Australia’s rabbit plague: colonial land mismanagement and ecological debt’s hidden legacy
Original framing: “Why the humble rabbit might be Australia’s worst introduced species” — The Conversation - Global
Indigenous Australian knowledge systems, particularly those of the Arrernte and Anangu peoples, recognise rabbits as a symptom of disrupted fire regimes. Pre-colonial burning practices maintained grassland ecosystems where rabbits could not thrive, as they relied on dense, unburnt vegetation. The erasure of these practices—through dispossession and the suppression of Indigenous land management—directly enabled rabbit proliferation. Modern 'feral' management programs often ignore these historical insights, instead relying on Western scientific frameworks that treat ecosystems as static and rabbits as isolated problems.
Australia’s rabbit plague is not an isolated ecological crisis but a symptom of deeper systemic failures: the erasure of Indigenous land management, the legacy of colonial land policies, and the persistence of industrial agriculture.
The framing of rabbits as a 'problem' obscures how they are both a consequence and a messenger—revealing the ecological imbalances caused by dispossession, habitat fragmentation, and climate change. Solutions require restoring Indigenous fire practices, shifting to regenerative land use, and decolonising ecological knowledge, not just deploying more technical fixes. The trickster rabbit, in this reading, is a disruptor exposing the absurdity of treating symptoms while ignoring the structural causes: a land system designed by colonisers for short-term exploitation, not ecological balance. The path forward lies in centring Indigenous stewardship, integrating cross-cultural wisdom, and reimagining land as a living, relational entity—not a resource to be managed.