These days, I live on a small private nature reserve in the Tasmanian highlands, where a whole family of wicked-looking though loveable black beasts regularly invite themselves to feast at my tent, sometimes around midday with the sun shining through their red ears, often in the dead of night, dressed as they are for darkness and cocktails . . . Some say Tassie devils are innately convicts, thieves and criminals, but I prefer to think they are nature’s creatures of fortune, as boisterous and inquisitive as children, who enjoy each other’s company, laugh at their own jokes, and share what they find. For what else would they have done with those five missing shoes, champagne bottle, and two billiard balls?
JOHN R. WILSON, QUOIBA
Tasmanian Devil: A unique and threatened animal is the story of a wild animal, the world’s largest living marsupial carnivore, about which we have limited understanding. Now there is a tragic possibility that it may become extinct in the wild, or extinct altogether, before we know much more. Sadder still, human activity may be behind the mysterious disease that has decimated the species in the only place in the world where it still exists, the island of Tasmania. Just a few short years ago it was unthinkable that the robust and protected Tasmanian devil might be about to follow in the doom-laden footsteps of its larger relative, the thylacine—a predator that was in large measure rendered extinct by government-sanctioned persecution. This, the first comprehensive book on the Tasmanian devil, is the vibrant, sometimes horrifying, but remarkable story of an iconic marsupial mammal and the great variety of people who have loved, loathed and misunderstood it for centuries.
Marrawah is a coastal township in the far northwest of Tasmania. Late in the twentieth century a fifth-generation Marrawah farmer, Geoff King, elected to cease using his 830-acre property for cattle farming. Instead, he turned it into a wildlife sanctuary, specifically to protect the Tasmanian devil. Much of ‘King’s Run’ fronts wild, rocky coastline. A slow, bumpy ride through scrub takes visitors to his ‘devil restaurant’: a tiny old white wooden shack close to the surf and protected by extraordinary slabs of multi-hued granite. The area is of strong Aboriginal significance and has an ethereal, otherworld quality about it.
Geoff King and his visitors chat, eat and drink in the crude but comfortable little one-room shack. Outside, near the window, a spotlit wallaby carcass is staked to the ground. A microphone will alert the guests to arriving devils—and they generally turn up, long after dark, hence the pleasure of socialising while waiting, briefly remote from civilisation. As often as not, it will be raining and blowing. The magnified crunching of the devils, and their black-white, sharp but transient interactions with one another, half in and half out of manmade light as they go about their complex feeding business, is vivid and magical, like the sacred area itself, with wind and pounding surf as constant background.
Great tracts of Tasmania are unpopulated, with many areas inaccessible. The King experience provides a surprisingly close natural encounter with a rare animal that even today is wrongly assumed to be aggressive and antisocial and—until its recent devastation—a rural pest. To what extent can we come to know the true devil? As a voyage of devil discovery, this book attempts to answer the question. References are included to most devil literature, good and bad. The devil discoveries, opinions and experiences of experts and casual observers are contained in these pages.
Prior to 1803, the year in which Europeans settled in the island then known as Van Diemen’s Land, the devil was known only to the island’s 4000 or so indigenous people. There is no documented record of the interactions between those people and the hunter–scavenger carnivore, which was as widespread across the island as were the nine tribes, although archaeological records show that humans and devils used the same cave systems as shelters. All that we have are a few phonetic recordings by early Europeans of the names they heard used for the devil by various tribes, including tar-de-bar (or tarrabah), pile-lin-ner (or poirinnah) and par-loo-mer-rer.
In the two centuries since then, just a small number of individuals can be described as being true devil experts, through their professional dedication to the animal over a substantial period, including much time in the field. They are academic and zoologist Eric Guiler, wildlife officer Nick Mooney, zoologist and curator David Pemberton, marsupial specialist Menna Jones and Trowunna Wildlife Park owner Androo Kelly.
