Environmental Management in Tasmania: Better Off Dead? - Island Futures: Conservation and Development Across the Asia-Pacific Region - page 158

principle, of 'closing the gate after the horse has bolted'; administratively the
thylacine paperwork was in order, but ecologically the thylacine was stuffed, in
both senses of the word. How did it come to this?
Bounty
Sheep were introduced to Tasmania with the 1803 white settlers. Twenty three
sheep arrived at Risdon Cove (a present-day suburb of Hobart and across the
Derwent River from the Hobart CBD). The population of sheep reached one million
in the 1830s, and 1.9 million by 1854 (Kirkpatrick 2007 ).
Despite this wonder of colonial economic growth, carried on the back of sheep,
Tasmania was not then, and is not now, some agrarian or ovine utopia. Land that
had been managed by the indigenous population was appropriated as grazing land
for this introduced species by an invasive class of 'land owner'. The Tasmanian
aboriginal occupation, dating through tens of millennia was, it seems, invisible to
this new class: “This country for the short time it has been inhabited far surpasses
Sydney and in the course of a few years will be a place of consequence” (Robert
Dixon 1821, cited in Abbott and Nairn 1969 :327).
Extensive land clearance and management had been undertaken by the indigenous
people, over millennia; what remained for the appropriation of these labours, and the
lands themselves, was the clearance of these people from their lands. “Martial law
was proclaimed, as far as regarded the Aborigines, and those engaged against them.
But in conformity with the humane intentions evinced all along by Sir George Arthur
towards the Blacks, certain lines of demarcation were marked out, beyond which it
was not permitted to molest or injure the Aborigines” (Jorgen Jorgensen 1830s edited
writings: Plomley 1991 :96). The native Tasmanians who survived these early encoun-
ters with settlers and government were systematically removed to Flinders Island
(off the north east tip of Tasmania) in 1835 where efforts to clothe, Christianize,
and devalue their culture, proved mostly fatal (Plomley 1966, 1987 ).
The Van Diemen's Land Company, based in London, owned extensive land
holdings in the north west of Tasmania, including Woolnorth, 100,000 acres
(40,500 ha) of the north west tip of the island. The Van Diemen's Land Company
introduced a bounty on the thylacine in 1830, apparently the first of such bounties.
The terms were generous: “five shillings for every male hyaena, seven shillings for
every female hyaena (with or without young) … When 20 hyaenas have been
destroyed the reward for the next 20 will be six shillings and eight shillings respec-
tively and afterwards an additional shilling per head will be made after every seven
killed until the reward makes 10 shillings for every male and 12 shillings for every
female” (Curr 1830, in Guiler 1985 :16).
The thylacine bounty of the Van Diemen's Land Company's persisted into the
twentieth century. Although the Woolnorth data set is incomplete, the number
killed peaked at 19 in 1900, declined to one in 1906, and then none until a final
three thylacines were killed in 1914 (Guiler 1985 ).