Season 2 Ep 1: Rabbits & other Pests

We start season two burrowing into the story of rabbits and other pests. What started with plenty of (h)optimism has led to generations of damage to our environment and economy.

You can LISTEN to the audio only podcast

Or WATCH a video version of the show!

By Tim Watkin

History is a river; fluid, flowing, always changing and always the same. That bit about history always changing is something that many people find hard to accept. It’s behind us, it’s happened, frozen in time. We often want to come to conclusions about the past and keep it, well, in the past. Wrap it up and move on. But as Billy Bragg once wrote, “The past is always knocking incessant / Trying to break through into the present”.

And it often succeeds. Whenever as a country we debate issues such as inequality, co-governance, free speech, taxes… you name it, history is banging at the door wanting to have its say.

How you see that river of history or hītōria, ah well, that depends on where you’re standing. And when you’re standing there. And who you’re standing with. And what you already know about rivers; or think you know. Perhaps which language you speak. As hard as it can be for people to accept, there is no right version of history, history does not end and our views of the events, people and issues of the past have always and will always keep changing. And that’s a good thing. History is at its most revealing when you approach it with an open mind and a little empathy.

That’s been a guiding principle for the team making the second season of The Aotearoa History Show. Our job is to explain history not to pass judgment on it. That’s a tough thing to do in these times, when people seem more eager than ever to make declarations about the rights and wrongs of history and the people who made it. Standing on at one point on the riverbank, looking at one part of the river while making sweeping declarations about the whole river is likely to get you lots of likes on social media.

But judgment is easy; understanding and putting yourself in the shoes of those who came before is the really challenging and fascinating bit. As L.P. Hartley famously wrote, “the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”. That difference is what makes for the challenge and fascination. Toss in the fact that every person you encounter there is someone’s ancestor or tīpuna (maybe yours), and it’s hard to avoid wrestling with all sorts of shades of grey.

That wrestling is also a good thing, if exhausting at times. We’ve done plenty of it over the past year as we’ve researched and produced this series and one thing we’ve learnt is that history is a minefield as well as a river. No doubt there will be criticism of the series and some explosions, but we have tried to stick to facts when we’re confident we’ve found them (they are like the gold nuggets we discuss in our episode on New Zealand’s gold rushes). Otherwise we’ve tried to present a range of opinions and show where history is contested.

Still, try as we might, a series such as The Aotearoa History Show can’t be made without some level of judgment. We have just 14 episodes and only around 20 minutes per episode. No history can ever tell the whole story, see the whole river. So we’ve chosen topics that capture a wide range of issues and ideas – not just the history of politics, war and race (which, quite reasonably, demands so much of our historical attention) – but also the history of our environment, young people, health, rural areas, law and much more.

We have tried to give voice to many different viewpoints, to ordinary New Zealanders as well as the most powerful and to pick a number of under-told parts of our history that help add new pieces to the jigsaw of our history. Can we understand the Treaty of Waitangi without understanding the Musket Wars? What do previous epidemics teach us about how we’re handling Covid-19? Can we make good economic decisions if we don’t know how agricultural innovations and railways have powered our export trade or the damage rabbits have done to it? How do you appreciate Māori culture today if don’t appreciate how much its evolved through the centuries?

This series has been made for all New Zealanders and, rest assured, by a group of independent producers at RNZ advised by a handful of historians, as well as authors, teachers and iwi. But given New Zealand history is becoming part of the school curriculum the Ministry of Education has funded the project for use in schools. One of the things teachers told us when we consulted with them is that they want history that makes young New Zealanders think and discuss. They want stories that resonate today. It wasn’t hard to find those resonating stories. As the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat but it sure does rhyme. And echo. And hopefully even challenges what we think we know.

Something we’ve added in this series are some references to further reading you might want to do to go deeper into New Zealand history. Because this series is intended as a river mouth, not the whole river. We hope that in understanding our past better we honour all those past events and ancestors back upriver – the good and bad – and those yet to come, further downstream. Enjoy getting your feet wet.

In this episode we look at:

• The introduction of exotic animals to Aotearoa by Māori, and early European explorers like Captain Cook.
• The ideology of many colonists that Aotearoa needed to be “improved” through the introduction of exotic animals.
• How rabbits were first introduced to Aotearoa and why they spread so rapidly
• The impact they had on the land, and farmers.
• The lives of “rabbiters” who trapped and poisoned rabbits for a living in the 19th century.
• The fierce debate over the introduction of rabbit predators such as ferrets, stoats and weasels.
• The introduction of new rabbit control methods such as 1080 and calicivirus.
• The current threat of rabbits to Aotearoa.

For more on this subject:

• Unconquerable enemy or bountiful resource? A new perspective on the rabbit in Central Otago by Rachael Egerton.
• Exotic Intruders by Joan Druett.
• Rabbits: It’s as bad as it’s ever been by Melanie Reid. Newsroom.
• WELLS, P. K. (2006). “An Enemy of the Rabbit”: The Social Context of Acclimatisation of an Immigrant Killer. Environment and History, 12(3), 297–324.
• Rabbits - Te Ara.

Funded by: