Free Carnivorous Nights by Margaret Mittelbach Page A

England, and this visit ultimately resulted in the Sydney area's being settled as a prison colony for British convicts in 1788. A few years later, when French explorers and scientists aboard the ships
Géographe
and
Naturaliste
began surveying the area around Van Diemen's Land, the British decided it was time to stake another claim. In 1803 they set up a second convict settlement on the southeast coast of Van Diemen's Land. From 1803 to 1853, about seventy thousand prisoners were transported from England and Ireland, and the island quickly earned a reputation as a cruel “convict hell.” If the condemned weren't doing hard labor under threat of the lashin prisons such as Port Arthur and Macquarie Harbour, they were “assigned” to work for private landowners. As one convict ballad from the early nineteenth century warned:
    The first day that we landed upon that fatal shore,
The planters they came round us full twenty score or more,
They rank'd us up like horses, and sold us out of hand,
They yok'd us unto ploughs, my boys, to plough Van Dieman's land.
    The cottages that we live in were built of clod and clay,
And rotten straw for bedding, & we dare not say nay,
Our cots were fenc'd with fire, we slumber when we can,
To drive away wolves and tigers upon Van Dieman's land.
    Wolves
and
tigers? The confusion was understandable. Van Diemen's Land was a strange place—unknown, unfamiliar, and filled with bewildering plants and animals. When the colonists spotted their first thylacine, they weren't sure if it was a wolf, a tiger, or
what
it was. In 1805 William Paterson, one of the island's first lieutenant governors, reported that an “animal of a truly singular and nouvel description” and “of the carnivorous and voracious tribe” was killed by dogs on the is-land's north coast. At the outset, the colonists couldn't agree what name to give this unfamiliar beast. Paterson thought it looked like a hyena or a “low wolf dog,” and for many years it was variously dubbed hyena, hyena opossum, zebra opossum, dog-headed opossum, zebra wolf, panther, tyger, tiger wolf, striped wolf, and Tasmanian dingo. Sightings were rare in the colony's first years, and in 1810 the explorer John Oxley wrote that the tiger “flies at the approach of Man, and has not been known to do any Mischief.” This status as a benign new animal didn't last long, however. The first reported killing of a sheep by a thylacine was in 1817. From that moment on, thylacines had a price on their heads.
    We headed back down the metal stairs, experiencing an increasing sense of vertigo. The ship was designed to focus passengers inward. The size of a cruise ship, it had once plied the Adriatic Sea. Its built-in stabilizers and size insulated it from the roughness of the strait. And when wewere inside—out of the wind—we barely noticed we were on the water. There was a bar, a restaurant, a tiny dance floor, a sitting area with TV monitors showing the Australian Open and the movie
Police Academy
, and a room filled with slot machines called the Admiral's Gaming Lounge.
    When we visited the onboard gift shop, we were thrown for a loop. If Tasmanians historically had not cared much for the thylacine, they obviously liked it now. Tasmanian tiger T-shirts, jerseys, and hooded sweatshirts lined rack after rack. There were tiger snow globes, decorative plates, pewter figurines, sun visors, key chains, refrigerator magnets, collectible spoons, shot glasses, tea towels, and “stubbie” holders for keeping beer bottles cold. One long, multi-binned shelf was devoted exclusively to stuffed animal versions of the tiger. There were also numerous tiger books—from children's stories to scientific treatises. And there were even little striped jackets you could buy to dress up your dog as a thylacine. Apparently being branded extinct was no barrier to marketing.
    We couldn't decide if the tchotchke-ization of the tiger was cute or disturbing. The Tasmanian devil ran a close