Rabbit Island (South Australia)

Transcription

<harp music plays> I was born on a small farm in central Victoria, a small sheep farm, where there were lots of rabbits. As a young boy, like many other young farm boys in the area, I was very keen to hunt them, because for us they were worth money. We made all our pocket money out of rabbits, usually by trapping or ferreting. As a kid I was fortunate or unfortunate, depending on your point of view, to have seen the rabbit situation just before myxomatosis arrived. I can remember back to around about 1948 to 1950 - in that period I was only a very young kid. But I can certainly remember going out one day to an uncle's farm, and my uncle stopped at one point, clapped his hand and said, 'Look at that hill over there,' and the whole hill appeared to move. It was like sort of a grey blanket running up the hill or sort of gently moving over the hill. These were rabbits moving back into bracken fern. But after myxomatosis there were more profound differences. Very soon after myxomatosis in fact, there was hardly a rabbit to be seen in our district. And my father famously declared in a pub that rabbits were going to become extinct. He was very quickly put in his place by an old rabbit trapper who knew rabbits a lot better than my father did. Yeah, later on when I eventually finished up at university, I did ag science first but was always more interested in zoology and in fact finished up in that line of work. After a career of about 23 or 24 years in the Victorian government working as a vermin pest control researcher, I decided to leave and go on my own and did a lot of work mainly in the area of pest control, actual pest control itself, field pest control, but also doing work as a consultant. But I found that in the field work that I obviously needed machinery. I started out using the sorts of machinery that I had been used to dealing with when I was in the department, And that's how I first came across this bait layer that we have here today. If you look at the history of rabbit poisoning - or the history of the method of rabbit poisoning, of course they started out in the early days I guess doing a lot of it before any machines came in simply by hand. But then fairly early on in Australian history after rabbits came in, various companies actually made poison carts. You will see occasionally -- people that go around looking at old equipment on farms - you will sometimes find the remains of an old rabbit poisoning cart. These were horse-drawn carts, and by the time I came onto the scene the horse era was over, and those machines had all been long since retired off. So there was a need then to have a more modern version of that type of automated machinery, if you like, for putting out bait. What happened was that most of the states had their own vermin pest control operations, and they tended to develop their own machines. So Victoria had its own type of machine, New South Wales had its, and South Australia, and so on. And ours, the one we developed in the government, was called the ailon bait layer, and that is the bait layer we are dealing with here. That was developed probably in the late 1950s, early 1960s as a way of sort of updating, if you like, what had come earlier during the horse-drawn era. Because now obviously these carts were to be drawn either by Landrovers, which were the main vehicles used by the department, or by tractors. The reason I got the cart was that by this time we were engaged in a number of field operations mainly for larger companies, and for larger farms and for some Landcare groups as well to provide field control services. I found that I needed a machine that could handle large volumes of bait. The old bait layer that I had been used to seeing or operating when I was within the department was at this stage at any rate the ideal choice for the sort of work that we were doing. I think it's important to realise when we are talking about poisoning of rabbits that it is not seen as a one-off or an overall technique of control of rabbits. Rabbit poisoning is very much a first strike, if you like, in a much more integrated approach to rabbit control. Normally poisoning is only used to get a rapid knockdown of populations and once you have achieved that, you then move on to other methods of rabbit control which give you much longer term and even permanent control. I am thinking here particularly of things like destruction of warrens which is, for most of southern Australia at any rate, the most important way of getting rid of rabbits is to destroy their warrens. The other means that I am talking about are things like warren ripping - that is, complete destruction of warrens - or, where that is not possible, the fumigation of warrens using fumigant chemicals which kill rabbits. Now you will see what I mean here by saying that poisoning is a first strike or knockdown technique because, for instance, if you are fumigating a warren and there are very large numbers of rabbits in it, it may well be that with your fumigant you are only killing a proportion of the rabbits in that warren. Because the first few that die from the noxious gases actually block the gases from getting further down the warren to others. So in essence the fewer rabbits you have in the warrens when you fumigate them, probably the more effective your fumigation is going to be. That is why your initial knockdown of poisoning is a good idea. But those other two techniques, and particularly warren destruction, give you long-term control of rabbits. Towards the end of my rabbit control or my pest control career, I realised that the era of large-scale poisoning was going out of fashion. There weren't the same resources within the various government departments to carry out the work via government at any rate, nor I think were as many farmers using the technique. By this time rabbit calicivirus had hit the scene and that, in conjunction with myxomatosis, had already done a pretty effective job in many areas. But one of the biggest reasons for the decline in the use of the rabbit poison cart - certainly in Victoria's case - was the fact that a lot more farmers started ripping their warrens. There were generous government subsidies given, and this was a very good step on the part of the Victorian government to offer subsidies for rabbit control by that technique; that is, by ripping the warrens. That worked particularly well in the part of the world that I come from, in north central Victoria, so that the need for the rabbit poisoning cart wasn't there any more. I could see the day when these indeed would become historical items and I thought it important we try, as it were, keep a little vignette of what had happened in the past.