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When it comes to unconventional travel, visiting a city’s historic zoo isn’t exactly off the beaten path. However, I figured I’d make an exception while in the city of nipaluna/Hobart.
Remarkably, there are no crowds. I don’t even need a ticket – which is refreshing if you’re a schmuck like me who travels to lutruwita/Tasmania for tourist traps like MONA and the Dark Mofo festival.
The catch is, unlike a typical zoo, there are no enclosures, no animals (save maybe a couple of possums) and no proper entrance. In fact, I have to awkwardly hop a fence in the middle of the night so that no one notices me coming in.
To attempt to explain this properly, I have to tell a story that starts back in the 1930s. At that time, one of the top attractions in Hobart was the Beaumaris Zoo (today referred to as Hobart Zoo). Within the city upon a hill overlooking the River Derwent, it housed exotic animals of Tasmania and the wider world. From the main gate, visitors would see a leopard roaming back and forth within its concrete cage; to their left, a pit that confined a polar bear.
If one animal marked the zoo’s history forever, though, it was the thylacine – commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger.
After having several tigers in their history, by the mid ’30s, the zoo was left with only one, known by the name Benjamin. The most famous thylacine in history, he was recorded by David Fleay in 1933, who created one of few film recordings of the now-extinct* species. You see Benjamin pace, scratch himself; he seems similar to any domestic dog. Only when he yawns with his powerful jaw and bares his large canines do you recognise the ferocity and uniqueness of this animal. The surrealness of seeing this long-lost animal is only compounded by knowing that Fleay claimed that Benjamin bit him on the ass while filming.
The zoo site is still there today, only there are no animals and it’s locked up, officially closed over 80 years ago. I hopped the fence late at night after driving back to Hobart from Port Arthur, a well-funded and researched historical site. I looked around in the faint moonlight. This place has undoubted historical significance and arguably as much conservational importance as the former penal colony. However, I saw the opposite of Port Arthur’s careful memorial. The only remnants of this old zoo are the concrete box that housed the leopard and the concrete pit that confined a polar bear: the rest is unkempt grass and wild weeds, all of which has started to consume the last remaining relics of the exhibitions. Without the small gate at the front with infographics explaining the site, there would be no indication that anything of significance happened here.
You could say Port Arthur has more important stories of human tragedy and cruelty that are central to this country’s grim history. However, I would say the full tale of this zoo and Benjamin is a very tragic and human story of its own.
Three years after David Fleay filmed him, Benjamin died due to gross neglect. On the night of September 6th 1936, Hobart experienced extreme weather, dropping to freezing temperatures. Benjamin was left in his open-air cage without any keeper taking care to put him in his sleeping quarters, safe from the elements. He didn’t make it through the night.
Upon discovering the body the next day, Beaumaris Zoo did not even report the death to the news, expecting Benjamin to be replaced seamlessly with a new wild capture. What they did not know was that there would be no more Tasmanian tigers in captivity, ever. Benjamin was an ‘endling’, a term used in conservation to describe the last individual of a species, whose death signifies extinction. It is largely believed some individual tigers were still in the wild until at least the 1960s, but Benjamin’s death is widely accepted as the true end.
Benjamin is profound not only as the witness to the end of his species’ time on this earth, but for the sheer cruelty and pathetic nature of his death. Confined for life to a small cage, alone for the entertainment of passersby; keepers barely caring enough to give him a name (Benjamin was claimed for him later, but has been disputed, as the original owners said they never named him); then one night, he is forgotten and dies. With seemingly no moment of reflection or report of his death, life went on. The only saving grace to this story is knowing that one of these lost creatures got a good chomp of a human’s ass before they passed.
The zoo closed a mere two months later due to financial problems. The site became a fuel depot for the Navy for 50 years before falling under ownership of the Hobart City Council in the ’90s, where it sits vacant today. Considered a historic site by the council, it does not seem they wish to act in any accordance with that idea. The area is in a condition a real estate developer would salivate over for their next multi-million-dollar project, perhaps some soulless inner-city apartments. This is not too far from reality, with the council allowing the sale of the original Beaumaris house, attached and built by the family who owned the zoo, as a modern mansion worth $3.5 million.
I was appalled at first, rambling to my girlfriend about how those in charge could do so little for this site; that it completely shows we never cared about our sins of the past; how there should be a monument or memorial to recognise the tragedy of what happened here. However, as I sat on the old concrete agitated, my sense of injustice gradually transitioned to a strange, uncanny sense of calm.
We looked out at the Tasman bridge as traffic passed by, a busy Saturday night of cars getting across town while this place stayed still, overgrowing seemingly for eternity. However the abandoned zoo space ended up, I thought, it would be no more or less empty as this current unkempt lot. The advantage of the rundown state is that it shows the tragedy for how it really is.
It feels like a good thing, even the right thing, to do something in the Tasmanian tiger’s honor. Commemorate it with a statue, a headstone or a fountain. Absolve us by building a nice park for families and their fancy dogs to enjoy, or maybe spin into some edgy night installation courtesy of MONA. But it doesn’t matter, because nothing we could do would ever truly satisfy our sense of significance and responsibility to this place.
As the use and promotion of keep cups and reusable straws while emissions rise has taught me, cute symbolic change feels good when the powerless have no option for real change, and the powerful have no inclination to change.
Coming straight from my visit to Port Arthur, where I was offered any souvenir I needed and a fancy bar in which to get loosened up before my spooky ghost tour, I thought, Does turning Beaumaris Zoo into some tourist attraction make experiencing its ghosts any better? Does a gift shop with Tassie Tiger plushies sound like a great change? Will it feel good to rub the foot of a bronze statue for good luck, above a plaque reading “We are so sorry for killing you, Benjamin”?
Your dog will have new fresh grass to piss and shit on, and a couple of food trucks could park there on the weekends to offer some overpriced food. Or maybe just turn it into new apartment buildings – Hobart’s city skyline isn’t quite an eyesore like the big cities just yet, after all. In no situation will anything truly change: the zoo is just an empty lot where something horrible happened, and we had no control over it, and the people that did, didn’t care.
The neglect shown in maintaining this space seems parallel to the powerlessness we feel to look after species like Benjamin. Although not yet destroyed by commodification and predatory real estate, a question lingers over Beaumaris Zoo, about what those in power choose to leave out in the cold: does empty concrete and towering wild grass express that fact the best?
By this time, I had seen my fair share of Hobart’s art and history, from Port Arthur’s plaques and ghost stories to MONA with its poop machine and vagina wall. But standing there in the middle of the night, on the site where the last captive Tasmanian tiger died, this rundown place was the most poignant way to see what Australia did, and does, and what it means about us. My visit to the site hit hard, but any self-reflection or grander attempt to memorialise Benjamin and his fellow dead zoo animals just feels fruitless. As David Fleay found out on camera back in the 30s, recording these memories doesn’t stop reality from biting us in the ass.
1 Comment
Ebony Everitt
This article has me hooked from the start.
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