The key instigator of the thylacine bounty scheme was a man named John Lyne, an independent member of the assembly for Glamorgan. A lecher by reputation, he’d earned the nickname Leghunter. Daniel also had him pegged as a dishonest braggart. He’d claimed his family migrated to Tasmania with letters of introduction from the highly renowned Earl of Bathurst, attached to the Colonial Office. A simple inquiry found this to be demonstrably false, as false as Henry Abbott’s knighthood. A disregard for facts and a flair for self-congratulation also characterised Lyne’s political life. He publicly dismissed reports that floggings continued in the island’s prisons as fanciful.
‘We are a humane society that has thankfully moved beyond barbarity,’ he boasted, in line with growing popular opinion.
But eyewitness accounts contradicted him. A young station hand told Daniel he’d been assigned as a boy to Lyne’s farm. ‘If I didn’t keep a still tongue in my head and do the master’s duty, Mr Lyne gave me thirty lashes.’
Dark rumours abounded of the family’s past violence against east-coast people. It was said that John Lyne personally shot Aborigines found on his land.
Now Lyne directed this considerable talent for hypocrisy to the thylacine issue. Though privately conceding that native tigers had never caused him a problem, publicly he spearheaded a campaign by rural members of parliament for their destruction. Paradoxically, it was during a discussion about the need for a closed season to protect native game that Lyne first proposed the government introduce a thylacine bounty. He lacked the numbers and his proposal was defeated. Undeterred, rural members waged a war of attrition against the anti-bounty MPs, never missing an opportunity to malign them. They also vastly exaggerated thylacine numbers and the damage they caused. Lyne’s private member’s bill soon followed, recommending ‘the appropriation of a sum of five hundred pounds for the destruction of tigers’. The die was cast.
The very fact that a parliamentary pro-thylacine block even existed gave hope to the Royal Society. Daniel and his colleagues spent the days before the vote furiously wining and dining the ten or so members still opposed to the bounty, shoring up their support. But they also courted the country members to gauge their opinions and change their minds.
Daniel found political lobbying to be a complicated beast. Alliances shifted like sand. He came to understand that the thylacine question was just a pawn in a much larger power struggle between urban and rural members. The average town dweller enjoyed seeing tigers on display in zoos, and thought rich farmers should pay to solve their own problems.
But to their surprise and dismay, the Royal Society found that the ‘Chinese question’ was tangled up with the thylacine issue. Anti-Chinese feeling was strongest in the towns, so some city MPs agreed to vote for the bounty in exchange for promises from rural members to support anti-Chinese immigration legislation.
‘This is outrageous! One has nothing to do with the other,’ said Daniel, during dinner with a Hobart parliamentarian who was an advocate for the tigers, but an enemy of the Chinese. Here was a man who understood about habitat change and saw tigers being used as scapegoats for poor farming practices. Yet he still planned to horse-trade his vote.
‘I hate Chinamen more than I love tigers,’ was his response.
The members of the Royal Society grew more despondent daily. ‘The standard of moral and intellectual debate in this state is a disgrace,’ said Daniel. ‘The bigots plan to sell out the thylacine, in spite of our facts and statistics.’
There was a murmur of agreement. The vote would take place next week and they could do little more to influence it.
The fateful day arrived. Debate commenced in Hobart’s grand parliamentary chamber, before a packed public gallery. Things began well enough. Several members spoke in opposition to the bill. Mr Young said that if any group could take care of themselves, it was the large sheep-owners. Colonel St. Hill did not see that it would be a great calamity if sheep owners were driven off crown lands anyway. Daniel felt quite optimistic when Mr Fenton ridiculed the idea of five hundred pounds doing all the good that was expected of it. He said runs had not been given up on account of tigers, but because of wild dogs and low wool prices.
Now Lyne spoke, stating that sheep owners lost at least fifty thousand sheep each year in Glamorgan alone. Daniel could barely contain himself. He’d read the report of the Chief Inspector of Sheep. It estimated there were only forty-four thousand sheep in the whole of the district. Apparently the tigers had wiped out the entire sheep population, along with ten per cent of next year’s flock!
The speeches rolled on interminably, well into the evening – some for, some against. At times Daniel was hopeful of success, the next minute certain of defeat. Everyone wanted his say.
Two more members spoke for Lyne. Mr Sutton argued that mutton would be cheaper if tigers were exterminated. So did Mr Pillinger. Then Mr Dumaresq spoke. He couldn’t see how tigers could be any more numerous now than formerly. Nor could he understand why they weren’t destroyed at the sheep owners’ own expense. He did not support the bill. Neither did the speaker, Mr Dobson, who spoke in defence of the tigers.
The vote began at close to midnight, and remained neck and neck until the last. Daniel held his breath for the last vote, preparing a cheer. Eleven against – twelve for, and surely Dobson’s vote a foregone conclusion. That meant a tie, and the motion could only be carried in the majority.
But to Daniel’s horror, Dobson’s courage failed him at the crucial moment. As former leader of the Opposition, he feared voting against so many of his old allies. So he refrained from voting at all.
‘I think the ayes have it.’
