock engravings 1–2, 186 world view 2–3 Aborigines, Tasmanian 47–48, 134 thylacine interactions 6, 49–52 Allport, Morton 91, 95, 199 American Museum of Natural History. See under museums animal agency 186–87, 198, 198 n45, 245 gaze 87, 97, 115, 125, 162, 232 histories 5 n12, 243, 245 myths and misconceptions 5 n12, 26– 27, 122 (see also thylacine myths and misconceptions) stripes 30, 139, 200–201 suffering 19, 21, 23, 165–66, 181 trapping 7, 19, 21, 78, 112, 121, 148– 49, 166, 228–30, 240 animal photography 16, 170 n6, 193–95, 197, 200, 203–5, 222 n31 as documentation 214–15 See also photography; photographs animal representation 2–5, 7, 15–16, 23, 57, 145 n55, 170 n6, 209–10, 222, 235, 244–46 constitutive role of 3–5, 17, 242, 243–46 animal species extinction of 1 n1, 2–3, 142–49, 178– 79, 191, 197–98, 211, 214, 222, 242–43, 246 (see also thylacine extinction) preservation/protection of 17, 80–81, 91–93, 173, 180, 196, 214, 225, 227–30 (see also conservation) animals in documentaries 4, 244, 245–46 hunting of 10, 38, 51, 61, 78, 91, 123, 165, 203–5 as pests 34, 57, 80, 92, 214, 244 (see also Economic Zoology; sheep:

thylacine predation; thylacine: as vermin) as primitive 94 n23, 145, 177, 201, 211 (see also marsupials) Quaker attitudes to 23–24 n11 as spectacle 4, 87–88, 126, 175, 206 as symbols 201, 224, 234–38 See also animal; Australia: fauna Annandale, C. The Popular Encyclopedia 160, 161 ant-eater 186 Antarctic Wolf 148 anthropocentrism 5, 72, 246 armadillo 186–87 Armstrong, Philip 5 n12, 187 n31, 198 n45 artists. See zoological artists Australia fauna 8–9, 47, 53 n22, 80, 91–93, 160, 162, 173, 177, 210, 222, 226–28, 240 natural history publishing 12 Australian Graphic 138 Australian Museum Magazine 210, 218, 219, 220–23, 226 Australian Naturalist 195–96 Baker, Frank “Report of the Superintendant” 171, 172, 173 Baker, Steve 198, 235, 237–38, 244–45 Banks, Joseph 13, 19, 23, 32–33 Barrett, James (Sir) Australian Animals 115 Save Australia 209, 227–28 Barrington, George The History of New South Wales 37, 65 Barthes, Roland 62, 167 Basire, James 30 Bauer, Ferdinand 22, 31 Bayzand, P. J. 110, 111 Beattie, J. W. 110, 113, 199, 230

278

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Beaumaris Zoo. See under zoological gardens Berlin Zoo. See under zoological gardens Bentham, Jeremy 24 n11 Berger, John 87–88 Berridge, W. S. 216 Every Boy’s Book of the Zoo 120, 193–94 Wonders of Animal Life 191, 192, 193 Bettany, G. T. The World’s Inhabitants 159, 160 Bertuch, F. H. Bilderbuch für Kinder 31–33, following 166 beutelhund. See pouch-dog; marsupialdog beuteltiere. See marsupials beutelwolf. See pouch-wolf Bicknell, W. I. Scripture Natural History 36–37, 53, following 166 Big Cat Week 246 birds 21, 42, 47, 58, 91, 95, 99, 110, 136, 165, 209, 229–30, 232 Blumenbach, Johan 32–33, 75 n36 Bonyhady, Tim 108, 204–5 bounties on snakes 81–82 on wolves 121, 148, 149 See also thylacine bounties Bowdler-Sharpe, R. The Concise Knowledge Natural History 161–62 Brehm, Alfred Edmund Brehm’s Life of Animals 157 Brehms T(h)ierleben Second ed. 135, 151–54 Third ed. 152 Fourth ed. 152, 185, 203, 254 Brehm’s Zoological Atlas Classified in 55 Sheets 151 Illustrirtes Thierleben 128–130 Breton, William “Excursion to the Western Range” 69 Excursions in New South Wales 37 British Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire 182, 229 Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon 156– 57 Brodtmann, J. K. 41

Broinowski, Gracius J. Birds and Mammals of Australia 109–10, following 166 Bromme, Traugott Zonengemalde 47–48, following 166 Bronx Zoo. See zoological gardens: New York Zoo Brower, M. 88 n12, 197, 200, 118 n24, 220 Buffon, George-Louis Buffon’s Natural History 30, 61 buidelwolf. See pouch-wolf Burgersdijk, L. A. J. De Dieren 127–28, following 166 Burrell, Harry 218–21 Australian Museum Magazine 218, 219, 221–22 The Wild Animals of Australasia 218, 223 Burrup Peninsula. See Murujuga Burt, Jonathan 4 n11, 87 n11 Busby, Isabel “A Visit to a Private Zoo” 195–96 Cambrian [pseud.] 27, 53 Carpenter, William B. Zoology 46 Cascade Brewery Company 230–32, 237, following 166 Cascade Premium Lager 115, 231, following 166 Cassell’s Popular Natural History 72, 73–74, 121 Cat-Bear 186 Chambers’s Encyclopædia 120 Chenu, Dr. Encyclopedie d’Histoire Naturelle 74–75 chicken/poultry thylacine predation of 37, 153 n10, 218–21 children’s books 11, 31–33, 210 Christmann, Fr. Australien 133, 135 Claude, Cäsar 151, 159, 163 Coleman, W. F. 130, 131 colonisation and colonialism 7, 8–10, 25–27, 39, 65–67, 73–74, 78, 83, 95–96, 165–66, 178 conservation 80, 93, 144, 147, 170, 181– 82, 209, 225–30, 240, 242, 245, 246 convergent evolution 118

index Cornish, C. J. The Living Animals of the World 189, 190, 191, 206–207 creationists 73, 143, 147 Crossland, John R. Animal Life of the World 186 Curr, Edward 39, 51, 66 Cuvier, Baron Georges 22, 41–42 The Animal Kingdom 30, 46, following 166 Le Règne Animal 43–44, 45, 65 Cynocephali 26 Dallas, W. S. A Natural History of the Animal Kingdom 120 Dance, Peter 42–43 Dando, Walter P. 179 More Wild Animals and the Camera 203, 204, 205 Wild Animals and the Camera 203, 204 Darwin, Charles 142–47 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals 180 n21 evolutionary theory 125, 143, 146, 178 extinction 142, 143, 145–46 natural selection 142–43 On the Origin of Species 142–47 reactions to 143–45 The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle 61 Datta, Ann 89, 91, 95 de Sève, Jacques Eustache. See Sève, Jacques Eustache de Desmarest, A. G. Encyclopedia Méthodique, Mammologie 28, 29, 30, 47, 53–54 ‘devil-dog’. See Tasmanian devil Dickes, William 59–65 dingo 5, 53, 144, 159, 187 dodo 88 n14, 243 dog(s) 7, 23, 38, 52, 66, 67, 74, 77, 81, 86, 108, 112, 121, 129, 134–35, 154, 165, 187 ‘Dog-faced Opossum’ 52 ‘dog-headed Dasyure’ 32 ‘dog-headed opossum’ 19, 68 ‘dog-headed thylacine’ 73–74 Dunbabin, Charles “Fossil Wealth” 197

279

Duncan, P. Martin Cassell’s Natural History 154, 155 Earl of Derby, 13th 49 ecology 9, 162–63, 165 Economic Zoology 10, 79–81 Edwards, George 13–14 Edwards, John 205 Emel, Jody 123 n16, 148 emus 78, 91, 115, 144, 234 endangered species 95, 115, 148, 244–45 engravings 19–21, 28–29, 32, 60–65, 128 rock 1–2 steel 20, 43, 45, 57, 59, 61–63, 70, 75 technique 28, 62, 129, 137–38 wood 29, 34, 52, 68, 73, 77, 78, 98, 99, 124,129, 131, 132, 134, 136, 138, 140, 152, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161 European wolf. See wolf Evans, George Williams 24 Description of Van Diemen’s Land 36, 52, 65 Ewing, Rev. Thomas 95 Excelsior: Helps to Progress in Religion 85, 124–26 exoticism 33, 46–47, 76, 85–86, 112, 172, 231 extinction. See under animal species; thylacine extinction Ezo wolf 149 feathers 28, 91, 223 Field, the Country Newspaper 216, 217 Figuier, Louis Mammalia: Their Various Forms and Habits 133, 134 films. See wildlife documentaries Finn, Frank Hutchinson’s Animals of all Countries 215–16 fish 24 n11, 30, 135 Flannery, Tim 53 n22, 115 Flower, Prof. W. H. 84 fossils 78 n40, 142 n45, 143, 144, 146– 47 ‘living fossils’ 178, 197 Foucault, Michel 89 fox 61, 63, 121 fox-hound 76 Franklin, Sir John 68–69, 95

