Thylacine by David Owen Page A

as a ghost, attacking the very small, the very young and the very old’. The contrast with the heroic young thylacine is starkly obvious and suggests a potential for the kind of man–animal relationship that had developed elsewhere with Canis familiaris , the domestic dog. 7
    Geographically, the island may broadly be described by four regions running from west to east, in three of which thylacines were well distributed and probably abundant, subject to the usual interruptions to a food supply such as prolonged drought or severe cold. The regions are the mountainous west, the central plateau, the midland plain and the east coast and south-east peninsulas.
    Much of the west consists of cool, wet rainforest, the mountains, valleys and river systems of which are unsuitable not only to a pursuit predator but to its prey as well. This was not always the case, however. At the height of the last Ice Age, about 20 000 years ago, rainforest cover was minimal. The Kuti Kina cave in the heart of the south-west, on the Franklin River, was home to a human population whose hunting grounds were the nearby tundra plains where wallabies browsed. Wallabies are prime thylacine prey, so they too would have flourished there, until gradual climate warming produced rainforest conditions and caused the wallabies to disappear, followed by their predators.
    These spectacular western mountain ranges of Ordovician sediments in places soak up annual rainfall of more than 3500 millimetres, and can experience snow at any time, but are equally vulnerable to the fires that are such a feature of the Australian seasonal cycle. Dense stands of beech, sassafras, King Billy pine, pencil pine, Huon pine, celery top pine and others— many of which are original Gondwanan stock, which is why they’re also found in New Zealand and South America—produce some of the planet’s tallest trees and a sunless floor thickly covered in decaying matter. The forest near Cox Bight in the south-west contains the world’s most ancient living clonal organism, the 40 000-year-old Lamatia tasmanica plant (King’s Holly), the breeding ground of one of Australia’s rarest birds, the orange-bellied parrot, and is home to the terrestrial mountain shrimp, which has a 200-million-year lineage. Lichens and mosses are prolific. Impenetrable woody thickets of Anodopetalum biglandulosum , commonly known as horizontal, together with leeches, make the area hard going.
    Yet the temperate maritime climate enables these forests to support animals like the devil, the carnivorous spotted-tailed quoll and the forest-specific eastern pygmy possum (which, however, is obliged to enter a torpor-like state to survive winter). Echidnas, pademelons (the small rufous wallaby) and possums also inhabit the less rugged areas of the west. All of the latter are prey for the thylacine, which is capable at the least of inhabiting rainforest fringes.
    Salt marshes, dunes, wet sedgeland and buttongrass plains make up a generally narrow coastal strip along the entire west coast, but despite being in the face of the wet, cold Roaring Forties, the strip supported both man and thylacine. It is a good example of the animal’s ability to adapt to a somewhat uncomfortable microclimate.
    The South-West Tribe occupied territory from the natural mid-coast boundary of Macquarie Harbour to the far south-west, including the large offshore Maatsuyker and De Witt Islands, which were visited seasonally for sealing and muttonbirding. This 450 kilometres of coastline supported just four bands, making up a tribe of up to 250 people. 8
    Not surprisingly, archaeological evidence from middens shows that theirs was a largely marine diet of shellfish, crayfish and seals, supplemented by wombat and wallaby from the narrow coastal plains. The comparatively small human population suggests a similar thylacine pattern, that is, thylacine numbers would also have been governed by modest terrestrial prey