#mawbanna

[hladky]

Mawbanna TAS, 2019 website / instagram / blog

[dudescook]

Had a great day today at #DipFalls #Mawbanna #Tasmania #Australia #travel #dudescook #nature #travelgram

[thylacine-dreams]

"On 13 May 1930, in the Mawbanna district of north-eastern Tasmania, farmer Wilf Batty was eating his lunch when he heard a loud squawking coming from the direction of his chicken coop. Without hesitation, he put down his soup spoon, seized his gun from the wall, pushed a couple of cartridges into the breech, and went out. He imagined the disturbance was being caused by an unwelcome visitor his farmworkers had seen in the area over the past few months.

Once outside, as he had feared, he saw an animal near the coop. As he recalled later, it had had its head under the wire mesh that surrounded the chickens. It looked at him for a moment, and then started to lope away, not particularly quickly, around the back of a shed. Batty followed, though both his kelpies hung back, whimpering.

It was a big, dog-like creature, low-slung, with a large head and a long, stiff tail. Its short brownish fur was banded all across the back with much darker, broad transverse stripes, which gave it its common name. Batty took careful aim as it headed for the perimeter fence, and fired. The animal dropped. Batty walked over and checked that it was dead, and then crossed his yard to see what damage had been done to his poultry. The beast he had killed belonged to a type that had a long-established reputation among farmers as a pest, though there had been fewer and fewer of them around over the last twenty years, and this was the first time in Batty's experience that he had heard of one raiding a henhouse. What Batty did not know was that it would also be the last time, for his action had made him the last man to shoot a Tasmanian tiger in the wild. Just over six years later the entire species would be extinct, when the last known survivor died in Hobart's Beaumaris Zoo, of neglect, on 7 September 1936." [x]

Bottom photo: [x]