280

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Franklin, Lady Jane 81 Fudge, Erica 9 n20, 16, 35, 243 fur trade 148, 227, 228 Geoffroy St.-Hilaire, Étienne 30, 36, 42 German expressionism 150–51 Géurin-Méneville, Félix Edouard Dictionnaire Pittoresque d’Histoire Naturelle 46, 75, 148, following 166 Gervais, M. Paul Atlas de Zoologie 42 Histoire Naturelle des Mammifères 72 Giglioli, E. H. 252 I Tasmaniani 133 Goldsmith, Oliver 154 An History of the Earth and Animated Nature 11, 86, 104, 154 Goodrich, S. G. Johnson’s Natural History 72, 74 Gosse, Philip The Romance of Natural History 145, 145 n55, Gould, John 49, 55, 83–96 The Birds of Australia 95 contribution to art 87–89 The Mammals of Australia 71, 83–94, 140–41, following 166 An Introduction to the Mammals of Australia 143–44 Greenwood, James Wild Sports of the World 121 Gregory, W. K. 226, 227 “Australian Mammals” 222 Guiler, Eric 19, 38, 46, 85, 118–19, 166, 196 Gunn, R. C. 39, 59, 95, 130 Annals and Magazine of Natural History 30, 66 “Letter from R. C. Gunn” 108 “Letter to the Secretary” 30, 84, 86 Hamilton-Arnold, Barbara 23 Hammerton, J. A. Wonders of Animal Life 178–79 Haraway, Donna 16, 98, 205, 209, 215 Harris, George Prideaux 10–11, 18–27 ambivalence of 23–25 attitude to animals 23–24 “Description of Two New Species” 19, 20, 21–26, 31–32

Harrisson, Charles T. 233 Hedley, Charles Wild Animals of the World 212, 213– 15 Henry Sotheran (publisher) 110, 250 History of the Mammalia 33 Hobart Zoo. See under zoological gardens Hornaday, William 147, 173, 225 “Fur Trade and the Wild Animals” 227 Our Vanishing Wildlife 208–9, 214, 226 Wildlife Conservation in Theory and Practice 227 human agency 2–7, 145, 229, 243–46 diseases 80 sight-lines 137, 170–71 human-animal relations 5, 17, 197 Human-Animal Studies 3, 5 n12, 17, 87 n11, 245 humming birds 42, 58 hunting. See animals: hunting of hyena/hyæna 24, 36, 50–51, 61, 65–66, 72, 201 ‘hyena-opossum’ 36 Illustrated Australian News 139, 140 Illustrated Sydney News 77, 78, 79 images power of 16, 17, 84, 115, 158, 171, 198, 209, 212, 220, 223, 232, 234, 237–38, 243 role of 2, 3–4, 13,15–16, 65, 137, 234, 236–38, 243 imperialism 7, 10, 74, 176, 214 Ingersoll, Ernest The Life of Animals 202–3 Institute of Anatomy, Canberra 219, 228 International Thylacine Specimen Database 42, 63–64, 69 Japanese Wolf 136, 149 Jardine, William 60, 64 The Natural History of the Felinae 48, 71 The Naturalist’s Library 12, 54, 57– 59, 60 n8, 69 Jeffreys, Lieut. 24, 36, 38 Johnson’s Natural History. See Goodrich, S. G.

