The well-written thylacine article is by Tammy Gordon and David Maynard, and details the thylacine’s status as a tragic icon of extinction, and highlights the plight of many other native species that are becoming increasingly threatened.

This issue of Australian Wildlife Secrets also includes articles on Australian lizards, freshwater crocodiles and Gouldian finches, together with an inspiring article by Miranda Gibson from the heart of one of Tasmania’s most beautiful forests. 

Captive thylacine with bird. Picture: Harry Burrell, c. 1921. Source: Wikipedia.

The captive mount

If Harry Burrell had been in possession of a taxidermied thylacine mount, the pressing question arises: why did he place the mount in a cage? Obviously there would be no danger of a mounted specimen running away, and as Carol Freeman has explained, zoological enclosures were very problematic environments for early animal photographers to work in.

Carol Freeman notes that many early zoo photographers complained about the problems presented by difficult lighting conditions within enclosures and the shadows that were cast from the bars, wire mesh and other enclosure structures. Photographers were also frustrated at being unable to avoid these distracting structures appearing in their pictures. Given these difficulties, it seems very strange that Burrell would deliberately choose a zoological enclosure as the location in which to take his photographs.

If we study the complete series of five pictures in Burrell’s sequence, we can see that the lighting conditions and various enclosure structures did indeed present significant problems to Burrell. The light is very harsh and many problematic shadows are being cast, and Burrell has not been able to avoid the chicken wire, wooden beams, lattice work and shade cloth of the cage appearing in his photographs.

Comment has often been passed on the foliage that lines the enclosure and how the scene has been constructed to mimic a natural bush setting. It can be appreciated that the construction of this scene would have been significantly laborious and time-consuming, involving the harvesting and collection of a considerable amount of branches, bracken, rocks, logs and plant debris. This material then needed to be transported to the enclosure and suitably arranged to give the appearance of the thylacine’s natural environment.

Would it not have been more practical to avoid both the pictorial hazards of a zoological enclosure and the difficult labour involved in the construction of a natural scene by simply taking the stuffed specimen into a real bush setting in the first place?

Given the abundance of true bush settings that would have been available to a photographer with a portable taxidermied mount, and the total absence of any human structures in these locations, it is very difficult to believe that Burrell deliberately chose instead to stage his photographs in one of the most difficult and problematic locations possible.

The bush background

Freeman believes that not only did Burrell place his taxidermied mount in a cage, but that he also undertook the laborious and time-consuming task of harvesting the natural vegetation that lines the enclosure and arranged the foliage to mimic a natural setting.

This is most unlikely.

As Freeman has explained, Burrell had advanced skills in the lifelike display of animals and the construction of dioramas for natural history displays. So greatly admired were his talents in this field that he once even provided advice to Dr Gregory of the American Museum of Natural History about how to best set up a diorama of Australian native animals. Given his obvious skills and talents in this area, it is odd that Burrell made such a bad job of designing the background for his thylacine photographs.

Captive thylacine with bird. Picture: Harry Burrell, c. 1921. Source: Wikipedia. Notations by Tim Squires.

We can see that the interior of the enclosure is a messy combination of wire mesh, wooden beams, shade cloth and harvested vegetation that bears little resemblance to a carefully designed diorama. The arrangement of the foliage is haphazard, random, untidy, and very strangely for a supposed deliberate design, we can see that the greatest concentration of foliage is on the far left of the picture, while the foliage immediately behind and to the right of the thylacine is very thin and fails to obscure all of the wire and shade cloth. If the background was designed and arranged by Burrell, why did he place the mounted specimen in a position where it was possible to see the enclosure structures behind it, and why did he not fully cover these structures properly in the first place?

Rather than being a contrived, staged scene, it seems more reasonable to take Burrell’s images at face value as being the straight-forward photographic documentation of a living thylacine feeding on a chicken in a zoological enclosure. It is very common for enclosures containing native animals to be lined with vegetation and natural materials, and this would be a more likely explanation for the appearance of the background in Burrell’s photographs.

Given these considerations, it would appear much more likely that Burrell was struggling to work in an environment over which he had very little control, and that the foliage had been placed and arranged prior to his arrival by someone who had little appreciation for the finer aesthetic qualities and details that Burrell would normally prioritise. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the foliage in the background of the picture had been placed and arranged by the animal’s keepers, perhaps to bring the atmosphere of a natural environment to the zoological display of the animal and/or to provide some measure of comfort to the thylacine by replicating it’s natural habitat to some extent.

It is reasonable to think that Burrell, like many photographers who took pictures of thylacines, was forced to do the best he could in a very difficult location.

Sadly, the luxury of having access to a fully equipped engraving and lithography studio is beyond my means, and until recently I have been content to use traditional drawing media – pencils, pens, inks and watercolours on paper – to create my drawings. However, the speed at which I need to get my artwork finished is making it  difficult to meet deadlines with the old fashioned tools that I normally use to create my drawings.

Prompted by the need for speed, together with a desire to have a more compact working space, I have recently been experimenting with a state of the art digital drawing and painting computer called a Wacom Cintiq. This ultra-modern equipment is a far cry from my old pencils, pens and paints, and it is taking some trail and error to get used to it, but after a few botched attempts I have begun to feel more comfortable with it and pleased with some of the results that I am getting.

At the moment my access to the Cintiq is limited, but it is such an impressive computer that I have decided to buy one for myself as soon as I can.

