Robert O’Neill Holmes & Angus Forsyth
Irwin and District Historical Society
6 June 2002
Bob
I would say the worst time was before the war – about 1940s. That would have been the first time the country was being cleared and developed. The rabbits, they originally migrated from the eastern states, that’s why the state government put in the rabbit-proof fence - which helped, but we still had to deal with the rabbits that were this side of the fence! (laughs)
There were all sorts of ways of trying to deal with them. The warrens, we used to rip with a single-furrowed plough or whatever we could get. And then we would – some of them you couldn’t get at, we’d go and close most of the holes up with a shovel and if we had a motor vehicle of some sort, stick the exhaust pipe down the hole and try to knock them off with the carbon monoxide. We had fumigators that you could operate and pump stuff down the warrens to get rid of them.
My father and uncles, when they bought the property they fenced it with what was called English rabbit netting. The bottom half was rabbit netting, the bottom was dog netting. The original boundary was that type of fence. We bought – my dad and uncles bought the property in 1907 and they paid the large sum of about seven shillings an acre for it. It was bought – payment was by promissory notes, and I’ve still got the list of promissory notes, paid on due date! About 176 pounds, I think it was.
Angus
We were wheat farming at Killaberen, and that’s on the Great Eastern Highway. The rabbit proof fence was – the second one was put up at Kundadin, which is on the west side of Killaberen. They’d past the first one, this is in the ‘30s, and I was only a child, but I remember…I was born in ‘23, so in ‘33 I was ten and we were in the height of our hunting experiences at that stage. I came from a family of seven boys – I had six brothers, there used to be four or five of us out hunting on the weekends, or whenever.
That was the depression days and we used to skin the rabbits and peg the skins out – they were more valuable than sheep-skins at the time. They must have been preparing for the slouch hats – the felt hats.
Bob
I believe your akubra hat is still made from rabbit fur. There used to be chaps trapping rabbits commercially – trapping them for their skins – they’d get 10 skins or so a night, that sort of business. We used to go shooting more foxes and kangaroos than rabbits. You had to be a pretty good shot to get a rabbit in the first place, and you only got one rabbit per shot!
Angus
You did! It was bit too expensive to shoot. We did our hunting with spades or mattocks – to dig them out. You always had a dog with you. It was quite a thing, in our family – not only that, we were encouraged to do it because of the damage they were doing to the crops.
We used to find, when we were digging burrows out, that a lot of their burrows were on water soakages. Or just around the edge – you know if you went down three of four feet, you’d get the moisture. Oh yes, they’d go down four or five feet in their warrens.
They were certainly an economic burden in the period that they were – in the ‘30s to the ‘60s, until, we’d say myxomatosis is the end.
Bob
Every penny counted in those days. A lot of people – its a pity some of them haven’t had the experience of what we had, Angus – the depression years, because it taught you a pretty good lesson, no doubt about that. The older farming community, they more or less survived on rabbits. A few chooks around the place, sheep were worth a bit more money than rabbits were.
Angus
Yes, sheep would be worth 4 and sixpence. But we used to sell a dressed rabbit – teachers would buy them at school – for two shillings. It was good money! In those days you couldn’t run a lot of sheep – you couldn’t get the pastures running, because of the rabbit.
We used to supply the family, although we ran sheep on the property it was more economical to eat rabbit. We all loved rabbit, cooked in different ways… mother used to stuff them, like you would a chicken, and roast them. For our family there would be three rabbits in a baking dish in the old oven, that would make a meal. We only chose the healthy ones of course, like you do with any stock!
Bob
It’s very much like chicken. Some of the old bush cooks could knock up a pretty good meal. Nothing wrong with rabbit at all - rabbits or kangaroo or mutton … as long as you had potatoes and onions, you could knock up a stew of some sort!
Angus
We used to set traps during the week also, after school we’d set the traps and after sundown we’d go and collect the rabbits, then go again early the next morning. So you had to do that to hopefully beat the foxes.
Bob
Once you got started baiting and poisoning the rabbits, you got an occasional fox as well, that has eaten a poisoned rabbit. Probably that wasn’t helping us much, because the foxes were probably keeping the rabbits down a bit.
Angus
They both came together – both a menace.
Warren ripping and fumigation came about after that. See, in the 30’s we didn’t have a tractor with wheeled power, only horses. If you came across a rabbit warren, you had to go around it, for fear of the horse breaking a leg. So it was only after the war when we really go stuck into the rabbits with mechanical way, with the bulldozer or rippers.
Bob
Or, if you had a crawler tractor … you could go in over the top of any warren with a crawler tractor. You’d always get through and out of it, or over the top of it. A wheeled tractor, they were a bit touchy, you could get them bogged. A wheel would only flop through into a warren and you’d have to go and dig it out. Not much fun.
Angus
I was looking through my statistics for the farm, from when I started, and the statistics had a paragraph – Bob will remember – that wrote in the seasonal conditions, and whether there was any vermin and so forth. And I went right through mine, as far as… up until the eighties and there was only two of three years where I mentioned that rabbits were a problem. A couple of years, foxes were a problem.
