Australia's Rabbit-proof Fence

Many English settlers brought animals and plants to Australia, including rabbits. The rabbit population exploded, and rabbit-controlling fences were started by the 1880s. Work on the State Barrier Fence began in 1901, and it's still maintained today.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hi, I am Tracy B. Wilson
that I'm Holly Fry. I welcome to the podcast. So

(00:22):
in our previous episode we talked about the Great Emu War,
and something came up in that episode which comes up
pretty often if you are reading about Australia, particularly if
you were reading about the state of Western Australia. It's
the rabbit Proof Fence, which I had known nothing about
before we got into that one. Now I feel like
it keeps coming up when I'm reading things about Australia.

(00:43):
There's also a film I have seen called rabbit Proof
Fence that came out in two thousand and two. It's
about some young girls who were part of the Stolen
Generation of the thirties who follow the rabbit Proof Fence
home to get back to where they came from in Jingalong.
I based on the book Followed the rabbit Proof Fence
uh And the score in the film is by Peter Gabriel.

(01:05):
I like it quite a lot. I have not seen
the film, but I will make a point too. Yes,
it is a little slight digression, but every time this
rabbit Proof fence comes up. I go, okay, obviously there
are lots of rabbits in Australia. Somebody put up a
big fence. What's really going on with this fence? And
so that's what we're going to talk about in this episode. Yeah. Uh,

(01:27):
And first we have to kind of start with how
rabbits got introduced to the environments. Uh. And the earliest
European settlers to Australia, as most people know, we're convicts
and their keepers. But by the mid eighteen hundreds more
affluent English people were starting to settle there as well.
They a lot of them brought animals and plants from

(01:47):
home with them to try to make Australia feel more
like England. These people were known as acclimatizers. There were
acclimatization societies, including the Victorian Acclimatization Society, which was founded
in eighteen sixty one by Edward Wilson. So really what
they were after was to try to make Australia, which
does not feel like England in most places, feel more

(02:10):
like England. Yeah. It was their own weird version of
terraforming to try to turn it somehow into an English countryside.
In a lot of ways this was deeply unsuccessful and damaging,
with this being one example. Enter Thomas Austin. He was
born in Somerset, England, and his uncle, James was a
convict settler who had been sent to Hobart Town, Tasmania.

(02:32):
James Austen died before Thomas and his family got to
Tasmania in eighteen thirty one, but they all got money
in his will and many of the family actually returned
to England, but Thomas and his brother decided uh whose
name was James, decided that they were going to stay
down Under and make a go of it. In eighteen
thirty seven, Thomas and James moved to what would later

(02:54):
become Victoria. Thomas established the estate of Borrowin Park, which
was a forty two room mansion. Eventually he didn't build
that right off the bat, but eventually there was a
forty two room mansion there. It was surrounded by twenty
nine thousand acres of stocked grounds. He farmed sheep and
raised and trained horses, among other things, on all of

(03:16):
this land. And he also really wanted some rabbits. And
he had married Elizabeth Phillips Harding in Melbourne on August
fourteenth of eighteen forty five, and together they had eleven children,
eight of whom survived to adulthood. And he also is
one of the people who introduced sparrows to Australia, which

(03:36):
also later became pists. So here we have Thomas, his family,
his wife living on this estate together really wanting to
introduce rabbits. Uh. There was a demand. They weren't the
only people who were of this mindset. There was a
demand for rabbits in Australia. Early acclimatizers had brought domesticated rabbits,
which did okay when people were looking after them, but

(03:58):
if they managed to escape into the Australian wilderness, they
usually did not manage to survive really well. Sometimes they
would manage to establish a little colony, get kind of
a foothold, but they didn't run rampant anywhere. They did
a little better in Tasmania and some of the other
smaller islands around the main Australian continent, but in general,

(04:21):
domesticated rabbits were not doing so well. No. Uh. And
Thomas actually asked his nephew William Mack to bring him
some wild rabbits in an effort to kind of bolster
the population, and William brought twenty four rabbits on the
Clipper Lightning in December of eighteen fifty nine. Eighteen of
those rabbits were feral, and they had just been trapped

(04:41):
and held in an enclosed warren. They weren't domesticated, they
weren'tccustomed to interacting with humans at all. Thomas, in an
act he became quite notorious for doing set thirteen of
the rabbits free. He kept eleven of them and fenced
enclosures on his property, and they multiplied as rabbits do.
Three years later, a flood destroyed part of his fence

(05:04):
and so some of those now huge population of rabbits
escaped into the Australian territory, which caused an explosion of
rabbit population. Yes, by eighteen sixty seven, rabbits were really everywhere,
and Thomas would have rabbit hunting parties at his estate.
Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh went on a hunting

