Yowies and rabbits are similar, in that they both have enormous feet. But they are somewhat different, in that yowies don’t exist.
Yet the whole economy of Woodenbong is essentially yowie-based. There’s your Yowie Markets, your Yowie Burger, your Yowies Crossing signs and the Ag department at the High School is planning a Yowie Husbandry course.
It seems crazy basing your whole economy on something that doesn’t exist, but wait: Vatican City has been doing just that for centuries, and getting away with it.
Anyway, whatever, ain’t no yowies near Woodenbong, but there once was a guerilla white rabbit marauding in the mists of nearby Mt Lindesay.
A brief history: Lewis Carroll imported white rabbits to Australia approximately 10,000 years ago.
Why?
Apparently there was some sort of wager or dare between Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, who wrote The Dong With a Luminous Nose, and E.W. Cole, who published Cole’s Funny Picture Book.
All three were loose cats, that’s for sure. E.W. Cole, who had a thing for monkeys, produced many a sketch depicting a monkey getting up to monkey business in his Funny Picture Book. You can read the book free on Trove.
Cole was a particularly loose cat and so he dares the other two to come up with a wiggy caption for one of his drawings.
Lear’s caption went They went to sea in a sieve, which was pretty wiggy. The best Carroll could do was, We’re all mad here, which Cole thought a bit too obvious.
Cole eventually went with his own splendid and succinctly marvellous Rare sport!
Since Carroll was the loser, he had to pay a forfeit, and that forfeit was to do something completely max-wig that would resonate down through the ages. Carroll sent a pair of white rabbits to New South Wales and they took over the joint.
Queensland erected a fence to stop their northward hop. That provoked the rabbits.
They took it right spiteful. Seven of them massed at the border, swearing a fearsome, buck-toothed oath to enter Queensland and play up like a second-hand televisions – or bust. Until such time as the border was breached by gnawing, burrowing or the application of brute bunny force they would terrorise motorists, both north and south-bound.
Their main survival strategy was camouflage, so the white rabbits did not thrive in the Mt Lindesay greenery. Numbers dwindled rapidly to one. A buck. An embittered buck.
He loitered, hopped and terrorised on the ‘Yowie Bends’ south of the border gate for many a long year.
The terrorisation, although ferocious, wasn’t particularly successful. Most motorists didn’t even notice.
Wiggy bush-doofers and No-Dozed truckies would sometimes mumble about “freakin bunnies, man!”, but the first sober folk to go on the record were the corroborative Will Smithers, Alice Piddens and young Big Minch Piddens.
Alice: Hey Will, you drive to Brisbane pretty regular. Have you ever seen a white rabbit on the bends north of Woodenbong?
Will: Yep. Sure. Early of a morning I see him in the fog.
Big Minch: Hey!
Will: You’re the first one I’ve told , except Shirl. I was a bit worried people would call me mad and provoke my drivers licence.
Alice: We’ve told a bunch of people, but no one else reckons they’ve seen it.
Will: Maybe we are mad.
Alice: You and me? Probably a bit wiggy, but Big Minch certainly has both oars in the water, and he saw that rabbit shaking its paw at us, didn’t you, Minchy?
Big Minch: Hey!
Alice: To tell the truth, it freaks me out a bit.
The rabbit disappeared. Will’s gone.
There’s just Alice and Big Minch.
Minch, now 39, wets his pants a bit when he hears koalas growling in the night, but otherwise he’s fine.
Alice scoffs at yowies, but mention The Rabbit and she’ll faint. Hits the deck, boom! And she thinks Alice in Wonderland is rubbish. So cop that, Mr Lewis Bloody Carroll!
A lesson to us all.
Bullgoose
and then