Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
two pomegranate trees, a quince tree and 3 fig trees that had started to grow. They
were very small and I pruned them and tilled the ground” (
1793
:42). This was at
Adventure Bay, Bruny Island, off the south-east coast of Tasmania; the 'Captain
Bligh' was William Bligh of
Mutiny on the Bounty
renown.
These earliest European responses to the endemism of Van Diemen's Land were
non-destructive, to harvest and sow, to collect and contribute. With a view to utility
and imagined futures, Delahaye identified a salad vegetable, a black fruit that, when
cooked, produced “something like ink; it could be used as a dye” (
1792
:35), and
observed “plains that could be cultivated and which I believe could produce very
good wheat” (
1792
:36).
This benign approach to the endemism of Van Diemen's Land was superseded
by the settlement/invasion of the English from 1803.
Tiger
Tasman (
1642
:13) reported that: “the footprints of certain animals observed on the
ground were not unlike the paws of a tiger; they also brought on board some
excrement”. An officer with Marion Dufresne's 1772 expedition, Roux (
1772
:42),
appears to be the first European to report a tiger sighting: “We have not seen any
quadrupeds other than a little tiger [
qu'un petit Tigre
] which ran away when we
pursued the savages in the woods”. Another expeditioner reported that: “our
people …noticed the traces of quadrupeds in different places, some of which
resembled deer and others dogs” (Le Jar du Clesmeur
1772
:21).
The thylacine, (
Thylacinus cynocephalus
), popularly known as the Tasmanian or
'Tassie' tiger is a marsupial and the last surviving member of the genus
Thylacinus
.
Its range once extended through Tasmania, mainland Australia, and New Guinea.
On all but the island of Tasmania it became extinct some thousands of years ago,
perhaps due to competition from the dingo which was introduced to the Australian
mainland 3,500-4,000 years ago (Corbett
2001
). Tasmania had been isolated from
the Australian mainland, due to rising sea level, some thousands of years prior.
Irish zoologist Eric Guiler (c. 1923-2008) spent much of his professional life at
the University of Tasmania. He was devoted to investigating the thylacine. He inter-
viewed the aging cohort of thylacine trappers, and published papers (e.g. 1986) and
several topics on the subject (1985, 1990, 1998), but despite his strenuous efforts,
all without ever sighting a living thylacine.
The dust jacket of
Thylacine: The Tragedy of the Tasmanian Tiger
(Guiler
1985
:dj)
declares that: “The tragedy of the Tasmanian tiger is that no one bothered to study it
properly when it was plentiful, or to investigate whether it was in fact a menace to
pastoralists, and nowadays we know so little about the animal and its ecology that
there is little we can do to help rehabilitate the species”. Guiler's tone reveals that he
was not convinced that the thylacine was, at that time, extinct. Driven by reported
sightings and the hope that it was merely elusive, rather than extinct, Guiler mounted
several search expeditions, to flush out the thylacine, but without success.
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