Bellarine Rabbit Sweep News

June 2025

• What are we doing?
• Report for work done in 2024-5
• The Rabbit Sweep catalogue
• The lessons from our research
• Proposal for a future

 What are we doing?

The Rabbit Sweep project has tried to find ways of building an infrastructure that will support landholders trying to control their rabbits. We have learnt a lot and think some of the ways of doing things that we now propose may make a difference. We have a few more weeks with our Facilitator Vicki Strachan and in that time want to work out what we might do at an operational level in the future (see below).

Report for work done in 2024-5

In 2024 we were lucky enough to get a grant for our work from Agriculture Victoria. The title was "Building capacity for private landholders’ aspirations and practices for a pest-controlled, healthy Bellarine Peninsula".

Our aims were 

• to give landholders confidence they can achieve worthwhile rabbit control for their efforts and expenses, and
• landholders in long-term relationships working with others gaining expertise in effective rabbit control practices, finding and deploying available, proficient, contractor support.

We believe our achievements included:

• more landholders with confidence to increase rabbit control work exemplified by their action;
• improved strategies for work coordination including cooperation across neighbourhoods and public and private land, and
• infrastructure to support small groups (to be known as ‘local autonomous landholder networks”) becoming communities caring for sustainable environments.

Click here to read the final report

The Rabbit Sweep catalogue

Developing the catalogue has been more difficult than anticipated. Going from 'use cases' to a product is always challenging. Nevertheless, we now have a functioning catalogue. It needs to be populated and the value of it is in this as much as in the resources it refers to.

Our catalogue allows for humans to nominate the subjects of the resources but also to sort them according to the user's interests and to comment on their quality and accuracy. We have an open invitation to others to help us now, both with populating the catalogue, in adding their own resources in some cases, and using the catalogue by simply placing a link to it on their own media in other cases.

 Click here to Explore the Catalogue

Our May 10 Blitz

We had three venues with three different activities and then lunch at one of them. We covered many different tasks, especially as we had contractors who could share their expertise. We are grateful to Parks Victoria, the City of Greater Geelong, the Victorian Rabbit Action Network experts Tim Bloomfield and Brad Spear, the BLG Facilitator Sophie, and David Lucas and the BLG RAG. In particular, we are grateful to the landholders who made their land available and paid for the implosions.

Our image shows the effect of placing small explosives in a warren and destroying the warren after the rabbits are fumigated. This work makes a huge difference to the outcome but needs to be done by experts - see how the vegetation is preserved.

We also consider a good shooter may be necessary as a final step in controlling the rabbits and Wayne Watson turned up just to offer this service! Thank you also to Andrew Wilkens (rabbit proof fencing) and Matthew Cobb (excavator) for bringing their expertise to the Blitz.

Being Landcare, we did on-ground work but not just as a demo - participants could try some of the tasks and ask as many 'silly' questions as they liked. This strikes us as a better way to learn and for us to spread the word, than lectures inside somewhere. And for this we were rewarded with fantastic weather!

Click here to read more about the Blitz and see photos

Proposal for a future

Having done all the work we have done in the last year or two, what should we do now.

Our main motivation for the future is to answer the question: "I have found rabbits on my block - what should I do?"  It is not easy to know exactly what to do, who can help, what about my neighbours - if I do something will I still get their rabbits visiting me?, and more. This sounds like the sort of thing an operational group could manage. It could have equipment that they might hire, it might have the support of experts who could answer questions, it could have volunteers for whom they might pay, or contractors, or even a map of where the rabbits are controlled and not,

We suspect an entity, set up as a co-op, focussed exclusively on rabbit control on the Bellarine, supported initially by environmental philanthropists, would soon find its place. Nobody really wants the environment spoilt by the rabbits.

If you have ideas, or contacts, or even problems, please don't hesitate to contact us via our email address below. We need your help because working together will maximize our impact!

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