index Jones, Menna 119, 244 Jones, Thomas Rymer The Animal Creation 76–77 kangaroo(s) 38, 46, 49, 50, 67, 70, 89, 91–92, 134, 165, 186, 227 and map 238–40 sheds 175 Kaup, Johann 14–15 kea 191 Keller, E. T. 170–71 Keulemans, J. 161–62 Kingsley, John Sterling The Standard Natural History 151 The Riverside Natural History 151, 152, 154 Knight, Charles (artist) 211, 217 Knight, Charles The English Cyclopædia 33 koala 46, 90 n17, 92, 134, 191, 227, 228 Krefft, Gerard 143–44 The Mammals of Australia 103, 104– 6 Kretschmer, Robert 128 Kuhnert, W. 163 Laird, Norman 218–19 Lang, John Dunmore 144 Lankester, E. Ray 7–8, 146, 164 Laplace, M. Voyage Autour du Monde 67 Lear, Edward 48–49, 58, 64 n18, following 166 leopard(s) 25, 201, 246 Le Souëf, A. S. The Animals of Australia 209 The Wild Animals of Australasia 218, 223 Le Souëf, W. H. 226 “Mammals in the Zoological Park” 208, 214 Lesson, R. P. Centurie Zoologique 42–43, 47, 54, 75 Lesueur, Charles-Alexander 22 Linnean Society of London 19, 32, 69, 120 Transactions 11, 19–20 lion 48, 104, 175, 234, 238 Lion House 169, 171 lithographers 14–15, 84, 89, 96–98, 102, 100, 101, 103, 127

281

lithographs 41, 45, 49, 76, 84–87, 89, 96–98, 99, 100–2, 103, 104–5, 107, 111, 114, 141, 126–27, 129, 140, 163, 232, 233 technique 76, 85–87 Lizars, W. H. The Naturalist’s Library 57–58, 59, 60–68, 80, 241 Leaves from the Book of Nature 58 logos and emblems 230–32, 234, 235, 236–39 London Zoo. See under zoological gardens Lord, Clive E. 228, 240–41 “Existing Tasmanian Marsupials” 240 “Notes for Members of Council” 241 A Synopsis of the Vertebrate Animals 113, 114 Lucas, A. H. S. The Animals of Australia 209 Lydekker, Richard The Concise Knowledge Natural History 161–62 A Handbook to the Marsupialia and Monotremata 60, 71 Harmsworth Natural History 163–64 Mostly Mammals 201 Phases of Animal Life 60, 70 The Royal Natural History 126, 151, 154 Wild Life of the World 94 n23, 163– 64 MacKenzie, Colin 228–29 “Australian Fauna and Medical Science” 80–81, 197 Mangin, Arthur The Desert World 131, 132–33 Marsh, George Perkins Man and Nature 92–93 marsupial-dog 41, 135. See also pouchdog ‘Marsupial wolf’ 71, 117, 120, 128, 149 marsupials 9, 30, 36, 58, 63, 70–71, 75, 88, 94, 118, 132, 135, 144, 146, 173, 177–79, 184, 197, 226 Martin, R. Montgomery History of Austral-Asia 37, 46 The Illustrated Atlas and Modern History 123, 124 Marvin, Garry 172

282

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Marx, Karl 157–58 Medland, Lewis 183, 195 n40, 207 Mee, Arthur Popular Science 176–78 menageries. See zoological gardens Meredith, Louisa Ann 106–9 My Home in Tasmania 52, 107–8 Our Island Home 1062 Tasmanian Friends and Foes, 106, 107, 109 merian opossum. See opossum Mesnel, A. 133 Meyer, Hermann Julius Meyers Konversations-Lexikon 135, 136, 151 Meyers Grosse Konversations-Lexikon 162–63, following 166 Mitchell, D. W. 84, 88, 96 A Popular Guide to the Gardens of the Zoological Society 136–37 Mitchell, P. Chalmers Illustrated Official Guide to London Zoological Gardens (1904) 174– 176 Official Guide to the Gardens of the Zoological Society (1911) 185–87 Mitchell, W. J. T. 15, 62 n12, 200, 211, 236–38, 243 Mitman, Gregg 4 n11, 170 n6 Moeller, Heinz F. 118, 130 n27, 152–53, 156, 168 n3, 206, 208 n15 Morey, G. W. “A Prehistoric Beast Still Living” 216 Mullan, Bob 172 Murujuga 1–3 Murray, Hugh Encyclopaedia of Geography 13, 30, 36, 52–53, 54 museums 8–9, 11, 14, 63, 69, 112, 158, 210, 227 American Museum of Natural History 170, 209–10, 222, 226, 228 Australian Museum 221–22 British Museum of Natural History 8, 14, 61, 68, 69, 71, 79, 120, 130, 194 College of Surgeons 68–69 Joshua Brookes Museum 69 Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, Lyon 44 Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, Neuchatel 44

Museum für Naturkunde, Humboldt University 152 Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris 14, 40, 41–43, 44, 69 National Museum of Australian Zoology (later Australian Institute of Anatomy) 80, 219, 228 Natural History Museum, Leiden 14, 35, 41, 69, 99, 127 Otago Museum, New Zealand 63–64 Zoological Society of London Museum (see under Zoological Society of London) Mutzel, Gustav 135, 151–53 ‘Native tiger’37, 90, 107–8, 111, 166, 229 ‘Native wolf’ 27, 136 natural history 7–10, 56, 81, 171, 233– 34 natural history literature 10–12, 56–58, 82, 111, 120, 145, 158, 191, 221–22 publishing/marketing of 56–65, 95–96, 123, 161–62, 203, 221–22 naturalists 6, 10–11, 38, 42, 67, 75, 99, 191 Naturalist’s Library, The 56, 57–65, 241. See also Jardine, William; Lear, Edward; Lizars, W. H.; Waterhouse, G. R. Nature: A Weekly Illustrated Journal of Science 168–69, 170, 171 Neumann, Paul 156 New Holland dog. See dingo New South Wales 18 n2, 37, 53–54, 65–66, 92, 144, 173 Department of Public Instruction 103, 105, 109–10 Zoological Society. See Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales New South Wales Wolf 37, 53–54, 105 New York Zoo. See under zoological gardens New York Zoological Society 170, 225, 227 News Bulletin 188, 193 Nochlin, Linda 8, 62, 159 nonhuman animals. See animals opossum 19, 36, 44, 46, 51, 57, 66, 68, 135, 228

index ‘opossum-hyena’ 36 orientalism 85, 112, 148, 159 Osborn, Henry Fairfield 170, 225–26, 227 Owen, Richard 68, 143, 145 “On the Rudimental Marsupial Bones in the Thylacinus” 69 Paddle, Robert 6–7, 30, 38, 65–66, 69, 111, 119 n9, 141, 177, 182 n24, 184, 206, 219–20, 221, 230, 241 n26 ‘placental chauvinism’ 177 ‘vampirism’ 111–12 Palawa. See Aborigines, Tasmanian Palmer, A. H. 96, 102 parallel evolution 119 Parrish, J. M. Animal Life of the World 186 parrots 49, 64 n18 pastoral industry. See sheep industry Paterson, William “An Animal of a Truly Singular Description” 36, 37, 118 Pearse, D. Colbron 238 pests. See animals: as pests; Economic Zoology petroglyphs. See Aborigines, Australian: rock engravings Philo, Chris 198 n45 photography 16, 167–68, 193 photographs 168–224 background of 207–17, 220–21 composite 167, 221 cropped 206–7, 218–19 hoax 199, 218–22 ‘posed’ 185, 200–5 retouched 199, 207, 209, 210–11, 215 and time 176, 214–15 and truth 167–68, 199–200, 221–22 Pictorial Museum of Animated Nature 33, 34 Pierron, Jean Antoine 28–29 Piguenit, W. C. 231 ‘placental chauvism’. See under Paddle, Robert platypus 9, 32, 80, 154–55, 156, 228 Plomley, N. J. B. 49, 51 Pocock, Constance Innes Highways and Byways 187, 188, 189 possums 41, 70, 160, 227, 228 pouch 24 n13, 74, 89, 177, 184 See also marsupials; thylacine: pouch

