How my parents survived the Great Depression

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If you are strongly into animal welfare, you might prefer not to read this although I’ll be writing about the 1930s. Rabbits have always been a problem for Australian farmers and graziers almost since the first dozen or so were introduced to give the aristocracy something to hunt. Rabbits found Australian conditions very much to their liking and it wasn’t long before they reached plague proportions. It’s too long a story to document here but I thought I’d share what I remember about my parents’ involvement with rabbits. During the Great Depression of the 1930s my parents were just starting out on their own farm. A very handy source of income during this period came from selling rabbit skins. Most were made into gentlemen’s hats. For several nights a trail of oats would be laid through a paddock. The ‘poison cart’ would be pulled by a horse. On the third or fourth night the oats would be poisoned. The following morning Mum and Dad would go out early and pick up all the dead rabbits. These would be skun and the hides stretched out on home-made wire frames to dry. The pelts fetched a shilling each and it wasn’t unusual for them to skin 100 rabbits each day. Farmers were expected to keep the rabbits on their farm under control. A rabbit inspector would visit each farm and want to know what was being done to keep the rabbit population at a minimum. Rabbit warrens might be ploughed in. Rock piles might be fumigated. A small area of water or a soak might be fenced to keep stock out but let rabbits in and the water then poisoned. Those who could afford it fenced their boundaries with ‘rabbit netting’, the holes of which were too small to let rabbits through. At the time it really was a matter of ‘them or us’. Later a virus called myxomatosis was introduced and at last numbers were brought back to something near manageable. However the rabbits developed an immunity to myxomatosis and now new viruses are being used. The battle continues. The photo is from 1938 and in the public domain. You can see just how thick the rabbit population was.