There is a heartbreaking scene at the end of The Hunter. The film tells the story of a mercenary hired by a global biotech company to find, take, and destroy a thylacine that is said to have lived deep in the state's wilderness.
The impact of seeing the last tiger in a movie in its natural habitat is quietly devastating. The choice made by the mercenary is both devastating and complex.
It isn't hard to find people who believe there is truth in the film's central conceit - that the thylacine still lives out there somewhere - but there is no scientific evidence that it survived beyond 1936.
What it has highlighted is how little, in relative terms, we prioritise our existing environment
Since the 1990s, there have been endless searches for the animal in the wilds of the two states, with the idea that it can be brought back through genetic engineering. The former director of the Australian Museum was the main proponent of this idea for a long time. The first step in the sequence of a thylacine's genome was led by Prof Andrew Pask.
What is new is the money. A $5 million philanthropic gift was given to the team to set up the lab. The lab made an announcement last week that it had formed a partnership with a US company that uses cutting edge technology.
The tech and software entrepreneur Ben Lamm has his share of ambition. The tiger could be back in its homeland within a decade, according to the two people. In both senses it sounds great. It was not helped by the news that Chris and his brothers were funders of the film, as some had suggested.
It's hard to overstate the place the thylacine holds in the local mindset in my area. Europeans put a bounty on it's head because they lied about how many sheep it killed and hunted it to the edge of extinction. The last animal to die was ignored. It is celebrated on the coat of arms and used to sell everything from hotels to beer. Exploitation has been more detailed.
The thylacine was not a tiger or a wolf. Though it looked like a dog, it wasn't one. It was Australia's only apex predator and its place in the landscape is still unfilled a century later. The scientists behind the recreation project think it could have a positive impact on the environment. It could come back in.
I don't want you to know what to think about this project. I don't know if the plan to edit stem cells from a living animal will work. People with more knowledge than I do. Some of the questions are worth considering.
To what extent would the recreated animal look and act like a tylacine? Minor variations on the original genome are likely to happen as a result of the editing process. It may take some trial and error to make a pure tiger.
Without experience with others of their type, would test-tube created thylacines know how to behave?
There are examples of human-raised predator being trained before being released into the wild. It is difficult to predict how a new-model thylacine would interact with its environment, and it is also difficult to know what the absence of a generations imprint would mean.
Does a lab-made thylacine have enough genetic diversity to thrive or is it doomed to fail?
The author of a paper that showed the thylacine was in poor genetic health before it was hunted to death says addressing diversity is nothing compared to bringing the entire animal back. ProfCorey Bradshaw is unconvinced.
The scientific community's reaction to the project has been mixed, with some understandable frustration that money is being spent to revive a dead species when hundreds of living threatened species are comparatively ignored.
I don't see it the same way. The support for de-extinction research has not come at the expense of other environmental protection. It is something else.
It has shown how little we prioritize our environment. As native forests continued to be cleared and billions were spent on subsidies to expand fossil fuel industries, the previous federal government made a $10 million announcement for 100 priority threatened species.
Even if they don't bring back the thylacine, the research will be worth it. He wants the technology to be used to preserve the genetic diversity of the threatened animals. It's a noble idea given the challenges faced.
I might be a bit more naive. I hope our leaders make the right choices so we don't have to rely on de- extinction projects.
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