There are losses that time cannot fully erase. Some fade into memory, others into legend — and then there are those, like the thylacine’s, that linger in the collective soul like a wound that refuses to heal.
The thylacine — often called the Tasmanian tiger for the stripes that adorned its back — was the largest carnivorous marsupial of modern times. For tens of thousands of years, it prowled the forests of Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea. It hunted softly, carried its young in a pouch like a kangaroo, and lived in quiet balance with its world.
But when European settlers arrived in the early 1800s, that balance shattered. Farmers blamed the thylacine for killing sheep — often without proof — and the colonial government placed a bounty on its head. From 1888 to 1909, more than 2,000 thylacines were killed for cash rewards. Traps, poison, and rifles did what no natural predator had done: they erased a lineage millions of years old.
By the time the last known thylacine — nicknamed Benjamin — died in Hobart Zoo on September 7, 1936, the species was already a ghost. It perished alone, locked out of its shelter on a freezing winter night. The next morning, the world lost a voice it never truly listened to.
The following poem is written in mourning for that loss — not just of a creature, but of our kinship with wildness itself.
“The Last Thylacine”
Beneath the southern cross you lay,
A hush upon your final day,
No forest left, no tender kin,
Only the cage, the cold within.
Your stripes were painted by the dusk,
Soft amber, grey, and ghostly musk,
You watched the world through weary bars,
As silence crept between the stars.
The hunters came with coin and law,
And called it justice what they saw,
They wrote your elegy in lead,
And paid in pounds for all who bled.
In Hobart’s frost your heartbeat slowed,
No mother’s call, no fernwood road,
The wind that stirred the eucalypt
Was all the prayer the earth had kept.
Now time remembers, faint and thin,
The shadowed world you once walked in,
And every rustle, soft, unseen,
Could be your ghost — the Thylacine.
O creature lost to human greed,
Forgive the hand, forget the deed,
May every forest’s midnight hue
Hold one last dream — of finding you.
The melancholy of the thylacine’s story lies in its ordinariness of extinction — not from plague or catastrophe, but from misunderstanding and fear. It was not a monster. It was a shy, nocturnal being that avoided people, hunted small prey, and tended its young with tenderness.
Today, sightings are still claimed in the Tasmanian wilds — fleeting shapes caught in headlights or shadows moving between trees. Perhaps they are wishful thinking. Or perhaps, in a way, the thylacine never truly left.
Every forest where the mist curls low, every lonely call at dusk — they remind us that the line between life and myth is thin. We need such ghosts. They remind us of what we owe the living.
The thylacine’s extinction should not only haunt us; it should guide us. Each species we save from vanishing is a small act of atonement — a whispered apology to those who never had a chance.
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