I was accused of killing over 100 million rabbits across Australia

I was working Sunday shift when the news broke and it gave me an immediate sinking feeling – the big kind that you hopefully only get once or twice in a lifetime. A potential biocontrol virus being tested to deal with Australia’s huge wild rabbit population had escaped quarantine, jumping about 250 kilometers from the South Australian coast to Yunta, a place so small it’s barely a blip on the map. The authorities said they only knew of two people who had been in both the recently quarantined area at Point Pearce and Yunta – and I was one of them.

All this happened in October 1995. I was a youth reporter, based in Sydney, for one of Australia’s biggest newspapers. There was a lot going on at the time in my round, but one story in particular caught my eye: news of problems with an ambitious plan to wipe out Australia’s vast population of wild rabbits – an alien species that had been introduced from Europe.

The nation’s leading federal science agency, CSIRO, managed the project. It tested a deadly rabbit calicivirus disease at a quarantine facility on Wardang Island, a few kilometers off the South Australian coast. There was still work to be done before the virus was ready for full-scale release. In particular, the researchers wanted to establish that native animals and the environment would not be harmed.

But on 10 October, the CSIRO issued a statement saying the virus had spread to two other locations outside the quarantine area, although it cryptically claimed the virus had not escaped the island. A week later, when I got to my desk in the morning, news broke that the virus had somehow jumped from Wardang Island to Point Pearce on the South Australian mainland. I suggested to my editor that a photographer and I fly to Adelaide immediately and go to Point Pearce.

In the early afternoon, the photographer, Peter Rae, and I got into a rental car and drove through the arid landscape to Point Pearce for a meeting with the government scientists coordinating the quarantine effort.

A member of the local Aboriginal community met us when we arrived and escorted us the last few kilometers to meet the quarantine team. We were the only reporters and it was clear that a rabbit apocalypse had begun – their bodies were scattered around the paddocks. We interviewed and photographed the researchers, and then followed them to a shed where autopsies were carried out.

As soon as the scale of what we had witnessed became clear to the editors in Sydney, they asked me to find a follow-up angle on what it would mean if the virus continued its march out of quarantine control. I called a rabbit meat wholesaler, who in turn put me in touch with a gunner who supplied the skins needed to make the fur felt used to produce Australia’s world-famous Akubra hats.

The next morning we drove to Yunta, over 300 kilometers north of Adelaide. Waiting for us was rabbit shooter Clinton Degenhardt, who looked like a character straight out of one Crazy Max film. We talked to him as he sat in the car with the rifle propped up next to him, talking through the windshield where the glass should have been. He and everyone involved in the rabbit meat and fur industry were afraid of the future.

The next day, the piece ran like a big, front-page story, and for me, I had done my job and was on my way home. For the next 10 days nothing happened. Then came that Sunday, and the terrifying news that the virus had made the huge leap to Yunta.

South Australia’s chief veterinarian at the time told reporters that Peter and I may have been inadvertently responsible for spreading the virus, and a press release to the same effect was distributed. My quiet Sunday shift suddenly turned into a frenzy of meetings as my editors tried to figure out how two of their employees had ended up being the story.

In the following days, the then leader of the National Party of Australia, Tim Fischer, raised the issue in Parliament. He said that if our commitment was proven, Peter and I would “be put to work on the dog control fence” – the 5,600 kilometer fence that separates south-east Australia from the rest of the country.

Fortunately, the scientists responsible for the quarantine soon suggested that it might not be us but blowflies that had carried the virus, and the news cycle moved on. However, it always seemed strange to me that of all the places the virus first reached after Point Pearce, it appeared in Yunta, the exact place we had interviewed the rabbit shooter. Coincidence, conspiracy, cock-up? I never found out.

Competitors’ news channels had a field day with the fact that our big scoop had turned into an embarrassment. My friends and colleagues enjoyed teasing me too. In the first intense weeks after being accused of spreading the virus, I got a copy of Watership Downand countless people thought it was funny to call me “bunny killer”.

But on the other hand, it was also confusing because almost everyone hated wild rabbits and most Australians were impatient to see the virus unleashed. Farmers, endangered species researchers and conservationists were delighted that one of Australia’s biggest pests was likely – at least for a time, until resistance began to build – to be nearly eradicated. And sure enough, in the first two months after that fateful October, at least 10 million rabbits died. In the end, hundreds of millions more would perish across the continent.

Almost four years later, I was at the 3000 square kilometer Erldunda Station, a cattle farm near Alice Springs in Central Australia. Before the calicivirus escape, there had been 20,000 warrens on the property. When I visited, there were almost zero rabbits. When the owner, Bernie Kilgariff, found out that I was the reporter who had been accused of spreading the virus, he rushed to find his visitor’s book. He insisted that I sign as an honored guest, above the Governor-General’s entry itself.