Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [137]
Errol Flynn referred to his scientist father as a “tall hunk of scholarship.” Be that as it may, nothing was actually done to protect the thylacine. And thylacines continued to be exported to zoos, ultimately commanding prices as high as £150.
“I think it's one of the most frustrating stories of the twentieth century,” Bob said. Saving, or even just seeing, the thylacine seemed so close, so within reach. “Yet it was snatched by greed, £1 greed.”
We knew what Bob meant. It was hard to let go of the tiger, to let it just drift off into the Styx.
In the end, Bob never saw a living thylacine, though he did see the last of Lake Pedder before it disappeared beneath the floodwaters. And when the Tasmanian Hydro-Electric Commission decided in 1979 to dam the Franklin and Gordon rivers, two spectacularly wild waterways in Tasma-nia's Southwest, Bob got involved. He rafted the Franklin River, organized an enormous blockade of the dam site, and spent nineteen days in jail after six hundred protesters were arrested. Ultimately, the protests led to the area surrounding the rivers being named a Wilderness World Heritage Area by the United Nations. In 1983, Australia's federal government intervened and the dam was stopped by a narrow decision of the Australian Supreme Court. The Franklin and Gordon rivers were saved. That same year, Bob became the first Green candidate elected to Tasma-nia's state Parliament where he served as an MP for ten years. Then, after a three-year break, he was elected senator from Tasmania to the Australian Parliament. He remains one of the most vocal advocates for protecting Tasmania's natural heritage and environment.
“We've got such a great wild intact island compared to the rest of the world,” he said. “Yet we're looking at the greatest slaughter of Tasmanian ecosystems in history. This year 150,000 logging trucks each carrying thirty tons of our forests will go to the wood chip mills to export what's left of the great Tasmanian forest to the Japanese paper mills. The utilitarian view is still there. If you can get £1 for the tiger, do so. If you can get wood chips from an ancient tree, cut it down.”
Bob handed us a copy of a small book he had written about a wilderness area just an hour and a half's drive from Hobart called the Styx Forest. It was home to the tallest trees anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere. Yet it was being subjected to heavy, industrial logging.
“It's called the Styx?” we said. “How did it get that name?”
No one knew exactly, Bob said. The river through the valley had been marked as the Styx on maps as early as 1826. Whoever named it had a “fear of shadows” and a little knowledge of Greek mythology.
But the Styx had more than just big trees. This area was one of the last known homes of the Tasmanian tiger. “The last six thylacines trapped in the wild came out of the headwaters of the Styx, Tyenna, and Florentine rivers,” Bob said. The wild mountains from which these rivers flowed down had been a refuge for tigers. “A trapper named Elias Churchill caught them there in the early 1930s. And that included the last one that died at the zoo not far from here.”
One of the last places where Tasmanian tigers were known to have lived was being clear-cut. Talk about adding insult to injury.
We glanced at the clock. Our time with the senator had long run out. His aides kept popping their heads in the door and glaring at us. Bob ignored them.
“I have something to show you,” he said. The senator opened one of the drawers in his desk and found a photo of a captive Tasmanian tiger. The picture was slightly grainy and a significant portion overexposed. But it didn't matter. The total number of photos of live thylacines was limited. There were none from the nineteenth century, and only a handful from the early part of the twentieth.