Shooters, Trappers & Poisoners

By MIchael Bogle

Shooters, Trappers & Poisoners explores the rapidly receding world of Australian doggers and rabbiters as they wage war on two of Australia’s most familiar feral animals, the dingo, its mixed-breed descendants and the feral rabbit. Beginning in the 19th century and continuing to the present, two paths emerge: one is the lucrative industry of selling animal pelts and carcasses (including the harvesting of koala and Tasmanian tiger skins); while the other is the practical requirements for eliminating wild dogs and rabbits. Rabbiters and doggers are notorious for their unique and secretive tradecraft, such as the preparation of odiferous dog baits, the use of firearms, the setting of traps and the deployment of arcane poisons and gases. The book also explores the phenomenon of the Australian outlaw animal, the impact of germ warfare on rabbiting and the isolation of the outback. To frame this lively survey, Shooters, Trappers & Poisoners draws on oral histories, bush folklore, memoirs, scientific studies, contemporary newspaper accounts and 37 rarely seen photographs and illustrations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MIchael Bogle
• Release date: Oct 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9780646942759

MIchael Bogle

Michael Bogle is an historian and former museum curator specialising in Australian design and popular culture. He has written on the evolution of the Sydney espresso bar, explored Australian design and architectural history, the culture of transported convicts and other regional topics. His books include Convicts. Transportation and Australia (2008); an anthology of essays, Designing Australia (2002); Design in Australia 1880–1970 (1998) and with Peta Landman, Modern Australian Furniture (1989). Michael grew up in a rural farming community and has encountered a wide variety of pests throughout his career. He lives in Sydney. You can email him about this book at: [e-mail].

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Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1. Shooters, Trappers and Poisoners

Chapter 2. Sport Shooting and Rabbiting in England and Australia

Chapter 3. The Australian Skin Trade

Chapter 4. Feral. The Outlaw Animal

Chapter 5. Rabbits and Rabbiting

Chapter 6. The Rabbit Business

Chapter 7. Germ Warfare and the Death of the Rabbit Industry

Chapter 8. Wild Dogs and Dogging

Chapter 9. Rabbiters, Doggers and Solitude

Notes and Sources

About the Author

Copyright Information

Foreword

Australian shooters, trappers and poisoners of wild dogs and rabbits have been active for over 150 years. And as Les Murray writes in this verse from his 1990 poem, An Australian History of the Practical Man:

he enacts every logic you can’t face -

and the land’s cleared for settlement

with arsenic and gun.

The pervasive pursuit of these feral animals continues to make a rich contribution to the Australian language, material culture (traps, firearms, knives, fencing, vehicles), rural values and the economics of land use. Shooters, Trappers & Poisoners captures some of this ethnography through analysis, images from the nation’s archives and libraries and the generous use of ‘word picture’ extracts from newspapers and journals.

Research for Shooters, Trappers & Poisoners has been inspired by the prose of regional and urban journalists and columnists intrigued by the nomadic search for feral animals. Many of the prose ‘sketches’ from newspapers such as The Mercury, Hobart, Sunday Mail, Brisbane, the Sydney Mail, the Longreach Leader, The West Australian, Perth, The Argus, Melbourne and others are luminous. It is no surprise that poets such as Rosemary Dobson, Les Murray, C.J. Dennis and John Kinsella have been drawn to this linguistic quadrant of our culture.

A special thank you to the collecting institutions mentioned in the captions for preserving and providing digital access to their picture and newspaper collections.

Pre-decimal currency is cited in pounds (£) /shillings /pence (d) using the Reserve Bank of Australia’s 2014 equivalents.

Chapter 1. Shooters, Trappers and Poisoners

It is old Peter, one of those nomads of the bush who make a living by trapping or poisoning rabbits, foxes, eagles, and dingoes, the first for the skins, foxes for skins and scalp money, and the scalp money for dingoes and eagles, but he wouldn’t miss a kangaroo if he had a chance, or a water rat either for that matter.

Allen T. Elliott. ‘The Trapper. Nomad of the Outback.’ Brisbane Sunday Mail, 9 January 1938, p.31.

