Four zoos within mainland Australia exhibited thylacines: Melbourne Zoo, Adelaide Zoo, Moore Park Zoo (Sydney) and Taronga Zoo (Sydney).

Melbourne Zoo:

    The first thylacine to be exhibited at the Melbourne Zoo was an adult male that entered the zoo's collection on the 4th November 1864 (Moeller 1997, p. 159).  The likely source for this specimen was Ronald Campbell Gunn in Launceston.

    Paddle (1996, p. 216) describes the circumstances behind the zoo's next acquisition of thylacines, a family group, in 1865.  Ferdinand Jakob Heinrich von Müller was appointed Government Botanist in the Colony of Victoria in 1853.  Paddle (1996, p. 215) states: "At the request of Victoria?s Chief Secretary, Baron Ferdinand von Moeller convened the first meeting of the Committee appointed to administer Melbourne's proposed Zoological Gardens on the 24th July 1858".

    In May 1865, Ronald Campbell Gunn wrote to Müller, offering him a family of thylacines - a mother with three young.  Müller gratefully accepted the offer on the 20th May 1865, and received the specimens on the 16th June 1865.

    Müller writes: "I received your very kind letter of the 14th together with the 4 Thylacini in excellent health.  It is indeed a precious gift and I trust to fulfil now the wish of the Parisian Savants, who were so eager to secure this rare creature for the Jardin des Plantes.  I shall not fail to render known who is the real donor".

    "How the Thylacine family fared on the journey, how many survived and where they went to on arrival in 1886 are, at present, unknown".

    In the Age newspaper of the 23rd January 1875 (p. 7), in an article entitled "Our Zoo", the thylacine on display in Melbourne is described as follows:

    "There is the marsupial wolf, a nasty looking animal that.  There is a cruel ferocious gleam in his eye that shows how remorseless it would be with anything it had the mastery of".

    In the Mercury newspaper printed in Victoria (not to be confused with its namesake in Hobart) dated the 15th May 1875 (p. 3), is an article on the Melbourne Zoological Gardens in which the thylacine enclosure is whimsically mentioned:

    "The visitor will now approach some Barrabandi parrokeets of the Murray River, having beneath them, a cage occupied by a kangaroo rat, or Bettongia cuniculus of Australia.  The adjoining compartment is bisected into two divisions one above the other; the uppermost contains a variety: of parrokeets, and beneath them is a cage tenanted by a fine specimen of the Thylacinus cynocephalus, the marsupial wolf, or native tiger, of this country.  The creature has two apartments appropriated for its exclusive accommodation, and, consequently, is much better provided for than was Dickens' Mr. Dick, whose grievance was that he was compelled to live in a room, where he had not sufficient space to swing a cat"..