The Last Tasmanian Tiger by Lance Morcan – book review

Disclosure.  This post is a review of an e-book I was sent for free.  All opinions are my own.

I have received a free e-copy of the book The Last Tasmanian Tiger by Lance Morcan to review. You may find out more about the author on his website.

Here is the book blurb.

Charlie Truganini can’t believe his eyes when on a trip into Tasmania’s wilderness he sees a Tasmanian tiger – a carnivorous marsupial considered by most Australians to be extinct.

Charlie has a number of claims to fame – one of those being he’s a direct descendant of one Truganini, the woman considered to be the last full-blooded Aboriginal Tasmanian and whose name he inherited. A close second to that is he’s the great-grandson of one Dingo Truganini, the tracker who helped capture the last known Thylacine cynocephalus – an animal better known as the Tasmanian tiger.

It’s his admiration for his great-grandfather’s exploits that explains why Charlie has devoted his life to searching for the Tassie tiger, as he refers to it, or the thylacine, as scientific types insist on calling it, to determine one way or the other whether it still exists. He has always suspected it does despite having never sighted it nor even stumbled across its spoor in all his travels.

When Charlie sees a Tasmanian tiger with his own eyes, he realises he doesn’t want his tiger meeting the same fate as the last one. And so he makes a decision. A decision that will have life-and-death consequences.

This is a short story of just 36 pages, so I read it very quickly.

Charlie Truganini, aged 48, a Tasmanian Aborigine tracker is trekking through the bush on behalf of the Southwest Wilderness Native Animal Protection Society (SWNAPS) to check and resite their cameras. It is a role he loves, as he hopes one day to discover a Tasmanian Tiger, an animal believed to be extinct for many decades.

But today is different. He actually discovers and photographs a Tasmanian Tiger. Now what should he do? Tell everyone or keep quiet? Zoos, scientists, conservationists, hunters, media? Does he make the right decision?

I enjoyed this story. It brought back memories of when I did a project on marsupials in junior school and made me think about the ongoing situation with the koalas and bush fires. But for such a short story, it did feel as if it should be part of an anthology rather than a book on its own. Although under current circumstances, one short story was probably all my attention span could cope with, so it was the ideal read for me just now.

The Last Tasmanian Tiger is available on Amazon, currently priced at £1.99 in Kindle format. An enjoyable short story. Lance is a very versatile author as this is quite a different genre to the brilliant Silent Fear novel that I absolutely loved, which Lance wrote with his son James, plus they write non-fiction and novellas too.

I’d love to hear about your favourite read.

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