It's arguably Australia's most enduring myth, and it reads something like one of Mike Burgess's annual threat assessments: I can't say what it is or when it happened. But somewhere, there's a giant black cat trying to eat all our sheep - thank you, no further questions.
Australia's panther (because, somehow, the stories only ever mention one) is one of those stories where everyone knows someone, who knows someone, who heard from a farmer once about a sheep carcass being found in a paddock, up a tree, or through a fence, and that's proof that the big cat is on the prowl again.
Whatever it is, it's big. And fast. It's spent some time at Charlestown, Redhead, Mount Sugarloaf, southern Lake Macquarie, bounded over to Lithgow, and up to the New England region. It's been seen in Perth (because Australia's jungle cats cross deserts like absolute champions), swung past South Australia for a stint, and most recently dropped into Ballarat.
Oh, and it's old. Like, old as dirt. One popular theory as to how Australia came to be home to the mysterious big cat is by way of a military mascot that US servicemen brought out during World War II.
Another, has it that the panther or jaguar or lion (other jungle cats are available) escaped from a circus and went on the prowl (that one could have come from a Melbourne Argus report from June, 1924, that featured an escaped circus puma that was ultimately shot and killed by one S Bray, who was given the beast's hide as a trophy).
And yet another theory, featured in history and anthropology researcher David Waldron's book Snarls From the Tea Tree: Australia's Big Cat Folklore, suggests that there was somewhat of a cottage industry for imported exotic animals in the 19th Century.
An article from the Rockhampton Bulletin from September 1875 mentions the auction of a litany of beasts from the "Manders's Royal Menagerie", mainly sold to other dealers in the trade, that included an orange crested cockatoo (noted as a "good talker" and sold for seven pounds), a wombat (five pounds, 10 shillings), a mongoose (a steal at only a pound), and a 14- or 15-year-old variegated mandrill called Jerry who went for 105 pounds (that's about $20,000 in the new money).
His neighbour, a black Canadian bear, only fetched a pound and six, and a big Russian bear about the size of a cab horse went in a daylight robbery for only a pound. (The scribe interestingly goes on to note that the street value of "a good a bear" in Rockie in 1875 was five pounds, before somewhat gruesomely noting that he would have been worth at least that to a barber to "fatten up for bear grease" whatever horror that could possibly entail).
"This bear was old and not a good show animal," the writer of the day said, "He was probably bought for his skeleton." (For the record: please don't let the Rockhampton paper write my eulogy).
The particulars also included a "very nice zebra" and a couple of wildebeest, a parade of camels (the male of which was said to have had an awful "temper" by which, it was meant, he bit someone), a llama in harness, spotted hyena and (bear with me cat people) two 18-month-old lion cubs that went for 150 pounds, as well as a five-year-old lioness and another lioness in cub. A leopardess with no tail (bitten off, the article had it) went for five pounds, a pair of jaguars from South America, bound for the Zoological Gardens in Regents Park.
Those cubs would only be - what - 147 years old now? But of course, I can hear the believers cry, we're not talking about the same cats. Ok, fair point. As sceptical as I am, I'm willing to go out on a limb and agree that even if the more modern war cat theory was true, it could have cross-bred with another feral species (like ... feral cats?) and, over successive generations, something-something-something, voila!, Australian panther.
But even then, it's a bit of a leap from the true statement that Australia has had at one time or another exotic animals on the mainland to Australia has a mythological species of big cat that has evolved over successive generations of breeding in the Grampians to only appear in blurry photos shot on someone's Nokia 35-potato.
The big cat myth crops up occasionally, as it did again on Wednesday. The question was even raised on ABC Breakfast when host Michael Rowland threw in a last question to that town's MP, Catherine King after a prospector caught some footage of what appeared to be a big black cat bounding across a field.
Ms King brushed off the tale: "The black panther ... (has been) a myth that I have long, long heard about," she said. "It pops up every now and again as a story, and there are pictures. Some of the pictures I've seen look a bit similar to some I might have seen 20 years ago as well-a little bit sharper. I suspect AI might have a bit of a hand in that."
Look, it's a great story. But, setting aside the sensational for a moment, Australia has a real big cat story, and it doesn't require mythical panthers, jaguars, or even a shady bear-shaming writer for the Rockhampton rag.
Australia has cats - big ones too - they're feral, about 50 per cent bigger than a house cat, powerful enough to take down a wallaby, and effectively cover every corner of the country. And they're killing a million native birds a night, according to research from 2017.
A few years ago, a wildlife ranger from across the Nullarbor told the ABC that the problem with the panther was that it stole the limelight from an actual ecological problem facing the country. A mythological big cat makes a sexier headline than the feral variety, but it also distracts from the real damage that the feral and invasive species are doing.
Last year, Curtin University researcher Bill Bateman, writing for The Conversation, noted that cats were one of the most invasive species on earth and had done the worth damage in Australia. Bateman wrote that our feral species were also getting bigger, with reports of seven-kilogram cats now common, up from their domestic range of four to five kilograms.
"Tales of panther-like felines may well be huge feral cats. Some have been estimated at 12-15 kilograms. Take the estimated 1.5-metre feral killed in 2005 - double the nose-to-tail length of a domestic cat," Bateman said.
Food for thought.
