2. ABOUT JEREMY GRIFFITH
WTM FAQ 2.7 “Like Jeremy Griffith, I’ve always been captivated by that remarkable animal the Tasmanian Tiger or Thylacine. Does Jeremy think they are really extinct because even as a child I believed in my heart they were still around, hiding deep in the bush?”
Jeremy Griffith’s response:
Yes, I certainly relate to being captivated by the Thylacine—imagine me as a young man learning there was this absolutely utterly incredible animal in Australia that might still exist; it was then only 30 years since the last captive Thylacine had died. I remember walking down the main street of Armidale in northern New South Wales in 1967 and walking into the post office and ringing Sir Edward Hallstrom, who was the director of Sydney’s Taronga Zoo and whose son went on an expedition to see if he would find the Thylacine without success, and telling him I was going to go and find it. He was kind enough but dismissive. Well fu*k him, I found this hound dog abandoned on the side of the road nearly dead from starvation, and I had read about these special hound dogs in America that were used to hunt mountain lions because of their amazing ability to follow scent trails (in particular, I had read the book Reddy The Hound Dog), so I picked up ‘Loafy’, as I came to call him, nursed him back to health, trained him to track animals like rabbits, then hitchhiked with him all the way to Tasmania—and I never quit until I had searched the whole island, including inventing the first trail cameras that are now regularly used to monitor for an animal’s existence. But I didn’t even stop when I sadly concluded that the Thylacine was extinct because I’ve gone on to solve the deeper issue of why we’ve been so insensitive to nature, which is our psychotic human condition, and having solved that we can now save all the people on Earth, along with all the animals.
You can read a description of that most thorough search ever conducted for the Thylacine, and see a photo of Loafy and me on a motorbike heading out to save the Tiger, at www.humancondition.com/tasmanian-tiger-search.
The following is some correspondence that Jeremy had in 2025 with a young Australian who spends a lot of time in expeditions on the West Coast of Tasmania, some of it looking for the Thylacine
Jeremy: I love your initiatives and gear and your fascinated mind. I spent a few years back in the 1960s and 70s trying to rediscover and save the Thylacine from extinction and at one stage I went down the Arthur River in a tractor tube tracking the sandbars for any Thylacine tracks. I think it was you who made a video about the Thylacine in which you included a photo of me outside an old boiler on the White River near the Savage River. The ABC made a documentary about my search. Anyway you can see a lot about it at this link, www.humancondition.com/tasmanian-tiger-search. These days I’m writing books about the human condition of all subjects, which you can see a lot more about at this website, www.humancondition.com. Again, love your exploring spirit.
Anyway the horse has bolted wherever you look in terms of dysfunction, which is what I realised after trying to save the Thylacine from extinction. Someone had to go deeper and get to the bottom of the problem of our distressed-and-devastated-everywhere-you-look human condition, and being a biologist that’s what I’ve done.
Response: G’day Jeremy. Thanks for reaching out mate!
I’m actually very familiar with the ABC documentary yourself and James [local dairy farmer and naturalist James Malley] were a part of. It’s a fantastic documentary and a real credit the effort that you lads went to back then, to try to save the tiger. I have also done a few tiger inspired trips…so it’s an honour to hear you found me…thanks so much for reaching out. Your work has inspired me along the way so it’s great to see it come full circle!
Jeremy: Lovely to hear back from you. Yeah, love watching your adventures, long time since I was in that wild country.
My close friend and supporter of my work, the first Aussie to climb Everest, Tim Macartney-Snape, has taken me out into the western desert of Western Australia, but there’s no Bauera [a wiry shrub that makes walking extremely difficult] out there! James and I actually found the remnants of an aboriginal settlement down on the south-west coast, I think maybe but I’m not at all sure that it was at the mouth of the XXX River. We told Bob Green at the Launceston Museum about it so they have the details, but he said not to publicise it because he couldn’t protect the site. I often wonder if any of those west-coast early miners’ and explorers’ articles you research report seeing tigers. I’ve just finished another book and potential video about the fu*king human condition. Stay bold and out there Mr Boys Own Adventure Man!
P.S. I once invented a fold-up alluvial gold mining contraption a person could carry into the bush, so, like you, I’ve been fascinated with prospecting.
The thing is a big predator like the Thylacine needs a reasonably big territory so there really isn’t any chance of a viable population of them surviving undetected out there. The Takahē bird was rediscovered in a remote part of the south island of NZ, but it isn’t a predator that has to range a pretty big area. And I invented what was really the first trail camera in the world, which you can see in that ABC documentary, and had them monitoring pretty well all the possible remote areas down there and they didn’t find any Thylacines. With regard to the south-west, as you know that is often such leached and glaciated morainal poor soil that any Thylacine there would very likely be living along the coast preying on the wallabies that have migrated there to live off the marram grass food there, and I tracked all the coast north of Macquarie Harbour, and James and I tracked all the coast south of Macquarie Harbour without finding any signs of Thylacines—we even tracked a wild dog that cray-fishermen told us they occasionally saw on the south coast, so we don’t think we were missing much. And god, we investigated so many fu*king sightings and accounted for many of them as being probably tiger cats which can get pretty big and impressive and when you quiz people they can’t actually remember whether it was stripes or spots that they saw, stuff like that over and over again. I write all the time about the human condition, which at base is humans’ incredible insecurity of self and resulting capacity for extraordinarily wishful and deluded thinking. Anyway, it’s excruciatingly sad, but I know from heaps of first-hand experience and in the field research that they’re extinct. Fu*k it, I hate it to the bottom of my toes that the tiger is no longer with us, but that’s why I work so hard on fixing the real problem us fu*ked up humans had to fix, which is the human fu*king condition, you really should have a look at this human condition stuff, even just watch the one-hour interview I did which is at the top of our website.
