For almost two centuries, Australia has been home to bounty hunters; paid to hunt and present their kills to authorities. From colonisation to the mid-1970s, bounties were targeted at ‘nuisance’ native species. These species were unfairly targeted, having been falsely accused of destroying agricultural efforts and ultimately, ruining the colonial project.
The arrival of the 1970s brought with it the environmental movement, at which point, many bounty programs began to shut down. A rebirth in the early 2000s brought back our bounty programs, but with a new target: destructive, invasive species.
From the blistering cold in Tasmania, to Western Australia’s arid regions and the western slopes of the Great Dividing Range in southern Queensland, bounty hunters were and are utilised all over Australia as a pest management tool, to keep some of our invasive species at bay.
But how did we get from killing wombats and thylacines, to targeting foxes and wild dogs?
When white fellas first arrived in Australia, the animals that they found on this continent were none like they had ever seen before. Early colonisers likened kangaroos and other small hopping marsupials to greyhounds. Not only do these animals look utterly different, but they move completely differently too. I am yet to see a hopping greyhound.
For the colonial project to become a reality, Australia had to look and feel like what it did ‘back home’. Rabbits and foxes were brought over for hunting, and sheep were shipped over to create an agricultural industry. Yet, for the invaders, just bringing in new animals wasn’t enough to drown out the ‘weird’ Aussie animals that occupied the country. They started shooting them, and were paid handsomely for their efforts. Perhaps the most famous example of an Australian bounty system, lies in the stripes of the thylacine.
Associate Professor Hannah Stark is based at the University of Tasmania, where she is working on reconstructing the thylacine archive. “The thylacine was falsely believed to be a predator to sheep,” Stark tells me. “This is a period where the colonial project is also a pastoral project. It was about converting land into farming land … so the thylacine became this creature that was working against the colonial project.” Thylacines had to go.
The Van Diemen’s Land Company introduced a bounty system on thylacines in 1830, as well as the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and the Buckland and Spring Bay Tiger and Eagle Extermination Society. “It’s interesting that there was not only the government bounty, but also a range of private organisations had bounties,” Stark says. “If we want evidence that we were trying to get rid of the thylacine, the title of that organisation really says it.”
At a meeting held in Buckland on the
14th inst., convened by the Warden, Mr. G.
F. Mace, to consider the question of abate-
ment of ravages by tigers, etc., a majority
of stockowners in the district attended.
Letters were also received from several whom
distance or other engagements prevented at-
tending, the writers all expressing sympathy
with the movement and promising support.
After the matter had been fully discussed
in all its bearings, it was unanimously de-
cided that an association be formed, to be
called the Buckland and Spring Bay Tiger
and Eagle Extermination Association, Mr. F.
Mace being elected president.
Rules were adopted for the working of
the association, the principal being, that to
raise a sufficient fund every sheepowner pay
1/2d. per head for each sheep up to 1,000, and
1/4d. per head for all sheep above 1,000 ; and
that a reward of £5 be paid for each full
grown tiger caught in the district, and £2
10s, for all cubs equal in size to a full-grown
domestic cat, the skins of all the animals
caught to become the property of the asso-
ciation.
It wasn’t just thylacines that the Tasmanian government had a bounty on at this time. Stark says, “In 1830, there was also a bounty on Aboriginal Tasmanians. Thinking about [bounties] with a racialised history is really important.”
For the remainder of the 1800s and into the 1900s, thylacines and Tasmanian devils were hunted relentlessly as farmers believed the animals were harming their livestock. Bounty hunters were paid £1 for an adult or 10 shillings for a juvenile. During this time, 2184 thylacines were handed in by bounty hunters.
Killing thylacines was not just a way to improve agriculture, it was a lucrative business. “The thylacine wasn’t valued in this period, and Australian fauna was not particularly valued by colonial settlers,” Stark says. “At the same time, the value of thylacines to museums [was] really high.” In 1926, a thylacine was bought by London Zoo for £150 (over $14,000 in today’s money according to the Reserve Bank of Australia). Just four years later, the last wild thylacine was shot in 1930, and the final thylacine died in 1936 in Hobart Zoo. “We can clearly say that the bounty system contributed to the diminishment of thylacine numbers,” Stark says. “This animal was hunted to death.”
In less than 100 years, colonisers completely destroyed Australia’s top predator.
It wasn’t just thylacines that were targeted by the colonial project. Wombats were also accused of impeding agricultural efforts, so from 1926, bounty hunters were paid to shoot and scalp them. It was soon the turn of the wedge-tailed eagle, where in Western Australia they were hunted for bounties between 1940 to 1942. The program only lasted three years, but it’s estimated that over forty years of culling – including the three year bounty period – farmers killed 147,000 eagles.
