I Saw Nothing: the extinction of the Thylacine

Gary Crew (author)

Mark Wilson (illus)

Lothian Books, Australia: 2003

ISBN: 0734409583

Genres: animal stories, historical fiction, picture book

Issues: conservation, environmental awareness, sustainability

This is the first in the Extinction series, which won the Australian Wilderness Society Award for Literature in 2004.

The extinction of the Thylacine is one of Australia's greatest environmental failures, coming about due to ignorance, complacency (about species numbers) and the simple reality that many people did nothing.

This beautiful picture book explores these themes through the eyes of a small girl whose father was a timber cutter in Tasmania in the 1930s. One of her father's acquaintances is a hunter and trapper, a man who always smells of the blood of animal carcasses and uncured pelts. One day he arrives with a live ‘tiger-wolf' slung across his saddle; he sells it to the Hobart Zoo. When her father is killed in a logging accident, Rosie's mother moves to the city to find work. The little girl stumbles across the zoo when delivering something for her mother. It is the Depression and Hobart Zoo is a neglected place - rusted cages, many empty, and animals hungry and badly cared for. A lone keeper remains: Alison Reid, the daughter of the former curator. And Rosie sees the last Thylacine left alive - her ‘tiger-wolf', the one she last saw slung over a saddle - alone in a smelly cage.

Sad, thought-provoking and historically accurate, this is a powerful story. Mark Wilson's illustrations are unusually evocative, capturing both the isolation of back country Tasmania and the bizarre beauty of the Thylacine.