The Extinction Story

Waratah, Tasmania, Australia

Public art

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Current

Checked by Project Big Things · Aug 2026

This Big Thing is recorded as still being here.

A large-scale thylacine public artwork at Whyte Hills Lookout near Waratah.

Before you stop

Remote gravel/sealed mixed road with limited mobile phone coverage; not wheelchair/access-need friendly.

Parking on site
P
Parking
onsite

Private to your Passport.

PLAN YOUR VISIT

Recommended arrival available

Onsite parking

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The Extinction Story

This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.

Site-level location · 41.4690° S, 145.4270° E

FIELD GUIDE

The story

The artwork at Whyte Hills Lookout is a recreation of a photograph of a thylacine in a trap.

Matt Calvert made it in fabricated steel and laminated glass, at large scale, as part of the Western Wilds arts route, and the choice of source image is what makes it uncomfortable in the right way. There are very few photographs of living thylacines, and a significant proportion of them show captured, cornered or dead animals – because the circumstances that got a thylacine in front of a camera were usually the circumstances that killed it. Calvert has taken one of those images and made it monumental.

That is a considerably harder thing to do than a sculpture of the animal walking. A statue of a thylacine mid-stride is a memorial to a lost species. A recreation of a trapped one is a statement about how it was lost, and Tasmania's bounty scheme, which paid for thylacine carcasses into the 1900s, is the reason.

Laminated glass is a pointed material for it too – transparent, fragile-looking, and permanently interrupting the view through the frame.

Waratah is a historic mining town at the eastern gateway to the Tarkine, about forty-five minutes south of Burnie and the same from Cradle Mountain, roughly halfway between the north-west and west coasts. The lookout sits in exactly the sort of country where the last of the animals were taken.

It is free, outdoors, and not a cheerful stop.

The Western Wilds route it belongs to was designed to give travellers reasons to stop between the north-west coast and the west, and this is the most demanding of the works on it. It asks for a few minutes rather than a photograph.

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PRACTICAL

Plan your stop

WHAT TO EXPECT

Tourism Tasmania describes Matt Calvert’s work as a large-scale fabricated-steel and laminated-glass recreation of a historical image of a trapped thylacine, installed at Whyte Hills Lookout as part of the Western Wilds arts route.

ACCESS

The Extinction Story sculpture and interpretive lookout sit within the Whyte Hills Lookout car park on the Waratah-Corinna Road, roughly the vicinity of Philosopher Falls travelling toward Corinna. Multiple official Tasmanian tourism sources confirm an on-site car park with easy, at-grade access to the sculpture and lookout; the site is not wheelchair-accessible.

COMMUNITY

Visitor Log

WHAT'S NEXT

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49 km away

TRANSPARENCY

Sources & research

Discover Tasmania – Whyte Hills Lookout

Tourism Tasmania · recorded 2026-08-23

Current official tourism listing identifies the Western Wilds artwork at Whyte Hills Lookout and explicitly lists a carpark.

Tourism

Matt Calvert CV

Matt Calvert · recorded 2026-08-22

Artist CV records The Extinction Story commission for Whyte Hills.

Official

Western Wilds Arts

Tourism Tasmania · recorded 2026-08-22

Official tourism description places work at Whyte Hills Lookout.

Tourism

What we're still checking

Open-licence image search completed 24 August 2026. No defensible reusable image with file-level commercial-use provenance was verified in the completed Commons, government/open-licence and archival/open-collection sweep.

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