'In the year 2073, humanity is making progress toward restoring the environment and fixing the mistakes of the past. Ellie has spent the last ten years going even further by working to resurrect the thylacine, extinct since 1936. But with no results and increasingly impatient bureaucrats threatening to pull her funding, the thylacine’s future—and Ellie’s—is in danger of reaching the point of no return.' (Source: Publisher's blurb.)
Epigraph:
Gently lifting up the side of the tent . . . I soon make out in the pitchy darkness two phosphorus-like orbs, which slowly approach. . . . I can dimly discern by a light shooting up from a few leaves on the almost expiring fire, the long round body of the native wolf or tiger. I get a tighter grip on the handle of my tomahawk, ready to give a warm reception to my night visitor.
—“Oscar” in the Hobart Mercury, 1882
Thylacines and the Anthropocene
‘Benjamin 2073’ is bookended by a real epigraph—an extract from 'The Native Tiger' published in the Mercury newspaper on 19 September, 1882—and one from an imagined future, where someone spots a wild thylacine near Lake Gordon, a man-made reservoir constructed as part of a Tasmanian hydro-electric project.
This intersection between real and speculative narratives, between wild and transformed spaces, is played out in the short story's themes of recovery and artificiality. Hobart has been 'reconstructed' through green spaces and green energy, but the legacy of climate disaster remains. Ellie is forced to use an exoskeleton to manage her Enviro-Genetic Dystrophy, brought on by in vitro exposure to pollution, and recounts her parents’ abandonment and drug-fuelled holidaying on a rebuilt Great Barrier Reef. Her work in genetically resurrecting the thylacine, by splicing Tasmanian devil and thylacine genomes, will only be successful if the animals can eventually breed without human intervention. This tension between humans’ culpability in ecological disruption and the ethics around our capacity to undo damage is explored in other thylacine narratives too, such as Krissy Kneen's Wintering.
Interestingly, the Mercury article gestures to how, even in 1882, the Tasmanian environment had already been transformed by human activity, first through First Nations peoples' hunting practices and secondly, by European colonisation: 'Not one is now left of the once numerous tribe who, within man's memory, roamed along the coast...the only memorials left of the vanished race are the moss-grown tumuli still remaining in great numbers in sheltered nooks. When cutting through some of these artificially-made hillocks, I found only shells of mutton-fish, bones of kangaroo...'