This book explores the rapidly receding world of Australian doggers and rabbiters as they trap, shoot and poison two of Australia’s most familiar feral animals, the dingo and its mixed-breed descendants characterised in the bush as ‘wild dogs’ and the well-known feral rabbit. Two masterful authors, the late Eric Rolls and Brian Coman, have surveyed the introduction of the rabbit in Australia tracing the first introduction of this fecund creature to the First Fleet in 1788 with later documented introductions in 1791, 1825 (Tasmania), 1829 (Western Australia), 1834 (Victoria) and of course, Thomas Austin’s famous importation of wild rabbits at Barwon Park, Victoria in 1859.1

Eric Rolls’ famed book They all ran wild (1969) describes in intriguing detail the colonisation of Australia by introduced animals of many species while the Victorian research scientist Brian Coman’s droll Tooth and Nail: The story of the rabbit in Australia (1999) blends anecdote and science to update and expand on the story of Coman’s ‘underground mutton’. Coman develops Rolls’ startling 1969 revelation that rabbits had propagated and spread throughout the mainland colonies and Tasmania, not by their own fecund nature, but by intentional introduction by colonists. However, the mythology of the creation of Australia’s rabbit plague from Thomas Austin’s Christmas Day 1859 release of rabbits on his Barwon Park property has entered the national consciousness. This anecdote has burrowed deep and seems likely to remain.

Two intertwined themes of the social and cultural practices of dogging and rabbiting are identified; one is the lucrative business of gathering, bundling and selling of their pelts and carcasses and the other is practical, examining the day-to-day (and night-to-night) shooting, trapping and poisoning of wild dogs and rabbits. And not infrequently, the hunters poison or shoot one another. Australia-wide surveys of contemporary regional and city newspaper accounts and memoirs are used to describe the mores and manners of Australian rabbiters and doggers as they work their deadly way through Australia’s feral animal population.

Most Australian methods for dealing with feral animals have their earliest parallels in the British Isles including the trapping, shooting, net-drives and poisoning of rabbits. While these practices influence some of Australia’s methods for feral animal control, the United Kingdom never faced the plague proportions of rabbits or wild dogs found in our continent.

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Rabbiters in the northern region of South Australia, 1907. The Searcy Collection, State Library of South Australia. no.PRG 280/1/4/241.

The commerce of rabbiting for carcasses and pelts also has a strong trade link with Britain as much of the highly profitable collecting, sorting and shipment of Australian rabbit skins went to London markets. Native animal pelts including koalas, water rats, the Central Australian golden mole and possums were part of the Australian fur trade. The record export year for rabbit pelts was 1926 when 134,024 CWT (6.8 million kilos) of rabbit hides were shipped. The hide economy was paralleled by the manufacturing and sale of tinned Australian rabbit for retail sale with the Melbourne-based McCraith’s factories exporting rabbit meat to the British grocer Sainsbury’s at a rate of 32,000 cased rabbits per week in the late 1940s.2

The circumstances, methods and motivations surrounding the destruction of Australian feral animals produced formal and informal animal control practices that continue to startle outside observers. The assignment of ‘feral’ or ‘vermin’ status to animals loosens the boundaries of acceptable behaviour, particularly in the context of amateur animal control measures. Surviving descriptions of rabbit drives concluding with rural men, women and children wading into a writhing carpet of rabbits to dispatch them with clubs and farm tools is an indication of a community’s revulsion at the massed population of animals. This palpable alarm is akin to the panic response that all animals, including humans, experience when attacked by a swarm of insects.

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Constable Darken of the NT Police [and his Aboriginal deputy], shoot at dingoes, 1949. National Archives of Australia, no.A1200, L11653.

Amongst professional shooters, trappers and poisoners, extreme responses to feral animals are notable by their absence. For these men and women, this is their livelihood and memoirs and accounts often illustrate real sensitivity to animal suffering.

The public perception of the solitary rabbiter or dogger working in the bush is entangled with the romanticism of the Australian bush, the dusty image of the wandering ‘sundowner’ and our innate fear of the dangers of the continent’s often inhospitable terrain. Rabbiting and dogging is not without overt danger particularly when the shooting of feral animals is pursued as sport. Professional hunters rarely trap, shoot or poison themselves. And with ironic detachment, the scientific community’s literature on feral animal management illustrates that professional and amateur shooting is largely an ineffective means of feral animal control.

On the other hand, the Australian statistics for accidental deaths by firearm demonstrate the effectiveness of Australian amateur hunters in killing or wounding themselves or bystanders. During the peak years of the rabbit population from 1911 to 1951, 80 to 100 Australians died annually from the accidental discharge of a firearm. The peak year was