Chapter 9

Into the Heartland

The 1980s were a busy time for my wife and me. Continuing to work on our Murray Bridge property, time was at always at a premium with almost every spare moment devoted to completing the house and further developing the property. This allowed me little time for additional thylacine research, but I nevertheless managed to return to Tasmania numerous times over the decade in my incessant search for knowledge of the animal. With the fauna sanctuary up and running by 1984, I pursued the possibility of bringing in Tasmanian devils; such was their rarity in South Australia I had arranged with a Tasmanian wildlife park operator to do a swap with dama (Kangaroo Island) wallabies in exchange for devils, but the plan was skittled by the Tasmanian National Parks and Wildlife Service who refused to allow them out of the state to a non-registered zoo. As our fauna sanctuary was a private affair, it failed to meet the criteria.

The two resident emus were without doubt our favourite characters, their crazy antics never failing to amuse. We purchased them as young chicks and watched them grow to maturity and they became real pets. Named George and Mildred, we were never sure which was which, but were assured by the breeder that they were a pair. Stories of emus being fed lighted cigarette butts and other nasties at open zoos and wildlife parks made us less than comfortable about opening the sanctuary to the general public, so we never took that step of inviting the public in.

And talk about the boxing kangaroo! I remember purchasing two young eastern greys from the Cleland Wildlife Sanctuary in the Adelaide Hills and transporting them in hessian bags. Finally arriving home in the late afternoon, I opened one bag and let the doe out and she was fine, but the moment I released the buck he immediately took to me. Grabbing the neck of my shirt with one paw, he dragged me forward and began pummelling my face with the other. It was full on boxing and I was the punching bag. That roo had it in for me from that moment on. He was very upset with me for transporting him in the wheat bag, even though it was what Cleland had recommended, and he never let me forget it.

I also managed to purchase two Cape Barren geese at a time when they were a rare and heavily protected species. They were handsome birds, but very private and never made friends with the other resident birdlife. When we eventually sold the property in late 1989, the only inmate that came with us was Chook the magpie. She was a local bird, having been rescued from certain death as she was set upon by other magpies after straying out of her territory as a fledgling. Chook became quite a character, doubling as a watchdog and chasing out any undesirables she found trespassing on the property. She could whistle a selection of tunes including her favourite, ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’. Despite her quite amazing musical repertoire, Chook never spoke a word.

My in-depth search for the thylacine began in earnest when we moved permanently to Tasmania in January 1990. The move was not without its problems and took a lot of planning. Two of our daughters were already married, one living in Melbourne and the other in Hobart. Our third daughter chose to stay behind in Adelaide, meaning that only our son, Steven, would cross the Strait with us, along with numerous pets.

It is one thing to visit another state on holiday, but quite another to pull up roots and shift there permanently, as many have no doubt found. We had much to learn about our new home, and settling as we did in a country district meant getting used to the locals, who were especially suspicious of ‘mainlanders’. It is a tag, they tell us, that sticks for life, but you are usually accepted as a local after 20 years. On that assumption we must now qualify.

Once settled on our family property at Tyenna in the heart of what was once known as tiger country, I began scouting around for information and soon came across a goldmine of anecdotal tales. Tyenna itself was famous in tiger folklore, figuring prominently in early records as a tiger hot spot. To the south of our property lay the Styx and Weld Valleys and to the west the vast Florentine Valley. All of these areas produced tigers back in the bounty days and beyond. To the south-west lay the Ragged and Saw Back Ranges and the huge hydro impoundment of Lake Gordon within the vast South West National Park, an area that was to figure prominently in my future searches.

To the east was Uxbridge, and it was in that virtually endless wilderness that Elias Churchill claimed in 1969 he could still locate tigers. To the north lay the Mount Field Range, taking in the magnificent Mount Field National Park. The original entry in the early days of settlement was by way of Ellendale, Mount Field East, and the Russell Falls River (now the Tyenna River) via the Lake Fenton pack track. This area was mostly worked by trappers and snarers residing at nearby Monto’s Marsh (now Ellendale). One of these old trappers, John McCallum, trapped four tigers in the district, claiming the government bounty on all four. This grand old Tasmanian bushman had a great innings. He was born in 1880 and lived all but a few months of his life in the National Park area, before eventually passing on in 1979, just a few months short of his century.

The Florentine Valley has over the years produced a host of tigers, including one of the last-known of the species trapped by Elias Churchill, the famous Benjamin who died in the Hobart Zoo in 1936. There was little doubt that the thylacine had roamed this vast wilderness until quite recent times and, if countless contemporary eyewitness reports were to be believed, still did.

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In the early years of the 1990s, I concentrated my search in the Maydena Range and Mount Field Ranges, as well as in the extremities of the Florentine Valley, and it wasn’t long before I became increasingly conversant with this region of southern Tasmania. Initially, illness prevented me from roaming far, but as my health and fitness improved, I began to explore widely in the Weld and Styx Valleys, as well as the Saw Back and Ragged Ranges and the extremities of Lake Gordon, taking in the Prince of Wales Range, and it was in these particular areas I was to have some of my best successes.

The diversity of the flora and fauna in these areas is truly amazing, with each season providing fresh attractions. The birdlife is particularly interesting, including various honeyeater varieties, dominant among them the crescent honeyeaters with their sharp, shrill calls most noticeable in the lower elevations. The yellow-throated variety is also numerous in season, with their green and grey plumage and striking yellow throats. Up in the highland areas the diversity of bird life continues, while along the moorlands the delicate and beautiful flame-breasted robins predominate along with the black currawong and grey thrush, to name a few.

In January 1993 we moved four miles along the road from Tyenna to the logging town of Maydena, on the very edge of the Florentine Valley. It was about the time that the Australian Newsprint Mills were closing their Maydena operations and as a result many older residents moved out. A number of the old hands claimed to have seen tigers near Maydena, including log truck driver John Pavlovic, who told me he came upon a thylacine early one morning in 1965 while driving through the Florentine Valley. When he mentioned it to one of the bushmen working in the forest nearby, John discovered that he too had seen tigers in the area but had never said anything, preferring to let the animal roam in peace. As I was to discover, there were many such tales to be found among the older Maydena residents.