'My name is Tessa. I am strong. I am brave. I do not cry. These are the only things I know for certain.
'I was found in the bush, ragged as a wild thing. I have no memory - not even of how I got the long, striping slashes across my back. They make me frightened of what I might remember.
'The policewoman, Connolly, found me a place in a boarding school and told me about her daughter, Cat, who went missing in the bush. I think there is a connection between Cat, me, and the strange things going on at this school.
'If I can learn Cat's story, I might discover my own - and stop it happening again.' (From the publisher's website.)
Thylacines and the Anthropocene
In this paranormal fantasy for young adult readers, Tessa is found alone and without her memory in the Tasmanian bush. She is taken in by a kindly policewoman named Connolly, who lost her own daughter Cat in mysterious circumstances. Tessa learns to navigate the drama of high school amid strange bodily transformations, and it is Rhiannah—the daughter of environmental activists and a passionate bushwalker—that helps her to understand just who and what she is, a were-thylacine.
While the novel does not explicitly engage with ecological themes, themes of shapeshifting mirrors the transformation of the lutruwita / Tasmania's since settlement. The collision of colonial pasts and hybrid 'more than human' futures gestures towards the possibilities of a more empathetic engagement with our past and those around us.
Thyla leverages many of the tropes typical of thylacine narratives in Australian literature. The most obvious comparisons are the were-thylacines in Krissy Kneen's Wintering and Frank Woodley's Kizmet and the Case of the Tassie Tiger, for younger readers. Julia Leigh's The Hunter foregrounds the reproductive possibilities of a female thylacine survivor, and in Thyla, Tessa's were-thylacine transformation is juxtaposed by her first menses, entangling her animality with her changing teenage body. Louis Nowra's Into That Forest features colonial 'feral children' returning to human society, and Sarah Kanake's Sing Fox to Me considers the trope of the lost child.
This work is affiliated with the Thylacines and the Anthropocene dataset, tracking thylacine extinction and ecological themes in Australian literature.
Vulpi
Australia
:
Random House Australia
,
2012
9057324
2012
single work
novel
fantasy
young adult
'Cat Connolly is a Thyla now. She's not sure where her life is heading, but she knows she doesn't want to go back to the human world.
'But all is not well among the shapeshifters. The treaty between the Thylas and the Sarcos is causing tension and the malevolent Diemens are still on the hunt.
'Then into Cat's life wanders someone who should be an enemy but acts like a friend - and everything changes again. She discovers more about shapeshifters and Diemens, about Tessa, and about her own heart.
'Vulpi continues the story of Tasmania begun in Thyla. It is the story of how the shapeshifters were created, and a clue to what they might become. It is the story of what happened to Cat, and about the decisions we all must make as we learn how to be.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
