The return of the living dead: unsettlement and the Tasmanian tiger

Australia has the ignominious distinction of having "lost" approximately half the world's mammals. Among these extinctions the Tasmanian tiger is perhaps the most iconic, not least because the "undead" thylacine has been routinely sighted since it passed into oblivion in the 1930s. I regard narratives of the "extinct" thylacine as a form of what Lacan called the "return of the real", that is, a positionality between a symbolic death and an actual death. My methodology has been dictated as much by the elusiveness of my subject as by my own fascination with its discursive configuration. Following Steve Baker, I consider any understanding of the thylacine as being bound to its cultural representation; and as such I grant equal conceptual weight to accounts of the representational or the symbolic thylacine as I do to the "real" thylacine. Using published accounts of the colonial encounter with both the biophysical environment and the indigenous (Palawa) population, data drawn from an eclectic range of scientific and "natural history" texts as well as sources from popular culture, I argue that until the trauma of colonial abjection is reconciled (integrated into our historical memory) the undead will continue to return and haunt the Australian imaginary.