SYMHC Classics: Rabbit-proof Fence

Published Dec 9, 2017, 10:06 PM

We're revisiting an episode about settlers bringing 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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Hey, Saturday listeners, Today we do have a classic episode for you, but we also have a little something special. We have special guests in house, John Roderick and Ken Jennings from the new podcast Omnibus, and they are gonna talk with us for a little bit. We're gonna have our episode as normal, and then at the end of this episode you can enjoy a little snippet of their new podcast, and we think you're really gonna love it. So first Ken and John tell us about your podcast. Our project is called Omnibus. John and I have been concerned for a long time that are increasingly turbulent world. You know, may face imminent doom at any second, and I know that's not usually a fun topic to bring up on a podcast, but our idea is to create a series of recordings of all human knowledge from our civilizations, so that just in case that gets lost, we can we still have these recordings that we can send to Earthlings of the future, whoever that may be. So the episode that we have picked for our Classic today is our prior episode on the rabbit proof fences that were built in Australia, which were a response to the fact that people imported rabbits that try to make Australia more like England. And it reminded me of the very first episode of Omnibus, which is about a similar story involving starlings. Uh. Tell us a little bit about that, John or ken Well. It is a similar story, although this one is full of even more hubris. I don't want to give too much away, but the premise of the importation of starlings to America was that one eccentric millionaire in New York City wanted to have all of the birds that appear in Shakespeare's plays present in Central Park. He thought that would make that would be a that would be an interesting diversion for him personally, and maybe it would get his name in the newspaper. And also all the residents of New York, of course, would love to see the birds of uh Shakespeare in Central Park. Uh. The eventual result was that starlings despoiled the entire continent. I guess, I guess I kind of ruined the ending. Sorry, every every starling you see sitting outside your window making its horrendous noise is a descendant of that initial population, which was a which was a complete folly on the part of this one person, hundreds of millions of these crude, murderous birds, all because one rich person had a little too much free time. Uh. We often talk on our show about how one person can really tip the scales of history and change things pretty significantly without giving anything else away. Uh, could you give us a few hints about other shows that maybe in the pipeline for you? Well, we're doing two shows a week, and uh, and every week Ken will bring in a topic and I will bring in a topic, and so the Tuesday shows will be driven by Ken's peculiar fascinations and Thursdays will be mine. But because I'm lucky enough to be working with Ken, who has a wide and varied intelligence and knowledge, every time one of us brings in an idea, the other has a lot to contribute to the conversation, and we discuss it in the context of it being some information that maybe won't be It won't be like a top tier level of information recorded for posterity. Right are our premises that even if it is a really big apocalypse, residents of the future will still be familiar with the Beatles, but they may not hear about the animals or the Kinks. So we're there too. We're basically bringing you the kinks. These are kind of the strange but true footnotes of culture and science and history. UM. A lot of them are oddballs, like a man who could picture four dimensional shapes in his head. UM. Some of them are unusual, unlikely historical occurrences, like the US and the UK almost going to war over a hungry pig in the nineteenth century. UM. Little things like that that we fear may not survive the inevitable apocalypse, but are very important to know about. That pig war is important. We have talked about it on our show before. Also, we love a good pig war here in the Omnibus, Parker, So we are going to hop into our Saturday classic for today, which our is our previous episode about the Australian rabbit proof fences, and then stay tuned at the end because we are going to have an awesome preview of Omnibus. I have listened to the episode on Starlings and I really enjoyed it. We do well. We are super pleased to be joining you in the house Stuff Works podcast. Cannon, thanks for having us. Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from House Stuff works dot Com. Hi, I am Tracy B. Wilson. I'm Holly Fry. I welcome to the podcast. So 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. 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 Jigalong. It based on the book Followed the rabbit Proof Fence, uh and the score in the film is by Peter Gabriel. I like it quite a lot. I have not seen the film, but I will make a point too. Yes it is. It's 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, And first we have to kind of start with how rabbits got introduced to the environment. 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 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 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. James Austin 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 become Victoria. Thomas established the estate of Barrowin 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 this land. And he also really wanted some rabbits. And he had married Elizabeth Phillips Harting 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 also later became pests. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 and the far southeast of Australia, and they spread north and west from there. By the eighteen eighties, the government had started offering bounties on dead rabbits because there were so many of them, and by dred 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. 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 continent is pretty amazing, right. The rabbits became prey for other introduced species like wildcats, wild dogs, foxes, and dingos. All of these except for dingoes, were introduced after the landing of the first Fleet, which was the eleven ships that reached Australia from Great Britain in seventeen. A lot of people think of ingoes as being native to Australia, but they really arrived to Australia whens 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 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. You can find pictures sometimes of really well maintained rabbit fences and on one side of the fence will 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. Yes, and then uh, the great idea happened to build a fence to help with this problem. Yea. 