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.