On the basis of Dobson’s missing vote, the bill had passed, twelve votes to eleven. A jeer rose from the gallery, still filled with onlookers despite the lateness of the hour. Public sentiment did not support the result, yet for Daniel it didn’t matter. The thylacine was as good as extinct. It was now only a matter of time.
Back at Binburra and with Daniel away, Luke and Belle grew ever more reckless. Despite Elizabeth’s efforts to keep them apart, they arranged secret rendezvous. Their favourite ruse was to ride out separately, on some pretext or other, and then meet at the waterfall. It became their special place, a place to explore forbidden love.
Belle, consumed by their new passion, abandoned her old friends. ‘You are all the world I need, Luke.’
It thrilled him to hear it. It also thrilled him that she spent no more time with Edward Abbott. He couldn’t stand the idea of her being anywhere near Canterbury Downs. With his tomboy princess by his side, all things seemed possible.
Even Elizabeth’s direct pleas fell on deaf ears. Luke wouldn’t give Belle up, not this time. The voice of reason faded to a whisper. Belle filled Luke’s mind, banishing pain and grief more completely than laudanum ever had. When they were together, even guilt disappeared. But it crept back home when he was alone, like a soft, insistent knocking at the door. Guilt over disobeying Elizabeth. Guilt over his father’s death. Guilt over Angus.
Luke hated that Scruffy remained with Molly. That woman wasn’t fit to care for a cockroach. If not for her greed, Angus would never have been down that stinking pit in the first place. He would bring the little terrier home to live at Binburra. It was the last thing he could do for Angus. But not today. Today he would spend with Belle.
He slipped Sheba’s bridle over her ears and opened the sliprails. He had one eye on his horse and the other on the track above the homestead. When Luke saw Belle canter Whisky up the hill, he swung on to Sheba bareback. He waited for a few minutes, watching for prying eyes. Then he gave Sheba her head and raced off in pursuit. Already tasting Belle’s skin on his tongue, aching to hold her again.
Elizabeth watched him go from her bedroom window. She felt like the onlooker of an imminent train wreck, certain of looming disaster and powerless to prevent it. Both Luke and Belle denied the affair and their deceit wounded her. She wished now she’d confided in Daniel and she hoped that when her husband returned, he would somehow know what to do.
Daniel stayed on in Hobart for a few days following the disastrous vote. The decision and behaviour of the House in general had provoked significant public outrage. The wool kings were seen to be flagrantly abusing the public purse. A damning editorial in the Tasmanian Mail summed up popular sentiment.
Year after year, this pampered industry wins the favours of the legislature. If any of their bills are rejected by the House, a few large landholders meet, urge their views on the accommodating Attorney-General and, hey presto, the rejected bill is reinstated. Thus the wool kings govern the House and get whatever they desire for the protection of their industry.
The Government puts a price upon the heads of native wolves, even though our own zoos report good specimens are rare and hard to find. They have £500 voted to them for the slaughter of rabbits on Crown Lands, even though these same pastoralists brought the rabbits here in the first place . . . there is no reason why one sixpence should come out of consolidated revenue for the destruction of rabbits, wolves or anything else.
Daniel took some cold comfort from a flurry of letters to the editor, ridiculing John Lyne and his cohorts.
Tiger Lyne, as the honourable Member for Glamorgan is now very generally called, is on the warpath, again, on the lookout for sheep killers, nay even manslayers. If he tells us the truth, the jungles of India do not furnish anything like the terrors that our own east coast does in the matter of wild beasts of the most ferocious kinds. According to Tiger Lyne, these dreadful animals may be seen in their hundreds, stealthily sneaking along, seeking whom they may devour, and it is estimated that in less than two years they will have swallowed up every sheep and bullock in Glamorgan.
Daniel struggled to accept that a major extinction was happening right under his nose, and for so little reason. Like Elizabeth, he felt like an onlooker at a train wreck. It was just a different train wreck. A vigorous debate began among the members of the Royal Society. Some thought an education campaign could do some good. Others believed zoos should try to acquire sufficient animals to support captive breeding through a private bounty on live specimens. Maria Island was proposed as a possible sanctuary for a remnant population.
‘It’s hopeless,’ said Daniel. ‘If a man captures a thylacine out in the backblocks, he has only to chop its head off and claim a pound. This does not spoil the skin, which then earns him several more. Far simpler than lugging a live animal for miles to a train station, in the hope of sending it to a zoo and perhaps gaining a greater reward.’
Glum silence greeted these words. His reasoning was faultless.
Daniel finished packing for the trip home. Checking himself in the mirror, he snatched his tie undone and began again. He needed Lizzie. He needed Binburra. Coomalong, his grand old house, didn’t feel like home any more. There was nothing left for him in Hobart, not now the bounty scheme had passed.
Daniel’s thoughts turned to the cubs. He hadn’t told anybody from the Royal Society about his rare guests. They’d want to put them in a zoo. But he had a different plan – to release the young thylacines into the highest, most inaccessible reaches of the Binburra ranges, at a place called Tiger Pass. Let them make one final, improbable stand against extinction.