Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [9]
As soon as we had left the dock, Alexis and Dorothy disappeared onto the boat's roof deck, stripped down to their bathing suits, and lay out in the sun. We had rented the boat out of Cronulla, a surf town on the southern edge of the Sydney suburbs, and were entering Port Hacking, an enormous bay with multiple arms and inlets. Million-dollar homes were built into the sandstone cliffs that rose up on either side.
As we plied down the main waterway, we were accompanied by other party boats, heading out for a day of fishing, swimming, and picnicking. But our destination was different. “It's something few people on this earth have seen,” said Les.
He spread out a map next to the wheel and indicated the southern section of Port Hacking. “That's Royal National Park,” he said. It was the second oldest national park in the world after Yellowstone, and it was filled with aboriginal artifacts, including ancient rock paintings. The native people who had lived in Port Hacking had vanished within a few years of British settlement in the early nineteenth century. The area around us was an aboriginal ghost town.
Les, a heavyset man with a graying beard and mustache, was an expert on the park's aboriginal rock art, and he was part-aboriginal himself— though he had not discovered this fact until he was in his late thirties. When his grandmother died, he found some photographs that suggested his family—ostensibly white and European—had an aboriginal heritage. “I traced my lineage back to a man named Dr. Ellis. He was a full-blooded aboriginal and a kaditcha man, a medicine man or witch doctor you might call it. His daughter, Susan Ellis, married my great-grandfather—he was a convict who'd been transported to Australia from England for stealing linen. So I'm one of just a few people who can trace their ancestry back to the original inhabitants of this region, the Tharawal people.”
That was saying something. “The last Tharawal people in this area were wiped out by disease by 1835, 1840. It's very sad,” said Les. “You'll find a drawing of a kangaroo that's half finished as if someone has put down their pen and never come back.”
In 1985 while he was working on his master's degree in anthropology, Les was asked to do a complete survey of aboriginal rock art in Royal. When he and his team began their research, fewer than forty rock art sites had been documented. By the time they were finished, they had found more than one thousand. And there was one in particular that he wanted us to see: an aboriginal drawing of a thylacine.
Although there is aboriginal rock art all over Australia, rock art depicting thylacines is rare. When the first aboriginals arrived in Australia about sixty thousand years ago, the thylacine was one of the fiercest predators on the continent. Over fifty millennia, aboriginals and thylacines lived together, and the thylacines were woven into aboriginal dreamtime stories and artwork. But then five thousand years ago, the dingo—a breed of domestic dog—was introduced to Australia (probably by Southeast Asian seafarers). Scientists believe that as the dingoes went wild, they killed off the thylacines in the same way that wolves will kill off coyotes in their territory to get rid of the competition. About three thousand years ago, thylacines disappeared from the mainland. They survived on the island of Tasmania only because dingoes never crossed the water.
When the mainland thylacines died out, so did the rock art. Now the only reminders of the mainland thylacines are fossilized bones, dehydrated body parts preserved in outback deserts, and a handful of ancient paintings.
Les said his discovery of a thylacine drawing in the environs of Aus-tralia's largest city had been slightly controversial in archaeological circles. “There's actually some debate about whether it is a tiger,” he said. “The jury's