The surface of the screen is so smooth that It’s not that difficult to imagine it as a beautifully prepared lithography stone, and so I’ve been thinking about the irony of having missed my chance to have sailed with Darwin, yet now using 21st century digital drawing equipment to emulate the kinds of illustrations that he would have needed to illustrate his book The Voyage of the Beagle.

The Wacom Cintiq has many capabilities that I’m yet to explore, but for now I’ve found a style that provides a nice quality of line – together with finished artwork in digital file form that is ready to go without the need for scanning. I have a long way to go before I am capable of making art that would please Darwin, but maybe he would have enjoyed my growing collection of digital lithographs.

As a model for the hound I turned to the work of Ken Hultgren for inspiration. Hultgren was an artist who did beautiful drawings of animals of many kinds, and being an animation artist for the Disney Studios his work is full of life, vitality and movement. Hultgren’s drawings are based on a rock-solid appreciation of artistic anatomy, and he was able to move freely from realistic depictions of animals through to caricatures and comic-style  drawings – all of which retained that terrific sense of movement and life.

Captive thylacine with bird. Picture: Harry Burrell, c. 1921. Source: Wikipedia.

Is this a real thylacine or a stuffed specimen?

I have been working on an analysis of the thylacine photographs by Harry Burrell. There is presently a debate surrounding the authenticity of the images, but I believe that I have strong enough evidence to prove that they are genuine. In this series of articles I will demonstrate my reasons for believing that Burrell’s photographs show a living thylacine.

The debate surrounding Burrell’s images was triggered by a report published in 2005 in Australian Zoologist magazine, in which animal studies writer Carol Freeman put forward her belief that the images had been staged using taxidermied specimens. I have great respect for the work of Carol Freeman, who has an understandably high and well deserved international reputation as a thylacine researcher. But unfortunately I strongly disagree with her findings, and I think that it is very important that the case for the authenticity of the images be put forward.

I have spent a considerable period of time studying this species, and I can see many indications that the animal in the images is indeed a living thylacine. This series of articles will detail my analysis of Harry Burrell’s thylacine photographs and hopefully generate further discussion on the topic.

For those who are not familiar with the debate surrounding the photographs, the following three fascinating articles will provide you with the material that has prompted my own research and thoughts on the issue:

Is this picture worth a thousand words: An analysis of Harry Burrell’s photograph of a thylacine with a chicken. By Carol Freeman, 2005.

The most photographed of thylacines: Mary Roberts’ Tyenna male – including a response to Freeman (2005) and a farewell to Laird ( 1968). By Robert Paddle, 2008.

On seeing the big picture: A reply to Paddle. By Carol Freeman, 2008

Why is the photograph so important?

On the Australian Museum website the question is posed: “If the thylacine is extinct does it matter if Harry Burrell’s was real?” I believe it does matter for two reasons:

1. All surviving thylacine material is of enormous historical, cultural and scientific value. Such material may take the form of preserved physical remains, historical documentation (both written and pictorial), or authentic film and photographic footage – all of which deepen our understanding of the thylacine and contribute to our knowledge of the tragedy of its extinction. Surviving photographs of captive individuals help us to not only gain a clear idea of the physical appearance of the animal, but also may provide some indication of the health and numbers of the wild populations present at the time the photographs were taken. I believe that Burrell’s thylacine is a living individual that is in good health and physical condition – indicating that around 1921, when the photographs were taken, that more such individuals could be found in the wild at that time. The glass plate negatives are also of remarkable quality, and are an invaluable visual documentation of this lost species.

2. Although Carol Freeman has stated that she did not intend to harm the reputation of Burrell (Freeman 2008), there can be no denying that her research has cast a shadow over Burrell and portrayed him as a man with deceptive  intentions. From my own research I feel that Burrell would be horrified by any allegations that implicated him in the deliberate attempt to portray the thylacine as a ferocious pest. Given the vast contribution that Burrell made to our understanding and appreciation of Australian mammals (see Paddle 2008), it seems inconceivable that he would risk  his reputation, his legacy and the well-being of wild thylacines or any native species by engaging in activities that would harm conservation measures.

Does the photograph vilify the thylacine?

Given Carol Freeman’s wider concerns  on “representations of extinct and threatened species, ethics in human-animal relations and visualisations of animals in popular culture and wildlife documentaries”, it is entirely understandable that she has interpreted Burrell’s photograph of a thylacine with a chicken as a negative and potentially damaging image. However, as I shall explain in following articles, the perception of the thylacine as a threat to poultry is very much a recent construction of the animal, and differs greatly from opinions and knowledge of thylacine behaviour in 1921, when the sight of a captive thylacine eating a chicken would not have been at all unusual – nor offensive to photograph.

Read more articles on Burrell’s thylacine.

Here is a preview of a drawing for Don Knowler’s column On The Wing. This drawing is running with Don’s article in the Mercury’s Saturday Magazine on December 10. On this occasion Don’s story is about the population of fairy penguins in Hobart’s Derwent estuary regaining strength in numbers, and, as always, it is a really interesting read and beautifully written. Like many bird species in Tasmania, fairy penguins thrived prior to European settlement, but since then they have been challenged by the invaders’ disruptions to their natural habitat. During the early 1800s there was a plentiful supply of whales in the Derwent and penguins were also harvested for their fat and skins. Later they were challenged by alterations to the sand dunes as people cleared land and built homes close to the beaches. Yet despite almost insurmountable odds the penguins have somehow managed to survive, and Don’s story is a really heartening tribute to these tiny, yet remarkably resilient birds.