Abstract This article reads Julia Leigh’s novel The Hunter (1999) and Daniel Nettheim’s 2011 film adaptation as two distinct mediations of extinction. Indeed, the article treats adaptation as an extinction practice: a process that defers extinction’s finality by translating disappearance into new forms of mediated presence. In Leigh’s novel, the thylacine persists mainly as a trace in a story that turns disappearance into narrative, epistemic, and economic productivity. The novel thus refuses consolatory mourning, presenting extinction as an austere problem of procedure, capture, and extraction. By contrast, Nettheim’s film foregrounds the animal’s mediated afterlife in and through archival footage, circulating images, and digital visual effects. In so doing, the film shifts extinction from procedural finality to visual reappearance, transforming the Tasmanian tiger’s death into a private rite of grief and human repair. By comparing the novel’s affective austerity with the film’s elegiac and digitally mediated thylacine, the article argues that the two texts imagine competing ethics of extinction. Read together, the novel and film show that extinction does not end the animal’s cultural life; instead, it generates new afterlives in which the thylacine persists in and through adaptation, mediation, and repeated reappearance.
Michael Fuchs (Fri,) studied this question.