Did you know? It’s the Easter Bilby!

This is how one bilby led to other bibbies some year later. This is what took place. In the late 1980s, I was the editor of several in-flight magazines when I, of all people, first met the bilby, a rabbit-ear marsupial who looks much like a rabbit. These critters were about to become the Easter Bilby! I kid you not! Another 15 years celebration feature of the past. Frank Morris reports.

The Easter Bilby – everyone shook their head. It wasn’t so much getting rid of the rabbit (that too, in a roundabout way) but getting rid of the “environment monsters” who were the symbols of our Easter get together.

A PR letter sent to me 34 years ago, explained the reasoning and the logic behind the whole deal. In part, its reads:

The Editor:

In the first century BC the inhabitants of Minorca and Majorca in Spain pleaded with Emperor Augustus for help to control the rabbit impact in their plagued lands.

Today, we are seeking your help to support the eradication of the wild rabbit in Australia …
The rabbit is the cleverest Jekyll and Hyde act since Jekyll and Hyde; except the rabbit is still with us.

In reality, however, the rabbit is brutal towards its food rivals, and has taken native animals to the edge of extinction. Rabbit are environmental monsters.

They wreaked havoc on Australia’s flora and fauna, and primary industries, for over 100 years. Currently, the rabbit is costing Australia at least $90 million annually in lost primary production.
The “friendly rabbit” is a myth …

Plans are already well advanced for the release of a children’s book, The Easter Bilby in 1994.

Yes, the rabbit is a menace. But is the Easter Bilby the answer?

From the Editor:

That was all said a long time ago: Author Russel Braddon, in his book The Year of the Angry Rabbit, told that Australia was about over to be over-run by rabbits – millions of them.

The scourge of the rabbit is well documented.

While the rabbit is essentially a sedentary creature, they will ‘mass migrate’ over many kilometres when a drought takes hold in the more arid areas.

Say a CSIRO research scientist: “The rabbit is a grazing animal … and displays (a) marked preference in its choice of plant species … when uncontrolled rabbit grazing occurs, a qualitative and quantitative, deterioration in the pasture takes place rapidly”.

Yes, the rabbit is a menace, but is the Easter Bilby the answer?

The wild rabbit has become an environmental destroyer of the farmers crops. They don’t hunt singly, or as a pair. They hunt in hundreds of thousands, no, millions

And yes, the Easter Bilby is now up and running. It’s still got a mighty haul to earmark the tear-away rabbit as the Easter King.

In 2022, the fight for the bilbies still goes on! 

How old is the Easter Bunny?

Let’s go back to the pre-Christian origin of Easter. Goddess Eostre, who was sometimes depicted with a hare’s head, is claimed to be the originator of both Easter and the Easter Bunny.

Appropriately, her connection with the hare would appear to be to origin of the Easter Bunny.
The idea of a rabbit laying eggs came to the United States in the 1700s.

German immigrants, in the Pennsylvania Dutch area, told their children about the “Oschter Haws”, the Easter Bunny. Presumably, the Oschter Haws lay eggs when the kids were not looking.

In Australia, wild rabbits have become an environmental disaster; the consequence have been well documented for the last 200 years. Already, over the past 50 years, there are attempts being made to get the Easter Bilby to take its place.

Top: A group of feral rabbits. They give the Easter Bunny a bad name. Second: This frisky bilby has a tough job. Will it ever take over as the “king”. Centre: In 1994, there have mountain of bilby books fit for an Easter King!