Nine days of accumulated mail and zero regrets: a Launceston woman is holding the line against a creature science insists doesn’t exist

Sandra Mellick’s letterbox, a cream-coloured plastic unit fixed to a low brick pillar at the end of her front path in Launceston’s West Tamar Road precinct, currently contains nine days’ worth of unread post. She knows this. She is not concerned about this. What she is concerned about is the thing she saw on the path between her front door and that letterbox on the morning of the fourteenth, which she describes, without hesitation and with what I can only call admirable economy, as ‘an extinct dog, but longer.’

Mellick told WTC she was heading out to collect the mail at approximately 7:40am when she observed the animal moving along the concrete path from the gate end toward the garden bed near her agapanthus. She stopped. The animal also stopped. She describes a striped lower back, a stiff tail that moved ‘like it was one solid piece,’ and a yawn — unprompted, she says — that showed more jaw than she was prepared for on a Tuesday. She went back inside, made a second coffee, and has not attempted the path since.

Community Notice

I’m not saying it was friendly. I’m not saying it wasn’t. I’m saying it was between me and my electric bill, and I’ve set up direct debit, so we’re at a bit of a standoff.

— Sandra Mellick, Launceston Resident

Five Witnesses, One Path, Zero Retrieved Parcels

Mellick is not the only one. WTC has confirmed five independent witnesses in the surrounding streets who report sightings consistent with hers over the same nine-day window — a striped, dog-like animal, heavier in the hindquarters than a domestic breed, moving with what multiple witnesses describe as an unhurried, deliberate gait. One neighbour, retired schoolteacher Phillip Oates, observed the animal from his driveway on the morning of the sixteenth and spent four minutes filming it on his phone before realising he had the camera facing the wrong direction. The footage is of his own ear. It is not useful. We have reviewed it twice.

The Thylacine — officially extinct since 1936, though Tasmania has spent the better part of a century quietly disagreeing — matches Mellick’s description in every documented characteristic: the striping, the rigid tail, the disproportionate jaw, the general attitude of existing somewhere it isn’t supposed to. WTC has submitted a formal information request to the relevant wildlife authorities. We expect to be told there is nothing to investigate. We expect this will not be the last sighting reported from this postcode.

Look, I’m managing. Online banking, email, the lot. It’s the catalogues I feel bad about. They’re really stacking up in there.

— Sandra Mellick, Launceston Resident

I walked the perimeter of Mellick’s front path this afternoon, for the record. Gate to door: approximately eleven metres of exposed concrete with a moderate camelia overhang on the eastern side that I would describe as offering reasonable cover for a medium-to-large cryptid with a low centre of gravity. I did not see the animal. I did find a partial impression in the soft soil beside the agapanthus that I am sending to our specialist for assessment. I am not going to speculate on what made it. I will say that my own walk back to the gate felt longer than eleven metres, and I have thought about that several times since.