'It's 1910 and 12-year-old Myko and his family have fled the Czarist occupation of their native Lithuania for the freedom of America—only to discover their ship has arrived in Tasmania, the once notorious prison island of the British Empire, known as Van Diemen's Land. Myko wonders what will become of them as he watches his father, Petras, and mother, Daina, become anxious about how they will survive in this new land where tigers roam. Myko has never seen a tiger before, except in his picture books, and is filled with fear as stories of the tigers' vicious attacks upon the island's settlers are retold to him. He wishes his brother Jurgis was with him, but knows his sibling's disappearance is something he should force out of his mind. But when Petras takes work as a tiger trapper and Myko discovers the den of the last tigers, the family are thrust into a fight over the last of these beautiful, wild beasts that will force dark secrets to the surface, and pit son against father.' (Publication summary)
Thylacines and the Anthropocene
Many of Tony Black's narratives are concerned with masculinity and father-son relationships, and in The Last Tiger, these themes are entangled with the violence of thylacine extinction.
Myko's family arrives in Hobart with little money, so his father pawns his own father's pocket watch to provide for them. Myko is transfixed by a thylacine pelt hanging on the pawnshop wall and, in his anger at the animal's death, notices how small it is: "... it seemed nothing like the fearsome creature he'd described ... Why would any man want to kill it?" Here and throughout, Myko wrestles with colonial abjection and dominance of the nonhuman: of animals, the wilderness, and of others. That his father eventually finds work as a farmhand and thylacine trapper brings this conflict—between the cruelty of man and the duties of the father—home. "What has the tiger done that is so bad?" he asks a settler's daughter. "I don't know," she replies, "... That's just how it is here."
