Exotic Intruders
The rabbit in Australia
The rabbit in Australia
Australia's first rabbits arrived in New South Wales with the first fleet. Andrew Miller, Commissary, listed five rabbits in his 'Account of Livestock in the Settlement' in 1788. Three belonged to Governor Phillip and two to the officers and men of the Military Corps. More rabbits arrived in 1791; in 1806 the Rev. Samuel Marsden was trying to establish a warren at Parramatta. By 1822 rabbits were abundant in Tasmania. From the 1830s on rabbits were proliferating along the eastern and southern coasts of the mainland: sailors used to go ashore and set traps for them. In the 1840s rabbits were taken to inland areas by squatters eager for a readily available food supply. All these rabbits were domestic varieties.
In 1859 Thomas Austin imported 24 wild rabbits for sport. Some of these were released at once, and the rest escaped into the arable lands of Victoria within a year or two. These rabbits increased to countless thousands in the space of three years; other settlers imitated Austin's example and were equally pleased at how well their rabbits were adapting to the new country. By 1868 reports of disaster began to filter into town. The rabbits were breeding in thousands and moving onto rich grazing land. In the 1850s a run-holder called Robertson had charged a man with shooting one rabbit (the man was fined £10); ten years later Robertson's own son was eaten out—in one operation he took 4 000 rabbits, and he estimated that he was feeding rabbits at the rate of 29 000 to 130 hectares. The Times of London reported in December 1868 that 'our correspondent from Melbourne tells us the rabbits threaten to starve the sheep out of their runs.'
The game of calculating the increase from one pair of rabbits in a given number of years became as popular in Australia then as in New Zealand later. By 1878 the progeny of four pairs of rabbits, liberated at Donald north of the Murray River, had infested 1.8 million hectares of the interior of Victoria. The big runs were entirely eaten out and, as in New Zealand, enormous plantations of thistles sprang up.
As the food ran out the rabbits migrated in their millions, covering the ground with a pulsating grey carpet. At Lake Alexandrina at the mouth of the Murray River four men killed 10 000 rabbits in one operation. The swarms even crossed huge rivers in flood. In the winter of 1879 a run-holder on the Wimmera River mustered his sheep and found 670 alive—the previous year he had mustered 12 000. Almost a million hectares of Victorian land became useless for any sort of farming at all. Then, in 1887, ten million rabbits were destroyed in New South Wales, and the north-eastern part of South Australia was an empty desert. Rabbits even climbed trees to eat the leaves; in plantations the trees were ring-barked white, up to half a metre above the ground. Some farmers fenced in their land with rabbit-netting, and later enormous rabbit fences were erected by the State Governments. The rabbits starved to death in such numbers at the foot of the fences that their live cousins were able to clamber over the fence via the heaps of corpses.
The Australians tried to make a profit out of the rabbits by tinning the carcasses. In 1878 a ship steaming north through the Red Sea suddenly assailed its passengers with a dreadful and inescapable smell. The cargo of cans of rabbit meat had expanded and burst open in the heat. Skins, taken from rabbits living in a warm climate, were not ever of the quality of New Zealand-bred skins, so few people made a fortune out of Australian rabbit fur. However rabbiters did become wealthy out of the bounties paid for rabbits killed. The Australian governments had no real wish to involve themselves seriously in wholesale pest destruction, and the one Commissioner who advised decommercialisation of the rabbit by levies on skins was treated with contempt. Various Rabbit Nuisance Laws had been passed over the years, but these were feeble and without teeth. The Pastures Protection Boards were formed in 1902, and could demand that property owners make 'earnest attempts' to get rid of rabbits on their land, but without greater legal powers these requests had little effect.
Some farmers imported cats. Others brought in mongooses, which failed to thrive. Foxes were already in the country. In the 1890s experiments were made with various poisons. On some stations 200 000 rabbits were poisoned in one night. But it took myxomatosis to wipe out the rabbit.
Trials of this disease began in Victoria in 1950, and the results were most discouraging until the end of the year, when increasing numbers of reports of sick and dying rabbits began to come in. By the beginning of 1953 most of Australia was free of rabbits. Since then, however, disturbing signs of recovery have been noticed. If a myxomatosis-immune breed of rabbit has evolved, then the Australian pastoralist may be in for another round of trouble from this most unwelcome intruder.