Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [134]
As it turned out, there were no bag checks or security guards inside the building—just cheerful, helpful people eager to direct us to the senator's office. When we got off the elevator on the senator's floor, we saw a woman with a furry animal in her coat pocket. It was a brushtail possum joey. Just as this was starting to remind us of a scene from Dr. Dolittle, a harried aide informed us, “We can't let him give you more than half an hour,” and we were whisked into the senator's private office.
The senator met us at the door and greeted us warmly. He was tall and thin, wearing a gray sports jacket and blue button-down shirt. His gaunt handsomeness suggested a fifty-something Jimmy Stewart. His office was decorated with a map of Tasmania, botanical drawings of endemic flowers such as Milligan's mountain heath, and a photograph of him with his partner standing beside a lichen-covered rock. In the window, a triangular yellow sticker read, “NO WAR—THE GREENS.” Bob was one of only three Green Party members in the entire Australian Parliament. He was also the party's unofficial leader. Over the years, he had become an environmental crusader and an outspoken advocate for human rights.
If we had imagined the senator would no longer be interested in the tiger—that he would find the subject trivial or dated—we were widely off the mark. He was still compelled by it, and his memories of his thylacine search, which had taken place more than thirty years before, were crystalclear. Something about that time period, he said, had galvanized him— made him what he is today.
Bob had originally come to Tasmania to see Lake Pedder before it was flooded. (Lake Pedder was the world's largest glacial lake, a two-square-mile shallow body of water in southwestern Tasmania bordered by a pink quartzite beach. When Bob arrived, it was slated to be inundated by a series of dams that would generate hydroelectric power. Intense opposition to the dam had led to the formation of Tasmania's Green Party.)
Trained as a doctor on the mainland, Bob had taken a job practicing medicine in Launceston in 1972, and it wasn't long before he bumped into James Malley and Jeremy Griffith. James and Jeremy were already searching for the tiger and Bob was intrigued.
“Those two guys were bright-eyed. They had talked to a lot of people who had seen it, and they knew the tiger was there. It was just a matter of tracking it down. As a kid I had read about the Tasmanian tiger and I was always fascinated by it and the sightings. And yet, I was the skeptic. When I first came to Tasmania, I thought the animal was most likely extinct. But you couldn't yet make that decision.”
At that point, the tiger had not been officially declared extinct—and the possibility that it survived had not been fully explored. Bob cited the example of the takahe, a flightless bird from New Zealand that had been presumed extinct for fifty years and then was rediscovered in 1949. “The takahe's as big as a turkey,” he said. The rediscovery of such a large creature raised the possibility that the thylacine, despite its large size, might also have survived undetected in a remote area. Considering how significant the tiger was—so much a part of Tasmania's history and sense of place—it was not an animal to be given up on lightly. At least Bob felt it was important to have a systematic look—and that was what he, James, and Jeremy set out to do.
With his own money—what he had left after taking out ads in every newspaper condemning the flooding of Lake Pedder—Bob set up an office and telephone hotline for the thylacine expedition team. When they received a report of a tiger sighting, they would proceed to the area, look for tracks, and interview witnesses.
One of Bob's jobs was to help set the camera traps that Jeremy had designed to capture a photo of the thylacine. This involved placing live chickens in treehouse pens and coming back periodically to feed them. “For the time, it was a sophisticated little system. If an animal tried to get at the chook, a line would be tripped and the camera