Carnivorous Nights

Carnivorous Nights: On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger
By Margaret Mittelbach and Michael Crewdson
With artwork by Alexis Rockman
Published by The Text Publishing Company
ISBN 1 920885 94 3

Here is an entertaining and yet serious romp through Tasmania by two New York-based wildlife writers looking for the ever-elusive thylacine. They tell how they became “infatuated” in the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan with a taxiderm of a Tasmanian tiger — “positioned in such a lifelike manner, its mouth curved in a friendly canine smile, that we found ourselves feeling affection for it as if it were a long-lost pet.”

With friend and artist Alexis Rockman, Mittelbach and Crewdson came Down Under to see a live tiger for themselves.

Alas, the tiger remained ‘long-lost’ for them. But sightings and theories persist, as the writers record.

In talking to many people connected with tiger hunts over the years, the trio came across those who are sure thylacines are out there somewhere, those that are sceptical because too much time has passed, and those, like Senator Bob Brown (who undertook his own exhaustive but uproductive tiger hunt in 1972) who remain hopeful because other birds and animals considered extinct for many years have since proved to still be with us.

As the writers say: “A few Australian mammals had, in fact, made it back across the River Styx. After disappearing in 1909, Leadbeater’s possum was rediscovered in 1961. The Central rock rat had been missing for 25 years when it was rediscovered in 1996. In 1989, the mahogany glider was rediscovered after an absence of more than a hundred years.”

So why not the thylacine? Their hunt went on.

The story records how the three travelled around our island, engrossed not only in tiger stories but also coming across the barely credible (to their Northern Hemisphere eyes) forms of Tassie’s unique animals.

Devils — and platypus, of course. The biggest crayfish in the world (we call them giant lobsters). The littlest (blue or fairy) penguins. The echidna, “a charming and enigmatic animal … that looked like a huge ball of black yarn stuffed with knitting needles.”

They met a spotted-tailed quoll along with Androo Kelly of Trowunna Wildlife Park, where he breeds devils most successfully and thinks it’s a shame that so few people appreciate the quoll, because ‘A spotted-tailed quoll is the closest animal we will ever have to a thylacine. They’re closely related.”

The writers’ descriptions of the animals, the bushland and the characters they encounter are graphic and lively, so that by the end of the trip you have been introduced one by one to all other wonderful creatures that make Tassie what it is. Written with laidback humour, as well as acute observation and scholarly research (as the notes at the back outline).

A quick look at their biographies reveal Mittelbach and Crewdson often team up to write, revealing nature in the strangest of places — such as Manahattan itself. Alexis Rockman’s evocative wildlife drawings are in many museum collections.

Along the way Rockman did drawings using soil, decayed vegetation or animal scat from the place where he saw the creature, mixed with acrylic polymer. The results are as enigmatic and charming as the echidna and pepper the pages of this delightful book. Patsy Hollis

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