Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [12]
The python was probably a diamond python, a species that grows to about six feet and still lives in Royal National Park (it eats bats, other small mammals, birds, and lizards). The wallaby was probably the brushtail rock wallaby, now an endangered species. All, including the thylacine, were nocturnal.
We began to look for something besides the stripes that might indicate this drawing was a tiger, rather than a crosshatched kangaroo. Its eye was a deep black almond, which gave it a slightly savage appearance. Very thylacine-y. Then again, from different angles, the animal looked more like a kangaroo than a tiger.
Then we saw something. It could have been just a fold in the rock, but there it was, a charcoal line, the tiger's mouth. We had spent too much time at the museum looking at the tiger to miss it. Tasmanian tigers have a wicket-shaped grin. The line of their mouths extends far back into their heads toward the ears and turns up at the corners—a feature that allows them to open their mouths in an unusually wide gape. When we saw that crafty grin beaming out at us across the millennia, we knew we would join the 60 percent crowd.
“It looks like I have another convert,” Les said.
We looked at the charcoal lines marking the sandstone. What made this thylacine drawing all the more remarkable was that it survived when so many aboriginal drawings had been lost.
At one time, Les explained, every inch of this rock shelter would have been covered with paintings. In fact, in the background behind the python-wallaby-thylacine were the faded or partial beginnings of many other drawings—the un-filled-in outline of a disembodied head, a featureless kangaroo in mid-leap.
These three charcoal drawings had survived because they were protected from the fading rays of the sun and covered with a clear skin of silica that had leached out of the rock face and formed a protective sheath.
“The wonderful thing about this drawing is that it's no longer on the surface of the rock. It's in the rock. It's probably preserved forever now.”
“How old is this drawing?” we asked.
Les borrowed one of our notebooks and drew three kangaroo heads. On one, he drew two stick ears—just two lines. On another he drew triangular ears, and on the last one he drew rounded ears. Stick ears were used on the oldest Tharawal drawings: 4,500 to 8,500 years old. Triangle ears dated from 3,500 to 4,500 years ago. Rounded ears were the most recent, disappearing only with European occupation less than two hundred years ago.
He circled the kangaroo with the triangular ears. “That's what we're looking at, and I reckon it's about four thousand years old.” The date fit. Thylacines were still living on the mainland then.
“Why did aboriginal people draw the thylacine?”
“Oh, there could have been lots of reasons,” Les said. Sometimes animals were drawn to tell a story or they could be totem animals, drawn to call on their spirits. In rock shelters like this one where families gathered for warmth and shelter at night, the rock art is often diary-like. “It's sort of Days of Our Lives,” Les continued. “They're keeping a record. ‘I saw a thylacine today.’ That would be a remarkable occurrence, I think, even for an aboriginal person. They're such a cunning and secretive animal. When you saw one, it was an event.” We imagined a thylacine passing unseen in the night and the drawings of the animals moving and dancing in the light of the flickering fire pits.
It was tragic that the thylacine was extinct on the mainland. But had it completely vanished from the earth? We asked Les what he thought. Les said he believed the thylacine survived in Tasmania. “They say there are no dingoes in this park, but I've seen them,” he said. “Tasmania's a big place with many untouched wild areas. The thylacine is out there. It has to be.”
As we were talking, Alexis had