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pouch-dog 36, 41, 47, 129, 154 pouch(ed) wolf 70, 76, 128–29, 152–54, 161 poultry. See chicken/poultry Protheroe, Ernest Handy Natural History 183, 184– 85 Prothylacine 217 Pyecraft, W. P. Hutchinson’s Animals of All Countries 215 “Man, Ape and Tiger” 80 quoll 41 Raven, H. C. 226, 227 “Strange Animals of the Island Continent” 209, 210 red fox. See fox. Regent’s Park Zoo. See zoological gardens: London Zoo Renshaw, Graeme More Natural History Essays 179– 182, 229 “Thylacine” 182, 183 representation. See animal representation Richardson, Sir John 68 The Museum of Natural History 75–76 Richter, H. C. 84–89, 101, 109, 113, 140, 231 Ritvo, Harriet 3 n6, 9 n20, 35 n23, 56, 88 Roberts, Mary 196, 226, 230 Robinson, George Augustus Journal, Van Diemen’s Land 49, 50–52 rock art. See under Aborigines, Australian Rothfels, Nigel 3 n6, 87 n11 Roulin, François 44 Routledge’s Imperial Natural History 164–65 Royal Society of Tasmania, The 11, 59, 80, 95, 98, 108, 110, 196, 228, 238– 39 seal and medal 238, 239, 240 See also Tasmanian Museum Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales 8, 12, 229 Ryan, James 222 n31

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Said, Edward W. 85 Schinz, H. R. 36 Naturgeschichte der Menschen 44–45 Naturgeschichte der Säugethiere 41, following 166 Schlegel, H. 127 De Dierentuin 99–100 Traité de Fauconnerie 99 Schulze-Hagen, Karl 97–98 science, colonial 7–9, 11–12, 18, 23, 41–42, 105–6, 117–18, 143–44, 151, 157–58 scientific institutions. See Institute of Anatomy, Canberra; New York Zoological Society; Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales; Royal Society of Tasmania; Smithsonian Institution; Tasmanian Museum; Zoological Society of London scientific materialism 151, 157–58 Sclater, Philip L. Guide to the Gardens 136–37 Zoological Sketches by Joseph Wolf 101–102, following 166 Sclater, William L. 188–89 scopophilia 158–59 Scott, Harriet 103–5, 127 Scott, H. H. A Synopsis of the Vertebrate Animals 113, 114 “Tasmanian Tiger Wolfe” 147 Scott, Thomas 21, following 166 Scott, William Berryman A History of Land Mammals 210, 211, 212 seals 31, 209 sentiment 178, 187–89, 226 Seth-Smith, D. 195 n40 Sève, Jacques Eustache de 28–29 Shapiro, Meyer 191, 193, 212–13 Sharland, M. S. R. “In Search of the Thylacine” 229–30 sheep 37, 38, 61, 65, 214 dog predation of 7, 38 kea predation of 191 stealing 66 thylacine predation of 7, 33–34, 37, 38, 53, 65–67, 71, 74, 75, 76–77, 84, 92, 94, 100, 102–3, 111, 126, 133, 139, 153, 159, 161, 162, 173, 180, 193, 212, 216, 220 sheep industry 6, 38–39, 65–67, 73, 79, 92, 148, 191, 226

Sheets-Pyenson, Susan 57–58, 64–65 Sleightholme, Stephen. See International Thylacine Specimen Database Smeenk, Chris 61 n9, 127, 129 n26 Smit, J. 100–101, 127 Smith, Bernard 8, 13, 86, 147 Smith, Geoffrey A Naturalist in Tasmania 110, 111, 112 Smithsonian Institution 168, 169, 173 snakes 81–82, 201 Sontag, Susan 167, 177–78, 199, 205, 214–15 Sotherans (publisher). See Henry Sotheran Specht, Friedrich The Natural History of Animals 157– 59 species’ conservation. See conservation specimens. See thylacine specimens; zoological specimens Spender, Dale 35, 120–21 Stoddart, D. Michael 119 stripes. See animal: stripes Swainson, William 52–53 swans 109, 173 tails 2, 6, 42, 46, 50, 62, 72, 74, 77, 94, 118, 123, 164, 170, 180, 186, 211, 215 Taronga Zoo. See under zoological gardens Tasmania. See Van Diemen’s Land/Tasmania Tasmania, Royal Society of. See Royal Society of Tasmania Tasmanian Animals and Birds Protection Board 229, 230 Tasmanian coat of arms 234–35, following 166 Tasmanian devil 19, 30, 33, 66, 67, 74, 128, 135, 147, 162, 177, 178, 181, 191, 209, 216, 230, 243–44 Tasmanian Field Naturalists’ Club 230, 232, 233, 234 Tasmanian gothic 27 Tasmanian Museum (and Art Gallery) 101 n35, 113, 238, 240 Tasmanian Society, The 9 Tasmanian tiger. See thylacine ‘Tasmanian tiger’ 27, 78, 80, 120, 207 See also ‘Native tiger’

