The Sandy Cape thylacine killing

Sandy Cape lies on the west coast of Tasmania, south of the Arthur River mouth. It is very isolated, accessible only by air or 4WD. For years the Animals and Birds Protection Board, known as the Fauna Board, had been collecting detailed records of reports of the Tasmanian tiger. What it did not have was a body.

On 12 August 1961, Bill Morrison and Laurie Thompson were camping in a hut on the coast while fishing. One night they heard a noise, as if some animal was trying to reach a bucket of fish bait left outside. According to the Fauna Board records, Thompson picked up a piece of wood to drive it away and saw only "the shape of some animal at the bait." He ran at it, struck it, and it disappeared into the darkness. Next morning the men found what they said was a young male Tiger, stretched out dead not far from the hut.

A later telling, by Eric Guiler and P. Godard in 1998, puts the blow in other hands. In that version Morrison heard noises in their storage hut, found an animal within, and clubbed it to death in the dark.

The men put the corpse in the hut, intending to take it out for examination at a museum. They reported the kill to nearby fishing boats, then went out on another fishing trip. When they returned, the body was gone. Someone, it seemed, had entered the hut and taken it. One later account says it had been left under a sheet of iron.

The men reported the loss as soon as they got home. The Board's field officers turned detectives. They believed the body was still in existence but being hushed up. It was never recovered. What remained was hair and dried blood, collected from the sand near the hut and sent to Hobart.

The Fauna Board arranged the examination. As Sharland wrote in 1962, it "later reported that both hair and blood referred to a Tiger and nothing else." Writing in Oryx in 1966, Guiler said the report "proved to be correct." The 1998 account was more guarded. The blood had been too degraded by the time it was examined, while the hair was judged possibly thylacine.

The Board followed its years of records with a field investigation, aided by a government grant, reportedly £2,000. The expedition set out in October 1963, led by Dr Eric Guiler. The team reportedly included Inspector George Hanlon, Wildlife Officers Reuben Hooper and Ken Harmon, and bushman Ray Martin. Their snares were checked daily, with the aim of capturing and photographing a living animal. Around 700 were reported along a 16 km line at Green's Creek, in the Sandy Cape area.

No thylacine was caught. As the Oryx paper put it, the animal "maintained its reputation for elusiveness."

Sharland was cautious even in 1962. "There is of course an element of doubt in this and other Tiger reports," he noted. Under cross examination Morrison firmly maintained it was a thylacine. But in 1980, according to Guiler and Godard, Morrison changed the story, claiming the animal was actually a Tasmanian devil.

Still, the Sandy Cape kill holds a rare place. A report from a lonely hut, backed by hair and blood, sent a government funded team into the bush. Guiler's searches left behind 160 small 8mm film reels and notes on site locations. The animal itself was never seen again.