Tooth and Nail: The story of the rabbit in Australia

When the First Fleet arrived at Sydney Cove in 1788, its cargo included a small number of rabbits. A hundred years later, rabbits had colonised vast areas of the continent, bringing irreversible change to the country's ecology.

Tooth and Nail is a wonderfully entertaining history about human reactions to the rabbit. A survivor of drought, fire, flood, diseases, predators, and poisons, this small and rather attractive creature has irrevocably transformed the environment and influenced social, political, and cultural life in Australia.

Brian Coman describes everything from 19th-century poisoning techniques to destroying rabbit warrens with explosives, from the many weird theories circulating on how to destroy the rabbit to Louis Pasteur's attempts to infect Australian rabbits with chicken cholera. He tells the story of a Geelong grazier who was one of the first to bring rabbits to Australia.

The book charts the extraordinary postwar story of the battle against the rabbit, including the unprecedented impact of myxomatosis and rabbit haemorrhagic disease. It is the history of how Europeans, through the introduction of a single species, changed Australia forever.