E-Mail is a Wild Animal

Thylacine by Alexis Rockman
Beaumaris Zoo soil and acrylic polymer on paper, 2004
9 x 12¼ inches

Don’t be offended if your e-mail isn’t replied to my friend Ken had at the bottom of the “out of town for a few days” notice I received today. “E-mail is a wild animal,” he said. He’s just put a new scientific / art project online so I imagine his e-mail volume exploding. I don’t think that E-Mail would be an alpha predator, something large, lethal and a lone hunter, like a Bengal Tiger, but more like the heat-seeking, tree-dwelling land leeches I’ve been reading about in urban naturalists Margaret Mittelbach and Michael Crewdson’s book Carnivorous Nights.

They came to Australia, with artist Alexis Rockman, to metaphorically and literally search for the Tasmanian Tiger (which graces the header of this blog). They all live in New York. Mittelbach and Crewdson have written stories for the New York Times about the wildlife in the Bronx: coyotes and bald eagles, among the creatures. Although the definition of ‘wild’ becomes fuzzy when I read that they found a taxidermy of a domestic poodle in the archives of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Before going to Tasmania they spent some time in Sydney. “Animals the size of cats were flying through the air and the city’s residents barely seemed to notice,” they wrote of the flying foxes in the Botanical Gardens that I walk through almost every day.

Taking a break from our research, we sat with Alexis and Dorothy at the city’s Royal Botanic Gardens, having tea with scones and observing a bird. A big white ibis with a thin, curving beak flapped up onto a cafe table, gobbled up some crumbs, and then dipped the tip of its foot-long beak into a pot of clotted cream. Suddenly a woman shrieked. “Oh, shooo! Shoooo!” The ibis flapped down to the graound and began strolling along on stiltlike grey legs. A few seconds later, it sidled up alongside another table and began probing the interior of a nother patron’s pocketbook with its cream-smeared beak.

Alexis was delighted by the bird’s bad behaviour. “That bird needs handcuffs,” he said. We hadn’t even gotten as far as Tasmania and the wildlife was already bizarre.

Exotic ibises wandered Sydney’s streets like pigeons, cadging freebies and putting their beaks where they didn’t belong. But they were just the beginning of the city’s strange animals. The night before, we had been standing outside an oyster bar in Kings Cross — Sydney’s version of Times Square — and a huge creature had flown toward us, circled, and then landed with a thump in a small street tree. It hung there like a gremlin, its leathery wings folded, and chattered spookily. For a moment we were petrified. Was this some sort of supernatural being? When we mustered the courage to look at it more closely, we realized it was a flying fox. A megabat.

There are sometimes spooky circles of flying foxes in formation cruising low above the edge of the Botanical Gardens near the Sydney Opera House. They look like vampire bats from a distance. And last Saturday night I saw what I thought to be an injured possum slowly crossing the road near the security station. Up close it was a fiesty old possum with a lot of healed bites all over him. “That’s just one of the regulars” the guard said.

There’s an interview with Alexis Rockman on the Carnivorous Nights website, where he talks about his own fascination with the Thylacine / Tasmanian Tiger:

Q: You’re a fan of extreme animals … what was the most extreme animal you saw in Tasmania?
A: I’m a fan of unlikely and unlovable animals. First on the list is the thylacine — a “Down Under lion” with a pouch. Also unloved is the Tasmanian devil (just consider its name), which to me looks like a child’s drawing of a scary dog. And the Tasmanian giant crayfish. Most people wouldn’t cuddle up to a giant crayfish, but to me it’s sexy.

Q: Why is the thylacine such a powerful image for you?
A: It’s the poster child of apex predator extinction … a haunting icon that forces us to face a legacy of extinction. Plus it’s cute as hell.

Q: There are images of cryptozoological creatures in your work like Sasquatch and the globster. Where does the thylacine fit in here?
A: The thylacine has double duty. Don’t forget it is foremost a real and genuine species, not one cooked up by fervid imaginations. Yet the current evidence of the actual animal is so fleeting. It is the coin that has two sides in cryptozoology — on the one hand it’s an historical figure, yet it fuels an industry based on hope and mythology. It brings tears to your eyes.

 Scenes from movie footage taken of a thylacine in 1912 can be seen here.