Carnivorous Nights (34 page)

Darlene was born on Flinders Island in the Bass Strait. “That was where George Augustus Robinson removed a lot of my old people.” Most of the aboriginals taken by Robinson to Flinders perished, and the last survivors, including Truganini, were ultimately moved to Oyster Cove, not far from Hobart, where they continued to die off. But they weren't the only aboriginal people on Flinders or the other Bass Strait islands. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, sealers from America and Britain had begun harvesting fur seals in the strait. The sealers kidnapped and lured aboriginal women to the Bass Strait islands to be their wives and companions, and to work harvesting the fur seals. The children of these unions stayed on the islands, and when the seals were hunted to the vanishing point, they began harvesting muttonbirds for their livelihoods.

Darlene's father had been chief of the Mansell clan, the Moonbird people. “That's my cultural totem, the muttonbird, the shearwater. Our community goes once every year for about eight weeks to harvest the birds. I was brought up on them.”

Darlene had some muttonbirds salted in brine in the café's kitchen. And she brought one out. She rubbed her finger over the wings of the preserved bird and we each had a lick. It was oily and tasted like salt, fish, the ocean. These were the same birds we had seen flying in a determined line past Geoff King's coastal property.

“When you look at the journey of the moonbird and where he goes, he goes in a figure eight. He travels from Tasmania and he goes up through Japan, where he's harvested by the Ainu people. Then he goes from there up to the Arctic, down Canada, and then he pulls into the native community up there. Then he comes across the Pacific and comes to New Zealand to the Maoris and they also harvest the muttonbird. The moonbird is significant to a lot of indigenous cultures because of the journey he takes.”

On the muttonbird migration, the birds travel nine thousand miles in each direction, crossing the Pacific Ocean and traveling to the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere and the northernmost part of the Pacific.
In search of an endless summer, the muttonbirds average 220 miles a day on their flight. Each year in September, the birds return to Tasmania en masse—usually all on the same day.

The muttonbirds were one of the last threads connecting the aboriginal people to their past. “We lost a great deal through the colonization process,” Darlene said. “In that process language was taken.” And their culture was nearly decimated.

We knew the tiger had been an important animal to aboriginal people. Was there any chance the tiger survived, or was that lost, too? We asked Darlene what she thought.

“I'd like to think the tigers are still out there. A lot of people tell me they are. But I don't know. I've been up in the skies and looked down at this little island, and I don't think there's too much where there hasn't been a human imprint.” She sighed. “Tigers
are
really symbolic in aboriginal culture in terms of dreamings and dreamtime. Our old people related stories of animals and their symbols, like the quolls with their spots and dots, or tigers with their stripes.”

But such tales are hard to come by. War, murder, disease, and dislocation had destroyed the thread of stories that had been passed down for more than ten thousand years on this island at the edge of the world.

“There are strands of old myths and stories that survive. But we've had a lot taken from us. It's like trying to find the missing pieces to a jigsaw puzzle.”

I
n the aboriginal languages of Tasmania—it's believed there were about a dozen of them—the Tasmanian tiger was known as
corinna, lorrina, kannunah.
At least those were the names recorded by early settlers. Today, the people of aboriginal descent who survive in Tasmania are often forced to turn to European recorders of history to access their own languages and stories.

How
did
the tiger get his stripes? In the book
Touch the Morning
by the Tasmanian writer Jackson Cotton, a series of stories tell the origin of Tasmania, how the aboriginals came to live there, how the devil got its snarling voice. The tales are said to be collected from aboriginal people by the author's ancestors, a Quaker family that had been in Tasmania during the early years of colonization. The story of “Corinna, the Brave One” was told to them by “Mannalargenna, the chief of a Northeast Coast Federation of Tribes.”

The story of the Great Ghost Tiger seemed dimly familiar. We thought about the rock art Les Bursill had shown us on the mainland. The stripes on that four-thousand-year-old thylacine drawing had been made using charcoal from an aboriginal campfire, too.

