On display in Launceston’s Queen Victoria Museum and Gallery is a one-of-a-kind item: a rug sewn together of nine thylacine skins.
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The soft brown furs show all the variations in colour and character that this species once had – some stripes are dark brown, others a paler fawn.
Surrounding the rug are the pitiful remains of one of Tasmania’s most remarkable species – bones, fur, paw prints and taxidermy specimens, stories of sightings and hunts.
A few precious seconds of black-and-white footage gives small hints at what this creature was like: curious, cautious, they used their thick tails to balance, dog-like paws digging at the fence, wide jaws grinning.
The thylacine was a marsupial carnivore, hated by the English settlers for its reputation as a livestock hunter, relentlessly persecuted to extinction.
A letter to the editor of The Examiner, published on January 15, 1909, wrote of concern that four thylacines were being shipped to New York.
“Indeed, they are practically extinct, and it cannot be doubted that in a few years they will have become so entirely. Surely it is worth a great effort, to secure a pair before it is absolutely too late, and then making such provision that they may be encouraged to breed,” an H. Button wrote.
On March 1, 1930, The Examiner reported that “there is not even one in any zoo in Tasmania”.
Finally, the species was offered state protection in 1936 – but it was far too late.
‘Benjamin’, the only thylacine still in captivity, died at Hobart’s Beaumaris Zoo a few weeks later.
It was September 7, 1936, and the last known thylacine was gone from existence.
The Examiner still reported on the species as if it existed, living undisturbed in the wilds of the West and South of the state.
Expeditions were advertised in the newspaper to seek proof that the thylacine still existed, but came back empty-handed. In 1937, Robert Stevenson wrote a letter to The Examiner protesting the thylacine’s protection.
“Many years ago after doing a hard day's work I would take my gun, a sheep dog, and an empty wool pack, for sleeping equipment, and camp below the sheep's bedding hill so that when the tiger chased the sheep I could run in front and get a shot at it in the moonlight, and sometimes with success,” Mr Stevenson wrote.
In that year, The Examiner asked: ‘Are They Extinct’?
“The last few caught some years ago were suffering from some form of mange, which also had been responsible for the destruction of many native cats,” the article read.
In the end, the Tasmanian tiger has been immortalised through the countless logos, sporting club names, rumours of sightings, and the collections of dust and bones still held with care at museums in Tasmania, Australia, and across the world.