TASMANIAN devils are well named. They have teeth and a temper only a mother could love. In Tassie, people tell tall tales about the fierce little beasts’ ability to eat their own weight of anything that comes their way.

A Tasmanian friend tells us that an axeman trapped under a fallen tree near the family property wasn’t found for days. By then, legend has it, he was nothing but chewed-up bones.

True or not, it’s a great idea for a horror film. What is true is the proposal last month to release devils at Wilsons Promontory. It’s such a common sense proposal it will probably never happen.

While various public servants and “stakeholders” hold endless dead-end talks on the pros and cons of returning devils to the mainland (where they roamed for thousands of years) the whole species could hit a dead end.

Until recently devils were common in Tassie. But now a contagious facial tumour plague has wiped them out in entire districts and threatens their survival. They could become extinct everywhere but zoos, victims of the sort of population crash blamed for finishing off their bigger cousin, the thylacine, in the middle of last century.

But if the boffins think that using Wilsons Prom as a sort of giant ark is new, they’re about a century late. Their forerunners not only dreamed up the same scheme but acted on it — a little-known historical oddity that could explain a long, detailed list of unexplained sightings in South Gippsland.

There wasn’t too much due diligence in those pioneer days: the old-time naturalists were as much amateur enthusiasts as scientists and very quick to ship wildlife around.

In the Victorian and Edwardian eras, wealthy landholders and “acclimatisation societies” imported and exported so many species that Australia is probably the best example of the world’s worst feral animal infestations. You name it, we got it: rabbits, foxes, goats, donkeys, camels, brumbies, feral cats, cane toads, Indian mynahs and two sorts of rat, for starters.

But for every species that enjoyed a population explosion, there were others that didn’t. When the ostrich farming fad hit in the 1980s, crafty breeders caught their foundation stock in outback South Australia, where ostriches had been running wild for 100 years after an abandoned venture to produce plumes for women’s hats. Who knew?

Who knew that a rare rock wallaby that zoologists (wrongly) declared extinct in Australia had in fact thrived on a New Zealand island, where they were “found” nearly a century after some busybody took them there? They were part of a wave of Kiwi imports that included zebras and antelope and other exotics that didn’t survive, as well as present-day pests that did, such as possums, deer and stoats.

That wouldn’t surprise people who live around Loch Lomond in Scotland. A colony of red-necked wallabies have lived on the island of Inchconnachan ever since an eccentric landholder released them in the 1970s. They’re company for kangaroos that escaped from a nearby wildlife park.

Up the road near Inverness, an American mountain lion was found in 1980 wandering the glens — probably dumped by an owner scared it was too big to keep around the house.

Germany is crawling with raccoons descended from those some genius brought from America a long time ago. The Germans, big thylacine buyers before World War I, still fancy Australian wildlife. The last time I saw an emu was in a pony paddock near Aachen in northern Germany.

The examples are endless, right up to a supposedly extinct jungle ox — related to the buffalo — rediscovered in the Cambodian wilderness, where locals had known about it all along. Along with the “yellow pig”, a wild porker that zoologists had also declared extinct.

The fact is, so many animals have been shuffled around the world no one can keep track of them all. Especially nocturnal species in low numbers that tend to stay out of sight. All of which suggests that a shy wild animal the size of a dingo could not only have been released at Wilsons Promontory with two dozen other species released there, but that it would be rarely seen and never caught. No one sets wild dog traps in South Gippsland, especially not in national parks.

People ask why such animals wouldn’t be roadkill. That question deserves to be answered with another one: when was the last time an emu was run over in eastern Victoria? Or a dingo? Or a quoll?

Experts with infra-red cameras and a lot of time proved quolls exist in districts where nobody has seen one in living memory.

It’s as likely as not that well-meaning naturalists quietly released a breeding pair of thylacines at Wilsons Prom some time before World War I. Management records show at least 23 species were released there between 1900 and 1941, including Tasmanian possums, King Island wombats and Queensland tree kangaroos.

Records also show that in that era, dozens of thylacines were caught and sent to the mainland and around the world. Sadly, they never bred successfully in captivity.

From 1863 to 1930, 44 thylacines were sent to Melbourne Zoo, some destined to go elsewhere. In 1899, an attempt to breed them at the zoo failed. Given that thylacines were still being hunted as a sheep-killing “pest” in Tasmania, Melbourne naturalists must have been tempted to avoid outrage from Victorian farmers by releasing thylacines (and maybe devils) on the quiet.

If so, Wilsons Prom would have been a home away from home for the “tigers”. It’s a powerfully persuasive explanation for the fact that sightings in that area go back to 1915.

In 1997, an investigative reporter tracked down a dozen witnesses to daytime sightings from the mid-1970s onwards. Those included a retired assistant police commissioner and his wife, a school principal and his wife, a dairy farmer, a Department of Agriculture scientist and his adult daughter and their neighbour, a noted horse breeder.

The sightings ranged from Loch Sport to Longford, Leongatha to Walkerville. Some details stand out.

Anne Anderson of Longford saw the animal open its jaw wider than 90 degrees and make a high-pitched “yip” not described since Tasmanian hunters heard it in the 1800s.

Anne’s neighbour Alison Alsop saw two in two years. She described one of them stretching up a tree trunk and sharpening its claws on the bark “like a cat”.

One reason the boffins are worried about releasing Tasmanian devils in Victoria now is that it might upset farmers, exactly the problem their forerunners would have faced 100 years ago.

But they needn’t worry too much. The Melbourne museum has devil specimens caught in central Victoria as recently as 1991.

Presumably this was because some unknown enthusiasts let some devils run wild.

The question is, did the same thing happen with that far more elusive beast, the thylacine?