What makes your Nillumbik home town/area unique? Who are the characters who have made it so? What sites have significance and why? During 2005 Nillumbik Shire Council and the Literary Reference Group invited members of the community to respond to these questions, to show us the history and flavour of your place – then and now – in a 500 word anecdote. This story by Gwayne Naug was originally titled : “The Sighting”
A few years ago, the corner of Mt Pleasant and Stringybark Roads (Eltham) nearly became the front-page story of every newspaper in the land. So, let me tell you a tale, a tale of a Thylacine. Yes, that’s right, a Thylacine!
It started with an ashen face over the barbed wire fence: “You will not believe me, but I think I saw a Tasmanian Tiger last night,” my neighbour gasped.
Of course we did not believe him. Would you?
Another neighbour reported a sighting. However, as he was standing for Federal Parliament, he deemed it wise to be discreet about his sighting.
An elderly woman swore she heard eerie sounds coming across Mt Pleasant Road at night. “Huh, she’s frightened of her own shadow, that one,” scoffed her neighbour.
Eltham Library was searched for references to a creature all sensible people regarded as extinct. Columbia Encyclopaedia maintained that marsupialia, family dasyuridae’ was an ‘example of convergent evolution’ and was possibly surviving in remote parts of western Tasmania. We contacted a Tasmanian who thought we were mad.
Another whispered sighting prompted me to don my fake fur coat, grab torch and folding stool and sneak out to wait to catch a glimpse of the elusive animal. But all I caught was a cold.
Nothing happened for a week or so and the conversation reverted to football once more. Then a friend reported that she had seen something resembling ‘a wolf’ at the bottom of her Montmorency garden. Our Tiger, perhaps?
Quickly I marshalled the neighbourhood together- it was our tiger after all and we were not going to let anyone else claim it! An all-night vigil was proposed and we drew lots. But really, it was rigged – the man with the most powerful camera won the draw.
However, when he reported back he just shrugged: “Saw nothing but a rabbit and something resembling a marsupial mouse.” We suspected he had just got bored and fallen asleep.
At my winter solstice party one sleepover (hungover) guest raved on about a striped creature he had seen dashing through the undergrowth up my back yard.
We blamed it on the rough red.
I began to think the whole sighting thing was just a fizzer until….one night I swerved to avoid a fox on Mt Pleasant Road. Unnerved, I drove cautiously toward home, lights on full beam. Suddenly I jammed on the brake. “What the devil is that?” I asked myself. There on the hillock was the thing. Quietly I opened the car door. The thing appeared to growl. I started to shake – after all, the carnivorous Thylacine was capable of bringing down a kangaroo.
The car door banged and the animal, with what I considered a look of disdain, retreated into the bushes. But not before I had seen its tail. I was convinced I had seen a Thylacine – striped coat, large jaw, long skinny tail. It all added up!
I raced home to the phone: “Let’s go public! We’ll be rich!” But riches meant nothing much to these people. Maybe they had enough wealth already. So I tried “You’ll be famous – a new discovery, your name in print.”
Fame was the hook!
My partner, Wynne Whiteford, although a Science Fiction writer of renown, was also a sceptic. He volunteered to watch nightly for the creature. It took him two weeks to get a good sighting.
“Just as I thought,” said Wynne.
“What did you think?”
He smiled his enigmatic smile. “Your Thylacine is a fox.”
“Rubbish!” I protested. “Since when have foxes become striped and skinny-tailed?”
“When they have the follicular mange.”
“The what?”
“The mange whitens the skin and moults the fur, giving the appearance of stripe.”
“And the thin tail?”
“Fur has all moulted from the poor creature’s tail.”
The next edition of the local paper reported cases of mange amongst foxes.
However, nowadays, when I pass that hillock it still captures my gaze and fires my imagination. I slow down, half hoping that the poor animal will reappear. But not as a mangy fox. As a robust Thylacine.
That is the stuff of legends and myths. But I love reading myths, don’t you?
Gwayne Naug © 2005