index ‘Tasmanian wolf’ 34, 71, 86, 117–41, 159, 160, 162, 164, 177, 184, 186, 193, 206 Tate, Charles Regan Natural History 194–95 taxidermy 14, 22, 43, 63–64, 205, 222 n31 See also thylacine specimens; zoological specimens Temminck, C. J. 19, 35, 36, 74, 117, 127 threatened species 4, 146, 243–44 thylacine behaviour 6, 88, 100, 118–19, 126, 136, 139, 152, 154, 181, 184, 186, 187, 206, 223 bones 50, 51, 69, 78 as dog-like 25, 28, 33, 70, 175, 184 as fox-like 63, 155, 223 habitat 22, 25, 33, 46–47, 78–79, 119, 128, 130, 132, 138–39, 180 as hyena-like 24, 33, 36, 205, 216 as jackal-like 61, 156, 216 on mainland Australia 1, 5, 51, 53 n23 naming 6, 26, 35–37, 107, 120–21, 160–61 as panther-like 25, 52–53, 65 population 6, 38, 116, 148, 153, 230, 240 pouch 36, 44, 46, 215 pouch-young 41, 69, 169–70 rarity 26, 83, 93, 115, 126, 153 n10, 213, 228, 232 as rat-like 66, 74 sexual organs 2, 44, 155, 160 as shy 113, 126, 156, 158, 240 stripes 41, 87, 127, 175, 202–3, 231 tamed 51, 84, 86, 100, 196 as threat 34–35, 37, 53, 60–61, 71, 84, 86, 91, 94, 117, 126, 134, 135, 139, 191, 193, 207, 222–23, 241– 42 as tiger-like 205, 216, 235 valued 169, 183, 196–97 as vermin 56–82, 156 weight 88, 102, 119 as wolf-like 24, 33, 53, 68, 71, 113, 117, 123, 154, 175, 212, 216, 222 thylacine bounties 6–7, 51, 77, 81–82, 241 first 7, 39, 40, 51, 56, 57, 66 second 57, 77, 90

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government 7, 70, 77, 79, 112, 117, 119, 136, 139, 147–48, 165–66, 220, 233, 234 thylacine: extinction 5–7, 17, 71–72 causes of 6–7, 67, 88, 241–42 predictions of 38, 69, 90–91, 93, 100, 102, 111, 113, 178, 182, 213, 217, 230 thylacine: myths and misconceptions 25–27, 30, 52, 74, 110, 111–112 thylacine protection/preservation 81, 92, 180, 181–82, 229–30, 234, 240 thylacine specimens 13–14, 41, 42, 43–44, 60–61, 64, 67, 68–69, 127, 197, 220–22 Tiffin, Helen 17, 243, 245 tiger 37, 72, 104–5, 201, ‘tiger wolf(e)’ 120, 125, 147, 181 Town and Country Journal 140, 141 ‘tyger trap’ 21, following 166. See also animal: trapping University of Tasmania 235–36 ursine opossum. See Tasmanian devil vampirism. See thylacine myths and misconceptions Van Diemen’s Land/Tasmania 5–8, 21–27, 38–39, 165, 230–41 fauna 9, 23, 39, 109, 113, 115, 165, 196, 214, 227–29 distinctiveness 231–32, 236 landscape 27, 139–40, 230–32, 237 libraries 11, 55, 56, 58, 95, 98, 110, 166, 187, 223 See also Aborigines, Tasmanian Van Diemen’s Land Company 39, 51, 59, 66, 123 Varin, Amédée 46 vermin. See Economic Zoology; thylacine: as vermin Vidler, Edward A. Wonder Animals of Australia 209 Virginian opossum. See opossum Vogt, Carl The Natural History of Animals 157– 59 Wallace, A. R. 153 n10 Washington Zoo. See under zoological gardens watercolour sketches 48, 86, 101, 163

