Free Thylacine by David Owen

colony. In the early years in particular, dog theft was a very serious offence. Bush-rangers and Aborigines kept dogs in large packs. Many went feral. The extent of their harassment of the fledgling sheep industry, for which harassment the thylacine was held at least equally responsible, can only be guessed at.
    The thylacine represented one element of the wildness to be tamed, and its turn would come. Until then, bushrangers and Aborigines, crop failures, disease, drought and licentiousness were enough to be going on with, let alone that the struggling island colony continued to receive the dregs of the New South Wales convicts and was in other ways poorly treated by the parent colony. Yet change would inevitably occur and it happened through a combination of the island’s natural bounty, its charms from a distance and the introduction of a horrifying system of isolated penal settlements. The grand plan, of ridding England of its convicts and then using their labour to supply the mother country with quality Van Diemen’s Land timber and, especially, wool, could not be held back. Had the grand plan instead involved potatoes, apples or cattle, the thylacine might today be as abundant as the Tasmanian devil.
    Important though crops were (wheat, barley, beans, peas, potatoes) livestock—particularly sheep—played a far greater role in opening up the colony. The first boatload of sheep in 1803 numbered a few dozen. By 1820 there were about 200 000 grazing the midlands between Hobart and Launceston, and by 1830, when the first sheep-protecting thylacine bounty was introduced, the total was over a million—now also spread across the north and north-west. Conditions were particularly favourable along the vital link between the two population centres, the midland plain, so much so that Surveyor-General Evans marvelled that the island appeared to have been in a state of civilisation and cultivation for centuries—which of course it had, thanks to Aboriginal fire management practices.
    Evans’s 1822 Description of Van Diemen’s Land , with its subtitle With important hints to emigrants, and useful information respecting the application for grants of land; together with a list of the most necessary articles for persons to take out proved a highly effective marketing tool, going into a second edition in 1824 and being translated into French and German. Free settlers, mostly British, began to arrive in numbers which significantly increased a population which, at the time of the book’s first publication, was just 1500 souls. Van Diemen’s Land was becoming a viable alternative to New South Wales. Indeed, Evans wrote of its ‘great superiority’ over the parent colony:
    Large tracts of land, perfectly free from timber or underwood, and covered with the most luxuriant herbage, are to be found in all directions . . . These tracts of land are invariably of the very best description, and millions of acres, which are capable of being instantly converted to all the purposes of husbandry, still remain unappropri-ated. Here the colonist has no expense to incur in clearing his farm: he is not compelled to a great preliminary outlay of capital, before he can expect a considerable return. 3
    Such glowing references were sufficient to encourage the London-based Van Diemen’s Land Company shortly thereafter to embark on its disastrous sheep farming enterprise, on vast acreages then totally unsuited to pastoralism. But, as will be seen, thylacines came to be demonised for the Company’s failures. It is true that Evans tempered his glowing account with the assertion that ‘the panther . . . commits dreadful havoc among the flocks’, but the fact is that at the time of that book’s publication there had been just two recorded accounts of thylacines attacking sheep.
    How economical was Evans being with the truth? Writing not much later, historian John West had a rather different view of