The thylacine looms large in Tasmanian culture. The animal’s image is everywhere, present on everything from
beer labels to licence plates. The documentary footage of the last thylacine in Hobart Zoo has come to
exemplify, among other things, the tragedy of species loss and humanity’s violence against the nonhuman.
This footage features at the beginning of both The Hunter and Dying Breed – two of the very small number of
films that constitute a notional Tasmanian cinema. In contrast to the meanings suggested by the documentary
images of the last thylacine however, the fictional Tasmanian tiger in these films becomes a repository for
those aspects of humanity that need to be expunged. In The Hunter, the thylacine’s dead body is potential raw
material for weapons production by a biotech company. In Dying Breed, the thylacine is aligned with a
cannibalistic community – implicitly descendent from cannibal convict Alexander Pearce – who rape female
tourists in order to perpetuate their kind. In these two texts the thylacine therefore symbolically embodies
humanity’s inhumanity, degeneracy, and monstrosity – qualities that The Hunter gestures towards wiping out
through the eponymous hero’s enactment of the thylacine’s ‘final’ extinction. The narratives of The Hunter and
Dying Breed assert man’s right to violently determine survival and reproduction. These politics resonate with
the thylacine’s history both in terms of the significance of the hunt in her extinction and the confinement of
the last thylacine in a zoo – an environment where reproduction is fully governed by humans.
thylacine; Dying Breed; The Hunter; critical animal studies;