THE WONDERFUL RABBIT FENCE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22256, 2 November 1935, Page 4 (Supplement)

THE WONDERFUL RABBIT FENCE

In 1788 there were rabbits in Australia, and in 1803 new settlers were introduced. Never were emigrants better satisfied with their new country. They bred and spread from State to State until they outnumbered the human inhabitants a hundred times. They began to eat the farmer and the fruit-grower out of house and home. Australia now exports some sixteen million frozen rabbits and a much greater number of rabbit skins every year, but this is a small compensation for the damage done. Hunting them wm nover of any avail, trapping them wafc no better. So first individual farmers, then associations of farmers, and finally State Governments began to erect fences to keep the rabbits out. The greater fences wore necessary because the rabbit invasion began to spread, like that of the Huns of old, from State to State The climax was reached when the rabbits, having spread from \ ictoria to New South Wales and South Australia, turned their tads to the east and their noses to the west and sought new lands, before the railway came, in Western Australia. Then it was that the building of the great fences began, hundreds of miles long, to keep them back. One of the earliest fences was built from the Macquarie Riyer m Isew South Wales to the Darling River, a distance of 291 miles. It was then extended to Corowa, making the total length 703 miles. Another fence was built from the Murray River northward along the western boundary of New South Wales for a distance 01 nearly 310 miles. The New South Wales Government erected altogether over 1300 miles of fencing. Ihe other States had to imitate this activity. Queensland built 675 miles,! Victoria and South Australia have of miles; finally the huge fence stretching over a third of the continent was built to protect Western Australia and in addition to these public precautions, paid for out of thp taxes, private farmers have P u t , U P over fifteen thousand miles Oi fencing to protect their own property 1 The Government fences cost more than seventy pounds a mile to build. They are of closely-woven wire netting 42 inches wide, with meshes a little over an inch. Other fences are made of larger mesh netting, stretched between posts set in the ground at

convenient _ distances, with barbed wires, one just clearing the ground and the other an inch above the top of tho netting. But in practice it has been found that even though tho fence may bo deeply set in the ground tho rabbits will sooner or later burrow under it. Tho Government fences are looked after by boundary riders who live in huts about thirty miles apart. But neither fence nor watchman can keep back tho rabbits indefinitely. Tho only remedy seems to be tho growth of population in Australia, which implies tho filling up of tho continent's great open spaces.