We continued along the highway until we reached the town of Deloraine, where we decided to spend the night at a “hotel,” a bar with accommodations attached. The walls of our room, a triple with three lumpy beds, were cotton candy pink.

At dusk we walked down to the river that flowed through town and onto a bridge built with stone masonry. From underneath, we heard cooing and the flapping of wings. Pigeons flew into view. “You can never escape the usual suspects,” said Alexis.

The river—called the Meander—presented a beautiful scene. The sunset was a flamelike mix of orange and yellow and the trees lining the banks were reflected on the slow-moving, placid water. The few houses on the
river were Georgian and Victorian in style. The setting evoked a tranquil river town in England—an effect that was slightly tempered by the sound of local youths drag racing on a road that paralleled the far bank.

Down at the river's edge, we gazed at the colors of the sunset on the water. Alexis took out his pipe and lit it. As he began to inhale, we heard a burbling noise. At first we thought he had put a bong attachment on his pipe, but then we traced the sound to the middle of the river. A dark form was blowing bubbles just under the surface.

We squinted, trying to identify the creature. In the waning light, we saw that the stream of bubbles was coming out of a ducklike bill attached to some sort of furry animal. The only thing that could have surprised us more was a shark fin breaking the surface.

“One platypussums,” said Alexis in a singsong voice.

The bubble trail moved toward us. Then with a splash, the platypus dived underwater. Reeds rustled along the bank by our feet, and the platypus disappeared.

“I think it just went into its burrow,” Alexis said. We envisioned the platypus curled up in a muddy tube in the riverbank somewhere below where we were standing.

It seemed impossible that a platypus would be so acclimated to human activities. What was one of the strangest animals in the world doing swimming alongside a Tasmanian village with a pub not two hundred steps away and keeping company with a bunch of pigeons?

We waited a few minutes, but the platypus didn't emerge from its riverbank home. As we followed the Meander upriver, however, we soon observed the telltale bubbles of another platypus. It was repeatedly diving and re-emerging, so we were able to see tantalizing bits of its unusual body. A beaverlike tail
… splash splash …
a webbed foot topped with long claws
… plop, splash …
a bill
… bubble bubble …
a smooth head with no apparent ears
… splash.

“They're unconvincing as an animal even in real life,” said Alexis.

It was true. The platypus was an animal that continued to stupefy people with its bizarre combination of parts. We had to sympathize with someone like David Collins, who was the first European to publish an account of a live platypus. In his description, he played down the duckbill, either because he did not know what to make of it or perhaps fearing he wouldn't be believed. First, he labeled the platypus as an “amphibious animal,
of the mole species.” Then he described the platypus's feet in great detail (webbing between the toes, claws) and only at the end did he mention the curious fact that the “mole” had a duckbill—perhaps hoping that readers would accept this idea once they knew a few believable details about the creature.

According to
Touch the Morning
, Tasmanian aboriginal legend said the platypus was originally two animals, a burrowing mammal and a duck. Together, these two creatures double-teamed young frogs, chasing them into a riverbank burrow and eating them. As punishment, they were torn apart and mashed together again into one half-and-half beast minus the duck's feathers and the mammal's hind legs.

When the first platypus specimens from Australia were sent back to England in 1798, people thought they
were
two unrelated animals sewn together. A faked-up mermaid (which was commonly fabricated from monkey remains and fishtails) was more understandable. At least mermaids were well-known mythical creatures. But who would believe an otter-and-duck combination?

In the end, scientists discovered that the platypus was not only real, but even weirder than was immediately apparent. For one thing, the platypus seemed to be some sort of reptile-mammal hybrid that broke the bounds of the existing classification systems. The platypus had fur like a mammal, but laid eggs like a bird or reptile. It had mammary glands (the hallmark of being a mammal) and nursed its young with milk—but it didn't have nipples. Instead, the platypus produced milk from slits in its abdomen. And like reptiles and birds, it had a cloaca—one hole from which to pee, defecate, have sex, and lay eggs. (Male platypuses did, however, have a separate penis.)