Tracking the Tassie Tiger: Extinction and Ethics in Julia Leigh’s The Hunter (original) (raw)
Related papers
The thylacine looms large in Tasmanian culture. The animal's image is everywhere, present on everything from beer labels to licence plates. The documentary footage of the last thylacine in Hobart Zoo has come to exemplify, among other things, the tragedy of species loss and humanity's violence against the nonhuman. This footage features at the beginning of both The Hunter and Dying Breed -two of the very small number of films that constitute a notional Tasmanian cinema. In contrast to the meanings suggested by the documentary images of the last thylacine however, the fictional Tasmanian tiger in these films becomes a repository for those aspects of humanity that need to be expunged. In The Hunter, the thylacine's dead body is potential raw material for weapons production by a biotech company. In Dying Breed, the thylacine is aligned with a cannibalistic community -implicitly descendent from cannibal convict Alexander Pearce -who rape female tourists in order to perpetuate their kind. In these two texts the thylacine therefore symbolically embodies humanity's inhumanity, degeneracy, and monstrosity -qualities that The Hunter gestures towards wiping out through the eponymous hero's enactment of the thylacine's 'final' extinction. The narratives of The Hunter and Dying Breed assert man's right to violently determine survival and reproduction. These politics resonate with the thylacine's history both in terms of the significance of the hunt in her extinction and the confinement of the last thylacine in a zoo -an environment where reproduction is fully governed by humans.
“Re-animating the Thylacine: Narratives of Extinction in Tasmanian Cinema”
The thylacine looms large in Tasmanian culture. The animal's image is everywhere, present on everything from beer labels to licence plates. The documentary footage of the last thylacine in Hobart Zoo has come to exemplify, among other things, the tragedy of species loss and humanity's violence against the nonhuman. This footage features at the beginning of both The Hunter and Dying Breed-two of the very small number of films that constitute a notional Tasmanian cinema. In contrast to the meanings suggested by the documentary images of the last thylacine however, the fictional Tasmanian tiger in these films becomes a repository for those aspects of humanity that need to be expunged. In The Hunter, the thylacine's dead body is potential raw material for weapons production by a biotech company. In Dying Breed, the thylacine is aligned with a cannibalistic community-implicitly descendent from cannibal convict Alexander Pearce-who rape female tourists in order to perpetuate their kind. In these two texts the thylacine therefore symbolically embodies humanity's inhumanity, degeneracy, and monstrosity-qualities that The Hunter gestures towards wiping out through the eponymous hero's enactment of the thylacine's 'final' extinction. The narratives of The Hunter and Dying Breed assert man's right to violently determine survival and reproduction. These politics resonate with the thylacine's history both in terms of the significance of the hunt in her extinction and the confinement of the last thylacine in a zoo-an environment where reproduction is fully governed by humans.
Affirmations: Of the Modern, 2016
In this essay I use Frankenstein as a lens through which to read a notable recent novel, Julia Leigh’s The Hunter, which raises questions about the relation between modernity, extinction and sexual difference. In The Hunter a professional bounty-hunter, known only as M, is employed by a shadowy multinational biotech company to venture into the wilderness of Tasmania’s central plateau to track down and kill the last surviving Tasmanian tiger, an animal long thought to be extinct, in order to harvest its genetic material for biological weapons. However, just as Shelley’s presentation of the creature as a sympathetic figure complicates any didactic reading of Frankenstein as cautionary tale against scientific hubris, so too, The Hunter studiously avoids reduction to a straightforward ecological fable. Indeed, the most compelling aspect of Leigh’s novel is not the human drama of M’s interactions with the Armstrong family, but its vivid depiction of his relinquishment of human attachments in a kind of becoming-animal that is an intrinsic element of his success as a hunter. Both novels suggest queer models of survival and futurity beyond an anthropocentric ethics grounded in sexual difference.
Isis, 2002
... Irene Semens, Liz Simpson, Dean Southwell, June and Derry Stewart, David Tiley, Monty Turner jnr, Hendrik Van den bergh, Kim Van Haaster, Pat Vickers-Rich, Michael Westerman, Cecilia Winkelman and Steve Wroe. Finally, there is my long-suffering family, Sarah, Seth and ...
'Review: Carol Freeman, Paper Tiger: How Pictures Shaped the Thylacine'
Animal Studies Journal, 2015
Images of animals we no longer share the world with carry with them a discordant sense of life as simultaneously tangible and elusive. Any attempt to read sense into anthropogenic extinction, or deliberate or careless extermination, forces us to negotiate our positon in relation to these deaths: how do we remove ourselves from such killings; how do we come to grips with the way we are connected to or have gained advantage from the deaths of these others? For Australians, and particularly Tasmanians, the figure of the thylacine provokes an uneasy and unhappy connection with the very recent past. At the same time, however, images of the thylacine provide an iconic symbol of Tasmania and Tasmanian officialdom, and of extinction as a force often traceable to human actions. Carol Freeman’s Paper Tiger: How Pictures Shaped the Thylacine brings a critical historical perspective to the way we perceive and conceive of thylacines, chronicling the transformation of the image of the thylacine from colonial metonymy to Tasmanian metaphoricity, illuminating the way meaning has played out during the period from the commencement of British settlement in Tasmania in 1803 to the present day, with the fateful date of 7 September 1936 being brought to bear on time before and after the extinction of the thylacine.
Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals, 2021
In the chapter, "Reassessing the Predator: Representations of Predatory Animals in John Vaillant's The Tiger and Nate Blakeslee's The Wolf ," Sousa engages with two examples of literary journalism to examine how commonly labeled "predator" mammals are represented in this creative nonfiction genre, and she argues that the concept of "the predator" is an anthropocentric reflection of the fear towards the collapse of human exceptionalism. Challenging notions of human exceptionalism/anthropocentrism is a significant tenet of posthumanism and animal studies, and arguing against anthropocentrism in these fields includes challenging specific notions that humans have established against specific animals (such as that of the tiger and the wolf, predator animals). This chapter builds on the argument by looking at the notions around the word "predator" and how they connect to both the animals as well as the humans in both texts, the empathetic humans that can be found in both texts, and discussions of language and communication, anthropomorphism, and embodiment.