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 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 to 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. 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. Is made of wooden posts, wire and wire netting with gates every thirty four kilometers which is about twenty miles, and traps to try to catch rabbits that did manage to burrow under it. Usually 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 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. 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 subdividing 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. 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 as Chief Inspector of Rabbits, which is just the best thing to put up that 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 breaches, and 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 just inspect it is. And they're, uh, we're not always areas that 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 in a roughly east west direction through South Australia, then along the South Australia Australia Queensland New South Wales border through queens 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 to their being multiple other sort of vermin excluding fences is the broad category they fall into. The State barrier fence also discussed deters 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 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 a 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 would now be maintained by the Department of Agriculture, the Agriculture 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. The new sections have steel posts and more modern prefabricated knitting. Right, so it's a fense that's still they're still being maintained, still attempting due 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 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 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 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 he was kind of taking the hint. He Yeah, he bragged about his rabbits a lot, and he made a name for himself that way. He died on December seventy one, which was six 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 went on to have kind of a legacy in Australia apart from bringing rabbits to all the negative rabbit 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. It's it's very likely the plenty of other people were 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 lot of parts of the world, for good or for illymore and siving this message, we are Ken Jennings and John Roderick. We speak to you from our present, which we can only assume is your distant past, the turbulent time that was the early twenty one century. Fearing the great cataclysm that will surely befall our civilization, we began this monumental reference of strange and obscure human knowledge. These recordings represent our attempt to compile and preserve wonders and esoterica that would otherwise be lost. So, whether you're listening from an advanced civilization or have just reinvented the technology to decrypt our transmissions, this is our legacy to you. This is our time capsule. This is the offibus you have access to Entry one dot p S eight four oh three Certificate number two seven six zero three. The European Starling. The European Starling is also known as the common Starling. The problem is that at least an our era, it's much too common and not nearly European enough. Uh. This is a story that begins back in eighteen nine. Indeed, on March six, there's an eccentric, wealthy pharmaceutical manufacturer in New York named Eugene Schifflin who goes to Central Park because he is a man with a dream. He's a man with a very weird dream. Funny that that an eccentric pharmaceutical magnate would also be a guy with a weird dream. To be honest with you, the weird dream is the only evidence I have that he's eccentric. I have no idea if he like also dresses up as a bear and runs down you know. Uh. But on this particular day, he's in service of this dream that has been animating him for many years, which is for some reason, to introduce to North America every species of bird that appears in the works of William Shakespeare. He's a lover, as so many of us are, of both Shakespeare and birds. Well, and that was when we were we hadn't yet decided how exactly we were going to make America all the way through. And that I'm sure that made perfect sense. I think he did. He was a member of a society called something like the America An acclimatization society, which really was like, how do we get all the good stuff from Europe into this new sort of suspect, shabby country. Yeah right, the good stuff from Europe apparently, and the Irish and the Irish of birds, the European starling alight. So he wants to introduce every bird from Shakespeare. Unfortunately for Posterity and Henry. The fourth part one, Shakespeare brings up starlings, which in his time we're famous for their sense of mimicry. Like a starling doesn't just have one call, I can have dozens. It can make like any noise. Do you have access to the Shakespeare quote? Yeah? So early in the play, Hotspur is very angry at King Henry. He wants Harry to ransom one of Henry's political enemies, a guy named Edmund Mortimer, and Henry forbids him to talk about this, and so, in the manner of shakespeare play, as soon as Henry turns his back, Hotspur turns to the audience and starts scheming about how he's gonna keep bugging the king about Mortimer and one of his plans, one of his very improbable plans. He says, nay, I'll have a starling. She'll be taught to speak nothing but Mortimer and give it him to keep his anger still in motion Mortimer. Yeah, So as any of us would do in this situation, Hospera wants to train a hypothetical bird to say the word Mortimer and bother the king with that. Quoth the starling Mortimer. Uh, And I'm not sure. I'm not sure if he if he just thinks that'll annoy the king, or the king will eventually change his mind. Hey, this bird is onto something Mortimer anyway. But the point of it is that the word starling only appears once in you know, the million million word corpus of Shakespeare. But that was enough for Eugene chief Win. Shakespeare had Starling's damn, it's