But we did concentrate on getting rid of them. You know, everyone tried to get rid of their rabbits, but if you didn’t do it at once, at the same time, your rabbits would go into your neighbour’s because there was more feed there, and vice versa. I was on the Roads Board early on there, and had the idea that we should have a March drive, and that was to allow Roads Board machinery to be used at a reduced price, and everyone was home from holidays so each one concentrates. It was very successful, the rabbit population just dropped. So much so that the neighbouring districts wanted to be in the next one – to be in it. I really think it was the beginning of the APB the –
Bob
…the Agricultural Protection Board.
Angus
Yes. Mr Thomlinson was the head of that department at the time, and he came up, and that was the great – the beginning of eradicating the rabbit, because of the cooperation of the APB. We had this autumn, or March drive each year, throughout the wheat belt.
Bob
Did your council have what we used to call ‘The Rabbiter’? You know, employed to go round with a little rabbit-baiting cart doing the road and wherever the rabbits were, along the river…
Angus
Yes, well that was prior to this period I’m talking about, where they used phosphorous poison -
Bob
- that’s right, with bran and pollard -
Angus
- and a horse and cart.
Bob
They used a little machine that used to chop these little pellets off as it drove along.
You probably used the oats on trails at night? Put a couple of feeds out for a couple of nights beforehand and then poison the next one.
Angus
Yes, a couple of free feeds and then put the strychnine in. I used strychnine. I remember one occasion, must have been about 1952, on a Saturday afternoon. I’d free-fed the rabbits on the trail for a couple of days and Saturday afternoon was the time to put the bait down, which I did. We were invited out to a party that night, so Glyn and I went out, and prior to leaving we could see the rabbits coming out of the bush and the hill, onto the trail, and we thought – ‘at least they’re attracted out there’. But the following morning we must have picked up over a thousand rabbits.
Bob
Truly!
Angus
That was a Sunday morning, a hot summer’s morning, so it wasn’t a very pleasant task at all. And of course, strychnine poisoned rabbits are dangerous for other stock. We had to make sure we picked them all up.
Bob
When you put down your treated baits, you only – the trail was not all poisoned. You’d put fresh oats, then poisoned, then fresh oats, so that’s the way you did it… so you sort of kidded them into eating the trail anyway. They were a bit suspicious.
Angus
Yes and the idea was to give them a good surprise! I just put down enough, we’d fed enough oats out to know that it was all taken the previous times, so then we halved the amount of feed that was poisoned.
On the introduction of myxomatosis and calicivirus:
Angus
I remember the introduction of myxomatosis very well. That was the period when the APB became operating. So that they could get to places where the cart couldn’t, with the poison. They found that myxomatosis was the great…
Bob
…myxomatosis was marvellous, really …the rabbit carried the myxomatosis and infected any rabbit they got near… The fleas and mosquitos transferred the virus or whatever you’d call it, from rabbit to rabbit.
Angus
Really, that is – myxomatosis broke the - brought them right down…
Bob
Broke the back of the rabbits, for sure. You couldn’t beat them until the old 1080 and myxomatosis came along.
Angus
Well, I don’t know what Bob’s views are about calicivirus but in my view, yes – it has been effective.
Bob
Well, something must be helping, because the rabbits – you see the odd one now, but they don’t seem to be getting the opportunity to come back like they did before. There’s something keeping them under control to a degree. They flare up in patches don’t they, they seem to, but that’s it.
Angus
Yes, the - I think the myxomatosis – they were becoming immune, and it needed something different. So when that came out - I think we’re just about ready for another wave of reinfestation of the rabbit.
Bob
You can’t beat nature – you can’t beat it completely.
On farmers leaving corridors of bushland for conservation purposes:
Bob
When the country was cleared, you were clearing to crop, and to put down pasture. This is only developed in recent years, with putting corridors in to protect some of our native animals from being completely wiped out.
Angus
In a way I disagree with you Bob. In the period when the APB were allowing the bulldozers out, they were clearing these patches of scrub and so forth, ‘cause that’s where the rabbits had congregated. The only way to get rid of them was to knock them out, and knock out those patches of scrub. And I often think that it’s a shame that we had to do that, however it would have been years before we would have been able to recover from the rabbit burden. We had to hit the rabbit and clear them out and that necessitated clearing out these clumps of bush, and a lot of them were left in good faith, quite pretty little outcrops, round rocks and places like that, but eventually they were, well in our case, up there we cleared them out.
On rabbit-inflicted damage to flora and fauna:
Angus
The rabbits they used to ringbark trees, particularly the small ones, and of course that was where they got a lot of their moisture from.
Bob
They had to be sappy sort of stems, branches for them to have a go at. The green sappy ones – they were getting moisture from the young ones. But I think once the tree go to any size, it was a bit big for them to tackle it.
Angus
I think when a young tree germinated also, they would chew them off. I think that’s where some of our forests lost a number of years of growth.
I remember vividly, with the bilby, we call them delgite – we used to catch them in the rabbit trap. We used to let them go – they still had a broken leg, sort of thing, so they didn’t have a great chance of surviving. Yes, we used to see them quite often in those days. They’ve disappeared now. They would never survive in the wheat belt now, there is so little coverage.
Bob
It’s only down in the timber country now, that they would have a chance.