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Waterhouse, G. R. Marsupialia or Pouched Animals (1841) 58, 59–65 Marsupiata or Pouched Animals (1846) 68–69 Wellington Caves (New South Wales) 144, 146 Wendt, C. 151 West, John 93 Westall, William Percival The Book of the Animal Kingdom 185–86 Widowson, Henry Present State of Van Diemen’s Land 36 Wilbert, Chris 198 n45 wild cat 37, 52 wilderness 26, 131–32, 231–32 wildlife documentaries 245–46 photography (see animal photography) reserves/sanctuaries 182, 182 n24, 214, 229–30 Wildlife Conservation Society 170, 227 Wilmot, Sir Eardley 108 Wolf, Joseph 14, 96–103, 153, 232, following 166 wolf/wolves 37, 77, 78, 79, 86, 90, 100, 117–19, 147–49, 159, 165, 188–89, 201 mythology 27, 119–23 wombat(s) 90 n17, 165, 209, 227 Wood, John George The Illustrated Natural History 130, 131 Routledge’s Popular Natural History 130 The New Illustrated Natural History 130–31 Wright, E. Percival 154 Cassell’s Concise Natural History 98 Mammalia, Their Various Forms and Habits 98, 133, 134 Y. N. U. [pseud.] “Australian Mammals” 140, 141 zebra 30, 201 ‘zebra dasyurus’ 30 ‘zebra opossum’ 24, 61, 68

‘zebra wolf’ 24, 61, 68, 76, 85, 120, 129, 139, 154, 173, 203 zoological drawings 19, 21, 25, 32–33, 48–50, 63–64, 86–87, 97–98, 101, following 166 zoological gardens 8, 14, 213–14 Beaumaris Zoo 88 n12, 195–96 Berlin Zoo 130, 152–53, Hobart Zoo 113, 115, 206, 230 London Zoo 34, 49, 83–84, 87–89, 96, 126, 129–30, 133, 174–94, 216, 217 New York Zoo 170 n6, 201, 207–8, 254 Philadelphia Zoo 173 Surrey Gardens Menagerie 48 Washington Zoo 168–69, 171–73 Melbourne Zoo 182 n24, 208, 209, 214, 226 Taronga Zoological Gardens 212–15 zoological illustration 13–15, 22, 28, 57–58, 90, 100–102, 151, 163, 170 n6, 171, 241–42, 245–46 conventions of 15, 40–41, 171, 194, 199 framing 191–93, 202, 213 models 13–14, 15, 28, 63, 152–53 in newspapers 77–79, 80–81, 137–41 purpose of 10, 13, 61, 91, 103, 137, 223 reception of 13, 57–58, 62–63, 167– 68, 171 techniques 97, 99–100, 105, 128–29, 137–38 (see also engravings; lithographs; photographs) and ‘truth’ and ‘accuracy’ 15, 21–22, 28, 32–33, 32, 167–68, 219–20, 221 zoological literature 10–12 American 168–74, 208–12, 215–17 Australian 103–10, 113–15, 178–79, 195–97, 212–15, 218–223 British 19–25, 33–35, 48–53, 57–65, 68–72, 73–74, 75–77, 84–96, 100–102, 110–13, 125–26, 130– 33, 136–37, 154, 159–62, 163–64, 174–78, 179–95, 201–3, 203–5, 206 Dutch 99–100, 126–28 French 28–31, 41–47, 72, 74–75, 133–34

index German 31–33, 40, 47–48, 128–30, 135–36, 151–59, 161–64, 128–30, 135–36, 153–54, 156–59, 162–63, Swiss 41, 43–44 See also natural history literature Zoological Society of London 49, 64 n18, 84, 88, 95, 96–97, 98, 101, 188, 203, 216 Gardens of. See zoological gardens: London Zoo Museum 48, 61, 63

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Proceedings of 11, 30, 69, 88, 96, 125, following 166 zoological specimens 8–9, 14, 15, 22, 40, 62–63, 68–69, 219–22 collections of 8, 63, 68–69, 106 collecting of 8, 95, 105–106, 210 See also thylacine specimens zoologists 13, 14, 35–36, 41–42, 70, 85, 93, 99, 164, 222, 206, 210, 218, 244 See also naturalists