East of Outback by Sandra Dengler

Author:Sandra Dengler [Sandra Dengler]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781441262578
Google: 1uTr0Xs2zNwC
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Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

BROUHAHA

“So you see, maybe God made rabbits and maybe He didn’t. Don’t matter. What matters is that stupid people turned them loose on us. Whitefeller know-it-alls brought rabbits in for sporting when there never should have been any rabbits in the land. Now they’re all over the continent. Rabbit fences don’t stop them. I helped build rabbit fences up north on the Murchison and up behind Port Hedland. Had rabbits on both sides of it before we could get the wire up. ‘Scourge of God’ ain’t nearly it. ‘Scourge of fools,’ is more like it.”

Colin watched the grand philosopher, Jackie Jump, wave a roasted rabbit drumstick high. Colin was getting pretty tired of eating rabbit, like everyone else, but he hadn’t yet made the furry creatures a topic of philosophical discussion.

With huge white teeth, Jackie stripped the meat from his rabbit leg. “You saw Eucla, Colin, what it looks like now. Didn’t used to look like that. When I was just a nipper traveling with my uncles, we’d stop at Eucla on the way ‘cross. Green it was then, with trees and birds singing-wrens, willy wagtails, big white cockatoos with tinges of pink. Most beautiful birds in the world, them major mitchells. Don’t ever see them no more ’round there.”

“Why the change?” Colin finished his rabbit forequarter and tossed the bone into the fire.

“Rabbits. Mobs and mobs of rabbits. They ate everything green, then the bark off the trees. They even ate the wood. Then they starved, thousands of them, ‘cause nothing was left to eat. They’re still out there, as you well know. Go out and shoot dinner anytime you get hungry. But not so many now. Not after they ruined the whole face of the land.”

“You mean twenty years ago there wasn’t this loose sand blowing around Eucla?”

“Twenty, thirty. Too right. Always the wind was blowing; the trees all lean away from windward, you notice. But not all this sand. Droughts didn’t mean as much then, ’cause the land came back with the rain. Now the droughts hit harder, and they hit suddenly. We’ve three years of drought right now in Victoria here. You see how the paddocks look.”

“So the desert is man-made.”

“Man-made. ‘Course, now there’s men making a living off it. Killing rabbits is big business. Lot of the larger stations hire blokes full time just to kill rabbits. And there’s other rabbiters who go from station to station, stay maybe a month or six weeks, cut the rabbit population back, and move on—they serve stations too small to hire a rabbiter year ‘round.”

“They shoot them?”

“Poison them. Too ‘spensive to shoot them. You’re talking hundreds. They put out phosphorized wheat, but it’s slow. They suffer for days. There’s stuff called ‘Toxa’ that kills them right away, but it’s expensive. Lotta rabbiters use apples soaked in strychnine. Lay a trail of poisoned apples, come along the next day and gather up the bunnies. They throw away the meat now. In the old days, you wouldn’t do that—throw anything away.

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