It struck me this morning when I was reading The Weekend Australian Review, that two of the books reviewed are companions to this one which I have just read by Bruce Munday. Those Wild Rabbits is a salutary reminder (and a warning) from an era that has vanished. Geoffrey Blainey makes the same point about a vanished world in his review of Slow Catastrophes: Living with Drought in Australia (Australian History) by Rebecca Jones and The Vanished Land: Disappearing dynasties of Victoria’s Western District by Richard Zachariah.

When I was married to The Ex, I became part of a huge family, and most of them lived in the bush or wanted to. That was where their roots were, in the dry dusty plains of the Mallee in an arc that had spread out from the Goldfields where some had been quite successful. When the aunts and uncles of this extended family retired they went back to the bush, to Wedderburn and to Swan Hill, but only one of them had nearby offspring (who was farming dried fruit not far away in the backblocks of Mildura.) Now they are all gone, and the thriving towns I drove through on my way to visit them in the 70s and 80s are dying too.

As Blainey says:

A host of city people now have no relatives who live in the bush, and yet as recently as 1945 I would suggest that more than half of the city dwellers had either come from the bush or were in touch with relatives who lived there. (The Weekend Australian Review, Oct 21-22, 2017, p 20)

This matters. I knew people who remembered the dust storms of the 1940s and the rabbit plagues which devastated agricultural and pastoral land. Bruce Munday writes in Those Wild Rabbits that one of the pleasures of writing the book was talking to people who had living memory of those dreadful times, and his fear is that because most people know nothing about it, Australia lacks the eternal vigilance that’s needed to keep the rabbit in check and preferably to eradicate it completely. Blainey, an historian sympathetic to the bush and its issues, links the growth of One Nation’s political influence with rural decline, noting the gulf in social values between the city and the land…

Well, it seems to me that we just don’t understand each other any more, and that brings a lack of empathy, a lack of understanding, a willingness to blame and punish and an unwillingness to learn. For every person reading this review there are probably many more who saw its title and thought, I don’t want to read about the rabbit problem in the bush and deleted it out of their inbox.

Well, the rabbit problem in rural Australia isn’t theoretical for me. It’s about people in my photo albums.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/10/21/those-wild-rabbits-by-bruce-munday/ ( )