Long before the colonists arrived, before ships split the horizon and gunfire echoed through the Tasmanian hills, the thylacine already walked in story.
To the Palawa, the First Peoples of Tasmania, this creature was not a monster, nor myth — it was kin. It shared their world, their food, their breath.
And like many beings in Indigenous cosmology, the thylacine was woven into song.
While no written Palawa poem survives from before European arrival — much was silenced by colonial violence and cultural erasure — linguists and elders have carefully reconstructed fragments of old oral songs and dreamtime verses.
One such reconstruction, offered here, is a composite of language fragments from Palawa kani (a revived Tasmanian Aboriginal language) combined with traditional oral imagery.
It is not an exact historical transcription — rather, it’s a respectful reimagining, built from linguistic preservation efforts and oral accounts that echo through Tasmanian country.
“Taraba Nanna” (The Shadow Walker)
(Reconstructed in Palawa kani, with English translation)
Palawa kani:
Taraba nanna, wurayna milay,
pina paywarra nika, truwana napali.
Wurrangka tara nika tunapri,
milay milay, niwarri kani.
Nita waranta nika tunah,
nara nanna, truwana, waranta.
English translation:
Shadow walker, silent hunter,
your eyes are the fire of the island.
Through the fern you move like smoke,
soft, soft, you speak to the night.
We are your people, you are our kin,
spirit of the land, spirit within.
This imagined ancestral poem is short, but every line breathes with the intimacy between human and animal that once defined the Tasmanian landscape. The thylacine was Taraba nanna — “the shadow walker” — a being that crossed both the physical and spirit worlds. It was said to appear at the edge of campfires or vanish at dawn, as if carrying secrets from dreamtime.
In Palawa cosmology, such creatures were not lesser lives, but extensions of the earth itself. Their disappearance was never conceived as possible, because Country — the land and its beings — was eternal.
The tragedy, then, is double. With colonization came not only the extinction of the thylacine, but also the silencing of the language that once called it by name. The loss of voice mirrored the loss of fur and blood.
Yet through language revival and cultural renewal, the old words rise again.
When young Palawa speakers say taraba nanna, they do not just name an extinct animal — they summon remembrance.
Epilogue: The Ghosts We Still Hear
The thylacine’s story did not begin with European eyes, and it does not end with scientific extinction. It began in song — in rhythm and firelight and the hush of the Tasmanian night.
Every time we speak of it now, every time a whisper of fur and stripe stirs in the mist, we are continuing that song — across centuries, across languages, across the thin veil between memory and dream.
No comments:
Post a Comment