A larger, but still select group of people, have had intimacy with the devil forced upon them tragically, through the spread of devil facial tumour disease, DFTD, the disease that has been killing the animal in increasing numbers since at least the mid-1990s. From the laboratory to the field, dozens of scientists, zoologists, veterinarians, specialist volunteers and bureaucrats are combined in an effort to find the cause of and a cure for DFTD, a virulent facial cancer which causes great suffering and which kills within five months of its manifestation.
A third category knows intimately a different kind of devil, namely, those people who engage with the animal through the daily course of their professions. Tasmanian farmers have the longest unbroken relationship with the devil since European settlement, stretching back 200 years, and even today their opinions of it range from respect to indifference to antagonism. Wildlife park operators are devil experts of another stripe, because they own and nurture the animals in their care, whether captive-born or brought in as surviving dependents of a roadkill mother. Mary Roberts, who operated a zoo in Hobart in the early twentieth century, appreciated the devil like no one before her, and she holds an important place in the devil’s story as the first person to study and write about them in detail.
There are also academic experts: the number of postgraduate research students at the University of Tasmania and elsewhere has grown sharply since the first doctoral thesis on the animal was conferred in 1991.
And then there are those for whom the devil has been—or one day will be—a brief encounter. Only rarely are they seen by day in the wild, hence the attraction of the state’s increasing number of wildlife parks, which inevitably have devils as the star attraction. To observe three or four in a wildlife park enclosure is a highly controlled experience, but even so, whether dozing, sunbaking, splashing in water, chasing one another or competitively bolting food at mealtime, they are the real thing, almost within touching distance.
The devil’s restricted habitat, the absence of devils in overseas zoos, and Tasmania’s geographical remoteness—the island is closer to the Antarctic than it is to Darwin—mean that very few people have seen a live Tasmanian devil, far fewer still in the wild. (And until the onset of DFTD, Tasmanians themselves generally thought little about or of the animal.) By contrast Warner Bros.’ cartoon character Taz the Tasmanian Devil, a whirling, brown, slobbering creature, has vast international recognition. This compelling paradox is an integral part of the story. Unfortunately, for many Australians the devil is no more than a two-dimensional symbol of the island’s identity—even though it has been extinct on the mainland for less than 500 years. Like the thylacine’s, the devil’s abstracted image can become overwhelming, reducing and belittling the importance of the animal itself.
This book gets as close as it is possible to get to the Tasmanian devil. It is written with great respect for the animal which, until recently, seemed to represent a tremendous evolutionary success story in an ancient continent with a harsh environment. Yet the disease so gravely afflicting the species indicates that, far from being a robust carnivore with no predator species to fear, it is highly vulnerable, and a stark reminder of how limited is our understanding of the unpredictable natural world.
Most difficult of all to describe is the evolutionary ‘fitness’ of the Tasmanian devil, its ‘success’ as a species. On the one hand it has flourished for tens of thousands of years throughout its island home. Yet that is the result of a negative evolutionary outcome, its range shrinking from all parts of the continent until a remnant population died out in Victoria. Furthermore, island carnivores are among the most vulnerable of isolated species.
But the disease has shown us a glimpse of remarkable devil behaviour. Evidence has emerged that, in response to the decimation of their numbers, devils have tended to become semalparous: males are breeding when much younger—so taking the place of older males dying while still in their mating prime—but as a result are themselves dying after their first and only litter is weaned. Previously seen only in mammals in the related antechinuses and possibly quolls, it appears to be a natural response to prevent the reproductive cycle from being fatally broken. In human terms we might salute these as acts of supreme self-sacrifice for the greater good. And there is another aspect of the devil’s behaviour operating in its favour. Time after time, field biologists dealing with sick and dying devils report a tenacious individual will to survive, including emaciated, cancer-ridden mothers weaning to the point of death. Tasmanian devils don’t give up.
David Owen
David Pemberton
2005