Thylacine by David Owen Read Free Book Online Page A

horseback), free settlers were hoping for the same as they expanded timidly north along the Derwent, planting potatoes and wheat. In both places starvation became the grimmer reality. Indifferent soils, poor animal husbandry, lack of supplies from Sydney—itself suffering hunger—and aggrieved natives put paid to visions of bounty and splendour. The European presence may have intrigued some bands of Aborigines, but for others the invasion, though still minuscule, had an immediate impact. Not only did their hunting grounds become cut off; the very food itself, kangaroo and emu, began to be taken in ever larger quantities by the invader.
    The inevitable clash over land and its worth set a precedent for mistrust and mutual suspicion. Needless to say, various levels of relationships between invader and indigene would develop, some decent, but ‘the settlers were warned to be on guard against the people of the island who, from what were described cryptically as circumstances that had formerly taken place, had become very much irritated against the Europeans’. 4
    What was the nature of the place they were attempting to tame in order to turn it into a prison? The ironies inherent to the task became very real in the first few years.
    Irony one: lack of food became so acute that Hobart Town’s convicts had once again to resort to theft in order to survive. Collins’s reprisals included flogging and hanging—but these achieved little. Everyone was suffering. Lack of seeds and livestock and Aboriginal hostility hindered attempts at expanding the feeble little settlement. So awful were circumstances that the pigs had to be fed on scraps from the whaling vessels which put into the Derwent; the pork began to taste of lamp oil.
    Irony two: convict servants were given guns and dogs in order to go into the bush to secure kangaroo and emu, thereby saving the colony. They took to the task with relish. Soon enough they, and many others, were wearing kangaroo shoes and cloaks and in time ‘tiger’ hats may have become sought-after items.
    Irony three: the European invaders were forced to adopt survival techniques not far removed from those of the indigenous people, subsisting and making full use of what the island provided. The Europeans did so, but in achieving this success lost sight of its intrinsic value.
    Irony four: a new breed of colonist, the bushranger, soon began to terrorise both native and settler . They were feral, they continued the often brutal offshore islands sealers’ tradition of taking native women, and they reflected society as a whole. To the extent that Hobart Town and Port Dalrymple might call themselves genteel—for the benefit of the Crown—this description would always be undermined by commoner observations on the ground. Those two little hot spots of Van Diemen’s Land, in their second or third summer, were each a rum economy, ‘in the hands of what one newcomer described as a set of the biggest rogues and scoundrels in the world’. 5
    How might such a base society at the top of the food chain treat a shy carnivore itself at the top of a food chain determined over hundreds of thousands of years? The thylacine had no specific meaning for Bowen, Collins, Knopwood and their people. It was merely a creature somewhere out there, as vague as the large interior was unfathomable. The Tasmanian emu may have helped to save the fledgling colonial outpost from starvation, but in doing so its fate was sealed. Easy to catch or shoot, it soon became extinct—a tiny sign of ‘progress’, perhaps, towards controlling the unpredictable island. There were those who warned, to no avail, of the emu’s likely extinction, but such attitudes had no place in the young colony. Today, the known local remains of the Tasmanian emu amount to a few eggs and one feather.

6 BEFORE
THE FALL:
TROWENNA
    My Grandfather had a farm there. He and his sons were doing some clearing