almost America. Let me ask. Was Eugene Chieflin responsible for the introduction of many other birds from Shakespeare into Central Park? I don't know if there's any Uh, I don't know of any evidence the starling was his his only contribution to this, his greatest work. It's like play the heads Eugene free bird. So then what happened free starling? Uh? He releases Uh. I don't know like thirty or forty birds into Central Park and uh doesn't hear back? And I think a few months later does it again? Releases a bunch more, and a matter of years later he learns that there is actually a pair of starlings, European starlings nesting in the eaves of the Museum of Natural History across from the park. And this, I can only imagine was an amazing day for our hero Mr Chi. Can you imagine a better place for them than the eaves of the Museum of Natural History? He just loves it. Starlings have come to his country. Can you imagine being a passenger on the ship that has like between sixty and a hundred starlings on it? Multiple times? It's true he had to import these from something, right, I mean that he had to first of all, capture eighty starlings, let's say, cage them, bring them. It might not be him personally. The American acclimatization society might be a a vast, a vast mechanism. He might have underlings combing England, employing starlings, employing people in like cloth caps to do this work. So for him, it's just a whim. It's a. It's an artistic fancy. He's he's a rich guy with a weird hobby. No idea that this will change the course of history, because what has happened in the succeeding a hundred and you know, from where we sit a hundred and twenty seven years for you listening to us, this is this is centuries over the past. Yeah, we don't we don't know what your starling situation is, but in our world it's not great. Actually, from the that one breeding pair in the eaves of the museum, they're now two hundred and twenty million starlings European starlings in America. You know, if you see just some random gray spotted bird flying around near your home or in the country, it's probably a starling because they have come to dominate the country. They they're really bad for native songbird populations because their nest bandits what their nest bandits. So tell me more. They don't like other birds. They only building nests. You know, they can nest anywhere. They'll nest in a little hole, which so you know, newly deforested, suburbanized America is great for them. You know, get any gas station or porch or nook of your house. You know, starlings can't find a hole there, but those are in short supply. So what they will do is they'll they'll they'll wait at the entrance to a hole, and if a bluebird or a woodpeck or whatever sticks its head out, the starling will impale it with its beak until it dies, kill the eggs, if there's any eggs, and just take over the whole. I dated somebody like this. This is almost an exact description of our relationship. And Starlings are also super loud and super annoying. They are because they'll you know, they can mimic any call, so you know, they make these sort of gross noises in you know, automobile heavy America. They now make car centric noises. They'll imitate the noises of crossing signals or of car engines. You know, starlings living near interstate will just sound like cars whizzing by. Uh, because that's absolutely true. They you know, they're they just want to fit in, you know, aren't they aren't we all starlings at art like that a little bit. That's not annoying at all, Although now that you're saying, aren't we all starlings. Of course, the most famous human starling is Clarice Starling from the Silence of the Lambs. She says she's a bit of a predator. She seems harmless on the outside, but when she gets her teeth in a in a case, her beak, she gets her beak in a case. When she gets a beacon her case, she doesn't like, you know, Lector finds out she's a force to be reckoned. With that, I wonder if that's what the references. She's gonna not only not only kill Lector, but all of the eggs in his nest. So the victims of the European starling are all of us many well, yeah, I mean humans included. Birds are birds. Bird populations have been decimated. They're believed to have contributed to the extinction of the Carolina parakeet and the passenger pigeon, so you know, whole species are on their hit list. I thought that the passenger pigeon went extinct entirely as a result of like wanton human hunting. Did the starling really play a role? Are we absolved somewhat of the responsibility of destroying the passenger pige I don't like they once. You know, they said they would once fly overhead for days, right, because I would say, the passenger pigeon like in the sky flock would start and then it would just be like twilight for like eight hours as they passed over. You know, there were so many and they were delicious, so we ate them all. And it always amazed me that we could even conceivably have killed that many birds. Now, thinking that maybe the Starlings are responsible makes me feel like we owe fewer reparations to the passenger pigeons community. I don't think should feel better because think about this, like we also created the Starlings, you know, like at least the people shooting the pigeons were like, I know, I'm killing this guy. You know, this was just some out of touch rich guy who was like, you know what the world needs these two starlings, Dick and Betsy, and he has no idea. I imagine sitting in the drawing room of some fancy lady's house on the Upper East Side talking about having introduced all the birds from Shakespeare's plays into Central Park. I think that was probably a pretty winning line at the time, right when people were dropping handkerchiefs on the floor as a supreme mating signal. If I were in that Edith Wharton drawing him like I think my monica would fall into my soup. If some if some strange man and a goatee started bragging about his successful ornithological acclimatizations, almost surely he had a Trotsky goatee, almost surely. Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar during the course of the show, that may be obsolete. Now, so here's our current contact information. We are at History Podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and then we're at Missed in the History all over social media that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest, and Instagram. Thanks again for listening for more on this and thousands of other topics because it how stuff Works dot com.

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