I visited some friends in a northern suburb of Sydney on Australia Day, and as I pulled up outside their house, I noticed a small collection of people gathered around a patch of nature strip, their lips scrunched into pouts, camera phones pointed at the grass.
As I got closer, I saw the subject of their coos- a tiny, white bunny sitting happily by itself, not bothered by passing cars or the people looming tall around and over it.
Why was such a young, domestic-looking rabbit alone and outside, and why were people simply watching instead of trying to catch it to return it to its doubtless-panicked owner?
I asked my friends about it, and they both laughed. The suburban legend, I was told, was that around a month ago, an elderly lady in the neighbourhood, increasingly bereft of her mental faculties, had released two of her pet rabbits into her backyard, one male and one female.
As she had told anyone that would listen, she felt she had very little time left in this world, and she wanted that time and that world to be filled with rabbits.
She wanted to see them everywhere; jumping about, eating grass; a world of cuteness.
I walked back to my car at the end of a lovely afternoon, and took a small drive through the surround streets. And there, nibbling on every patch of grass, leaping through every front garden, sitting in every driveway, was another rabbit. Colours and sizes of every imaginable combination. Everywhere.
Yes, the old lady is being (probably rightly) described by the suburb as ‘crazy’, and the council responsible for the area is already investigating their extermination options, but there was something utterly joyful about seeing all those rabbits.
And I wasn’t the only one. Despite the tennis and cricket both being televised, and the Hottest 100 countdown already being in the teens, people were outside, watching the rabbits. Laughing. Strolling. Patting.
Most of us want to change the world, but we forget that sometimes it’s as simple as releasing a few rabbits*.
* Metaphor
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Tags: Australia Day, bunnies, rabbits
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