The Nannup Tiger and the 1971 tiger hunt

Nannup is a timber town in the forest on the Blackwood River, about 260km south of Perth. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, its people kept reporting something in the trees.

A striped animal. Built like a dog. Moving like nothing else. Jim Green, a Nannup resident, says members of the local car club began recording the sightings in the 1970s. They gave the animal its name. The Nannup tiger.

1966. Tom Longbottom stood and looked at it for 2 to 3 minutes, from no more than 15 to 20 feet away. It was "about the size of a roo dog with big head, long body, heavy shoulders." "Some dark bands went around the body as well." Its "eyes were not like dogs eyes." After dark, there were sounds. "We hear funny sounds at night like a choking or a soft barking."

November 1972. Freda and Joe Carmody were on the road some nine miles from Bridgetown, in the neighbouring district. A large creature leapt across, "between 5ft to 6ft from nose to tail tip." It moved with "a graceful bound remarkably like that of a kangaroo, turned in its tracks." They passed within 30 feet of it. The sun was behind it, so they had no impression of stripes. It "seemed to look at us with a blank expression."

1971. Nannup went looking. Later retellings describe a full-fledged tiger hunt, a mass search for the animal. Jim Green was among those who took part. It was to no avail. No newspaper report from the time has surfaced. The Nannup Historical Society and Museum holds an item titled "Nannup 'Tiger' Hunt (Sheep Painted)".

In 2009 Green told the Countryman he had seen the animal about five times since the 1970s. Photographs, he said, "were often dismissed as being doctored or fake."

That museum title points to a joke. In one version, a local joker painted stripes on an old ewe in 1970 and put her where people were searching for a tiger. In another, farmers tired of the attention painted stripes on a sheep, added a tail and left it in a paddock. Nannup Police have since treated an unofficial sign reading "CAUTION THYLACINES NEXT 50KMS" as a prank.

The animal described resembles a thylacine, the Tasmanian tiger. In 2017 the Department of Parks and Wildlife said: "There has never been a confirmed sighting." The most recent thylacine evidence in the area is a fossil about 12,000 years old in Leeuwin-Naturaliste National Park. Regional coverage suggests large feral cats may be mistaken for something bigger. Another theory blames cougars escaped from a circus accident between Bridgetown and Nannup around 1961. The town's own plaque calls the tiger part of "Western Australian folklore rather than zoology."

Sid Slee, a farmer and pioneer thylacine researcher, spent decades trying to prove the Nannup tiger exists. In 1987 he published The Haunt of the Marsupial Wolf. His daughter Wendy Slee is certain. "You can scoff at it, but I've seen them enough times now to know they exist." Christmas Day 2016. Sid's brother Brian Slee, president of the Busselton Historical Society, watched an animal trot across the road about 15 feet ahead of his car, its tail stuck straight out. "It was so plain, it was in front of me."

Today a sculpture by Flint Edwards, sponsored by the 2003 Nannup Music Festival, stands on Brockman Street. Councillor Ian Gibb puts it simply. "People come for the tiger."