24 rabbits made Australia's land harsher
I was reading Bill Bryson's compelling * n a Sunburned Country* where I encountered this sobering anecdote:
Although inland Australia has never been exactly verdant, much of the marginal land once experienced periods of relative lushness, sometimes lasting years, occasionally lasting decades and, it enjoyed a natural resiliency that let it spring back after droughts. Then, in 1859, a man named Thomas Austin, a land owner in Winchelsea, Victoria, a little south of where I was now made a big mistake. He imported twenty-four wild rabbits from England and released them into the bush for sport. It is hardly a novel observation that rabbits breed with a certain keenness. Within a couple of years, they had entirely overrun Austin's property, and were spreading into neighbouring districts. 50 million years of isolation had left Australia without a single predator or parasite, able even to recognise rabbits much less dying of them, and so they proliferated amazingly.
Collectively their appetite was essentially insatiable. By 1880, 2 million acres of Victoria had been picked clean. Soon they were pushing into South Australia and New South Wales, advancing over the landscape at the rate of seventy-five miles per year. Until the rabbits came, much of the countryside where I was driving now was characterised by lush growth of eremophila, a shrub that grew to a height of about seven feet and was in flower for most of the year. It was by all accounts a beauty, and its leaves a boon to nibbling creatures. But rabbits fell on the eremophila like locusts, devouring every bit of them — leaves, flowers, bark, stems — until none were to be found. The rabbits ate so much of everything that sheep and other livestock were forced to extend both their range and their diet, punishing yet wider expanses. As sheep yields fell, farmers perversely compensated by increasing stocking levels, adding to the general devastation.
The problem would have been acute enough, but in the 1890s, after 40 unusually green years, Australia fell into a murderous, decade-long drought — the worst in its recorded history. As the earth cracked and turned to dust, the topsoil — already the thinnest in the world — blew away, never to be replenished. In the cost of the decade, some 35 million sheep, more than half the nation's total perished; 16 million went in a single pitiless year, 1902. [. . .] At all events, the damage to the landscape, much of it permanent and irreversible, had already been done. And all so some clown could have something to pot at from his veranda.
24 rabbits, breeding as rabbits do, led to the wiping out of so much lush and arable land. Forever. There's something scary and awe-inspiring about this. This continent we know for being barren and empty, may well have been greener, were it not for these pesky rabbits. There are so many lessons one could derive from this but the one that strikes me now is this — how easily small things compound into the big things!