(05:27):
day in Barrowin Park that year and he shot four
hundred and sixteen rabbits and three and a half hours.
He reportedly had to have attendance on hand to hand
him new guns when the one he was using got
too hot because he was shooting too fast for his
guns to cool down between shots. By eighteen sixty nine,
the infestation of rabbits was causing property values in some

(05:48):
areas to plummet, and the rabbits themselves, we should point
out we're not the only ones to blame. Farmers were
actually clearing woodland and making it a much more hospitable
environment for the rabbits to thrive in. Their introduction was
in Victoria on the coast in the far southeast of Australia,
and they spread north and west from there. By the

(06:09):
eighteen eighties, the government had started offering bounties on dead
rabbits because there were so many of them. And by
rabbits were in all or part of every Australian state.
They were the biggest nuisance outside of the tropical areas.
And so this was less than forty years after they
were introduced to Australia. They were in every state of Australia.

(06:30):
It's a big continent, it is. That's a pretty explosive
population growth for any animal, uh in less than four
decades to completely engulf a comment is pretty amazing, right.
The rabbits became prey for other introduced species like wild cats,
wild dogs, foxes, and dingos. All of these except for dingoes,

(06:51):
were introduced after the landing of the First Fleet, which
was the eleven ships that reached Australia from Great Britain
in seventeen eighty eight. A lot of people think of
dingoes as being native to Australia, but they really arrived
to Australia when humans did, about three thousand or four
thousand years ago, So whether to call dingoes native is
a subject of debate. Yeah. Uh. And in addition to

(07:14):
the basic nuisance factor that was going on and the
fact that the rabbits were crowding out native species, they
could also completely strip an area of anything they would eat.
That includes food crops that were intended for people as
well as crops that were intended to support the raising
of other animals. So this also led not only to
things going without food, but also really bad erosion issues. Right,

(07:37):
you can find pictures sometimes of really well maintained rabbit fences,
and on one side of the fence will be be
completely stripped of all vegetation, and on the other side
there will be healthy grass growing. So it's it's a
dramatic difference of rabbits versus no rabbits. They're extremely thorough
in finding every consumable element in an environment. And then UH,

(08:01):
the great idea happened to build a fence to help
with this problem. By the eighteen eighties, people were building
fences on their own an attempt and an attempt to
keep rabbits out of their property. Often this was not
effective at all because there were already rabbits on both
sides of the fence, and also rabbits like to borrow
under things, and so even if there had not been
rabbits on both sides of the fence, the rabbits would

(08:24):
just dig a hole underneath and come up on the
other side. So eventually, UH construction was begun on what
what became the State Barrier Fence, and that happened from
nineteen o one in nineteen o seven, and this followed
a five month investigation by Arthur Mason which started in
eighteen ninety six and a Royal commission in nineteen o one.

(08:44):
So private contractors did the work on the State Barrier
Fence and then handed it over to the Public Works
Department in nineteen o four. The fence itself when it
was originally being built, was made of wooden posts, wire
and wire netting with gates every thirty four colm letters
which is about twenty miles, and traps to try to
catch rabbits that did manage to burrow under it. Usually

(09:07):
the crews were cutting timber from the surrounding trees to
make the posts, and if there weren't any trees they
would use metal posts instead. UM. The netting for the
fence also extends underground to try to prevent burrowing from
underneath it, and they would coat the bottom part of
the fence too in the hope of keeping it from
resting out. So the number one fence runs from north

(09:30):
to south roughly through the middle of western Australia. The
number three fence stretches out east to west about midway
down the number one fence, and the number two fence
stretches north to south, dividing the zone created by the
number one and number three fences roughly in half. Yes,
so basically there's a fence running the entire height of
Australia from north to south all the way down. UM.

(09:53):
The reason that there are three of them is because
as they were building, rabbits kept getting ahead of the fence,
and so they were sort of further sub viding to
try to keep the rabbits contained. What they wound up
with was three thousand, two hundred and fifty six kilometers,
which is two thousand, twenty three miles of fence, which
cost more than three hundred thousand pounds at the time.

(10:15):
Like we said in the last episode, Australia was not
on the dollar for money at the time, so it's
a little hard to compare what that would amount to
you in today's money. Uh. And the fences fell under
the jurisdiction of I love this title. The first Chief
Inspector of Rabbits, whose name was Alexander Crawford. At their
completion in nineteen o seven, he took over his Chief

(10:37):
Inspector of Rabbits, which is just the best thing to
put on the It's just building the fence was not enough.
They were going to then have to inspect the fence
constantly to make sure that it didn't get damaged or
burrowed under. People would travel the length of the fence
using bicycles, horses and camels to lick for breeches, and

(10:59):
there were huts set up periodically along the way that
people could stay in while they were doing this inspection.
Once motor vehicles became more common, people did start using
them to inspect the fence, but really in the beginning
it was bicycles, horses, camels or on foot, which is
a lot of fence to try to dis inspect it
is and they're, uh, we're not all these areas that

