Tasmanian Tiger, Sightings Keep Coming In

[Lionel]

Buck and Joan Emberg have never walked away from controversy. How could they?The brash Canadian and the quietly spoken former Queenstown girl started a relationship more than 30 years ago in the midst of controversy and never really looked back.As the story goes, Buck's best friend - Joan's husband - disappeared with his wife and left the remaining partners with eight children between them.So they joined forces and found they fitted - philosophically as well as romantically.Together, they introduced cosmopolitan dining to Lalla, at the Stuga Restaurant, in the 1970s where previously eating out in the district had meant a Devonshire tea or two.Together, they toured the graveyards of Tasmania, producing a memorable series of books on the stories behind the tombstones. And together, the larger- than-life former clergyman and his once-upon-a-time teacher wife have taken on causes like fighting logging and pine plantations, reminding the world of the joys of steam travel and saving the elusive Tasmanian tiger.It's the latter that has had Buck urgently on the phone as he and Joan pack up the mud-brick house with all its memories at Golconda that they mostly built themselves to move closer to Launceston.Now that they are leaving the Golconda bush where they say that there have been more than 20 sightings of the tiger in the past five or six years, the Embergs want the world to be aware that they need to take great care of a region which they believes could be home to the native Tasmanian animal supposedly extinct by the mid-1930s.

Why them? "Because we don't care what people think," says Joan. "Most people are too scared to reveal their identity to report a tiger sighting because of the ridicule, people ridicule you. They call you crazy or drunk or say that you are making it up." Buck shows plaster casts of animal footprints which he swears are those of a Tasmanian tiger. He shows photographs of paw prints taken by an anonymous friend only three months ago and he repeats stories from influential business and community leaders from politicians and policemen to a hospital doctor, passed on to him because they don't want to be involved. All the sightings have been in the Lilydale- Golconda area around Ferny Hill, Panama and Lone Stone roads.

View: Full Article | Source: The Examiner