However, the beginning of the 1970s brought along the environmental movement, and a change in attitudes of Australians.
In the late 1960s, wombats were freed of their bounty and in 1975, eagles became a protected species. The thylacine was finally declared extinct in the 1980s. The beginning of the environmental movement cannot be inextricably linked with a decline in bounty systems, but attitudes were changing and bounty programs to kill native Aussie species were diminishing.
In 1976, Simon Whitehouse, a research officer for the Agriculture Protection Board of Western Australia, produced a document declaring that bounty hunters systems in Australia were ‘extremely hard to justify’, and that there was ‘little evidence of… [a] successful bounty system’.
This dramatic change of attitudes put bounty systems on the back burner of environmental management. But, a reincarnation was imminent. This time, there was a different target: invasive species.
Foxes were brought to Australia in the mid-19th century, and have been wreaking havoc on Australian ecosystems and agricultural efforts ever since. Foxes are an established, widespread pest species, causing significant ecological and economic damage. By 2011, Victoria had had enough.
Jason Wishart is a Biosecurity Manager of Established Invasive Animals at Agriculture Victoria. “The Victorian Fox Bounty was designed to encourage community participation in fox management,” Wishart says. “[It] contributes to an integrated management approach which includes baiting, shooting, exclusion fencing and trapping.”
The bounty has been a highly effective strategy in reducing fox numbers. In the 2024 bounty season, which runs from March to October, 92,308 fox scalps were collected and paid out by Agriculture Victoria.
Bounty hunters have been paid $10 per fox scalp, but this is increasing to $14 when the 2025 program begins.
Since the program’s inception, Wishart says they have, “paid out over $11 million … and collected more than 1.19 million fox scalps.”
With the bounty hunters program functioning alongside other management strategies, there’s a promising outlook for our native Aussie animals, and hope that they’ll have a fighting chance against the destructive red furries.
Bounty hunters and dogs
Ray Lambert is the Local Laws Coordinator at Southern Downs Regional Council, two hours southwest of Brisbane. He looks after the council’s pest management, including their bounty program. Lambert tells me that pest animals are “one of the big problems we hear about from landowners.” This includes feral pigs and rabbits, but “wild dogs are on top of the list,” Lambert says.
The term wild dog is not synonymous with dingo or domestic dog. Wild dogs are more like feral cats; they were originally brought in as pets but now have ever expanding populations. They roam Australian landscapes and threaten native mammal and bird species.
Lambert and his team employ a variety of pest management strategies to keep wild dog populations at bay. “We do a helluva lot in the pest management side of things,” Lambert says. “We got two fences that we look after … we do top netting, we’ve got cluster fencing … We’ve got trapping, shooting and baiting.” He continues, “We’ve got a lot of inaccessible country, and that’s where our aerial baiting comes in.”
Combining different strategies helps Lambert and his team manage wild dogs. He emphasises, “No one thing works. You’ve gotta use all the tools in your belt.”
Lambert is clear about one thing; their aim is not to eradicate wild dogs, but to control them and maintain balance between agriculture and the environment. “We’re controlling and maintaining a healthy balance,” he says.
In the last 10 years, the Southern Downs Regional Council has collected 3,663 wild dogs for bounties. “We usually do 300 to 340 [dogs] a year,” Lambert says. “But in the last six months, we’ve done 248.”
The council has run a wild dog bounty hunters program for decades, with the price increasing from $30 for a dog, to the current $100 bounty payment. Each council or government that runs bounties sets their own price, so I asked Ray how they determine how much a dog costs. It was much less scientific than I had imagined. “That’s set by budget constraints,” Ray says. “Every year we do our budget review and that’s how we decide.”
Claiming a bounty payment requires an obscene amount of paperwork. Once filed, the bounty hunter must make an appointment.
“They bring it in the back of the ute and then we sight it, spray it, collect all the paperwork and then send them on their way,” Lambert says. The ‘spray’ is not a disinfectant, it’s pink paint so that the same animal cannot be presented twice for collection. Dogs must be presented whole and ideally quickly, because “they won’t stay fresh for long,” Lambert says. “If [landholders] get a dog on Friday and bring it to us Monday, we don’t love that. It’s pretty smelly by the time it gets in.”
This process helps to keep people away who might be trying to earn a quick buck. “A little bit of red tape tends to keep them away,” Lambert says.
The bounty hunters program is helping agricultural landholders, and Lambert says there is evidence of the environmental benefit too. “We’ve now seen quolls and brush turkeys coming back, showing back up on cameras where they weren’t previously because the dog numbers have been reduced,” he says. “It’s not just protecting our landowners, it’s protecting our wildlife as well.”