Some time in the late 1990s, a man is hiking through Tasmania’s Central Plateau , hoping to kill a thylacine. He’s a mainlander, and he has come to a Tasmania that no longer exists: before MONA, before Jetstar, before secret saunas and mountain bike trails, before the Tasmanian Forest Agreement, before Richard Flanagan won the Booker Prize . In this Tasmania, the Tarkine Tigers, a direct-action conservation group, have recently lost their long fight to stop a road being built through the unlogged wilds of the north-west.
The Tasmanian government has only just recognised the dispossession of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, only just agreed it might be legal to be gay. There is one gin distillery in the entire state. This was the Tasmania of Julia Leigh’s The Hunter , which 25 years ago hit the shelves to international acclaim and a ripple of local irritation.
At home in the wild The Hunter is told from the point of view of M. He is a nondescript mercenary who has come to the Central Plateau to harvest a thylacine for a mainland bio-tech company that, for unspecified reasons, wants its genetic material. Thylacines, or Tasmanian tigers, were declared extinct in 1936, but have allegedly been seen all over the island ever since.
(In his book, The Song of the Dodo , David Quammen estimates 300 unconfirmed sightings in the 60 years after extinction.) The thylacine of The Hunter has been spotted in the Walls of Jerusalem National Park. M’s employer has set him up with a cove.