(11:22):
motor vehicles could even reach, so they had to retain
some of those slower methods for the those areas that
just couldn't be um arrived at by car. And there
were other anti rabbit fences constructed elsewhere in Australia. This
these three were not the only ones. Now there's there's
the dog fence which goes it's very meandering, but it's

(11:44):
in a roughly east west direction through South Australia, then
along the South Australia Australia Queensland New South Wales border
through Queensland and almost to the coast. It keeps dingoes
on one side of the fence and was put up
when dingo attacks were happening so frequently that it had
become basically impossible to raise sheep. Um Also in addition

(12:08):
to their being multiple other sort of vermin excluding fences
is the broad category they fall into. The state barrier
fence also discussed uh the ters other animals than rabbits,
such as emails, as we talked about in the previous episode. Now,
the thing is that all of these contracts, all of
these fences remain a little controversial um as to whether
or not they really work, whether their impact on the

(12:31):
bio diversity of the areas outweighs um the benefit of
containing vermin, and so it's it's while they are doing
your jobs. In many cases some people question their validity
as maintained entity, like are we wasting our time and
money on this? But the Department of Agriculture and Food
in two thousand one decided that the fence was now

(12:55):
would now be maintained by the Department of Agriculture, the
Agricultural Protection Board, the State Barrier Fence Advisory Committee, local
shires and stateholders. So roughly every year the fence is
has about thirty to thirty five kilometers that need replacing,
and new sections have steel posts and more modern prefabricated knitting. Right,

(13:15):
So it's offense that's still they're still being maintained, still
attempting to do the job of keeping rabbits on one
side and not on the other side, or at least
fewer rabbits on one side than on the other side.
And rabbits are still a nuisance um right now. There
there's a similarly controversial attempt to introduce diseases into rabbit

(13:38):
populations to try to curb their spread, and there there
are lots of layers of the reasons why that can
be problematic or upsetting to some people, but that is
one of the things that's being done in an attempt
to keep their rabbit population from completely overrunning the rest
of Australia. So one important legacy to look at is

(14:00):
that of the man who brought rabbits to Australia. Thomas
really started to take the blame for the rabbit infestation
pretty early on. He was probably not the only person
to bring rabbits that eventually did multiply. Uh that that's
sort of unlikely, but he was really boastful about what
he was doing. He frequently gave breeding pairs to people

(14:23):
as gifts. Uh So, while it's probably not true that
the entire population of rabbits in Australia now is the
fault of this one guy. He was kind of taking
the hit he Yeah, he ragged about his rabbits a lot,
and and he made a name for himself that way.
He died on December eighteen seventy one, which was six

(14:46):
months after their mansion was finished. His widow eventually used
her money to open a hospital for what they called
incurables in eighty two, and she opened a children's ward
in so they know to have kind of a legacy
in Australia apart from bringing rabbits. All the negative rabbit

(15:07):
image is not the only thing that his family left behind,
which is good. Yeah, And it's also good to recognize
that while he's getting all the flak, probably there were
many other rabbit people who just did not make quite
the name for themselves that he did. Yeah, he was
not the only person that wanted to turn Australia into England. No,
It's it's very likely that plenty of other people were

(15:28):
bringing in rabbits as well as other species, right. And
that's the thing that you'll see in other English colonies
and attempts to make other places that are absolutely not
England like England. It's a it's a sort of a
colonial tradition and is absolutely problematic, but is a thing
that definitely contributed in a long lasting way to a

(15:50):
lot of parts of the world, for good or for ill.
And that's the story of the rabbit fence. Now we
knew he also has listener mails. Today's listener mail is
a listener postcard. It shows on the front a very
lovely picture of a coastline, like a hilly coastline, with

(16:10):
a village at the bottom of it. Um It is
the village of Actuan, which is a Native Alaskan village
in the Aleutian Islands. Less than a hundred people lived there.
Written on a coastcard, less than a hundred people lived there,
along with a fish processing plant. Sarah, who wrote this
to us, says, I travel to remote Alaskan villages such

(16:32):
as a two in by float plane, small planes and
boats to do eye exams. I work in the public
health service, so it keeps us very busy traveling to
the villages with all of the eye equipment three hundred
pounds and doing eye exams. I always bring you with
me to put on speaker during my hikes to keep
the bears away. That's the best use of our podcast.

(16:54):
I think I love hearing about people who are using
the podcast to sort of do tasks that they don't
like to do. But scaring bears away is a new
and awesome one. Spectacular. So to return to Sarah's postcard,
thanks for keeping me entertained and safe. More Native American
and Alaskan stories would be great, Sarah. Thank you so much,
Sarah for this postcard. I love hearing about your hiking

(17:16):
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(17:38):
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(18:00):
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