Excerpt from communications between the Apollo 11 spacecraft and its mission control in Houston, Texas. Enroute to the moon.
Pt.1 - Out of the Briar Patch
Collins himself did not reach the moon, but instead piloted around the moon while his crewmates toured down to the surface. His command vessel in lunar orbit, Collins sailed over the moon rabbit, and its mortar and pestle that pounds the elixr of life.
In 2013, a Chinese lunar rover named Yùtù (Jade Rabbit) explored the surface of the moon on the Chang’e-3 mission to the moon, fulfilling a mythalogical journey that was imagined across cultures who have recognised the shape of a rabbit in the face of the moon, for thousands of years.
Three years after Apollo 11,as John Young stepped out of the Apollo 16 Lunar Module and became the 9th person to stand on the moon, he chose the words: "I'm glad they got ol' Br’er Rabbit here, back in the briar patch where he belongs".
Br’er rabbit is the trickster hero from folk traditions of enslaved West Africans in North America. In Br’er Rabbit and the Briar Patch, a fox captures him, while he yells out ‘Whatever you do, don’t throw me into the briar patch!’ When the fox tosses him into a thorny bush, where Br’er Rabbit safely hides, he teases the foxes stupidity: ‘I was born and raised in the briar patch!’
While mostly based on stories originating from West African folktales, the stories of Br’er Rabbit and the Briar Patch are identified by some as an amalgamation of Cherokee rabbit stories too. Br’er Rabbit is an archetypal trickster, outsmarting predators as a cunning and outwitting prey animal. Kicking and laughing and dancing as he runs. ‘Why don’t you try to snare me?’
The stories of Br’er rabbit were popularly sold to white audiences in the ‘Uncle Remus’ stories. Uncle Remus is a fictional ‘free’d man’ and storyteller, who author Joel Chandler Harris approximated from enslaved storytellers he had met while touring the plantations of the deep south. Br’er rabbit was later adapted into animated series and films by Disney, and is regarded as the prototypical character reference for Bugs Bunny, who first appeared as a nameless hare that outsmarts a hunter known as Porky Pig. (Before Elmer Fudd.)
Bugs Bunny himself traveled to the moon as a reluctant participant of American space exploration in 1948’s Haredevil Hare.
“No no, I don’t want to go - I’m too young to fly - stop! I’ve got a wife and kids, million’s of kids! Help! I don’t wanna be a hero!”
After a rocky landing, he begins pulling pranks on Marvin the Martian. Diffusing a plot by Marvin to blow up planet earth, Bugs detonates the alien Uranium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator on the lunar surface, shattering the moon into rubble and leaving it hanging in it's distinctive waning crescent shape. Whether knowingly or unknowingly, the episode writers added bugs bunny to a pantheon of cheeky, foolish and divine rabbits who have given the moon its character through some kind of cataclysm or event.
In England, Br’er rabbit emerged in a more pastoral setting, as the carrot-stealing trickster in the tales of Enid Blyton, and in Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit. Although wrapped in imagery of the English countryside, Peter Rabbit’s stories of survival are iterances of tales from the deep south.
Beatrix Potter’s life is itself tied to slavery, as her grandfather owned a Manchester Cotton Mill that brought her family it’s wealth. She openly admitted her inspiration from Br’er rabbit only once, in a letter to her publishers, but later denied the connection.
The heroic and cheeky character of Peter Rabbit bears no resemblance to prior rabbit archetypes of northern europe, such as the celestial and occult hares of folklore who travel into the earth, carrying messages into the underworld and communing with spirits. Or the Easter/Eostre rabbit, transformed from an injured bird by the goddess of spring, who continues to lay eggs in gratitude for the seasons renewal.
Pt.2 - Into the creek
As a baby I was given two hand sewn rabbits reminiscent of Beatrix Potter, and I was soon identified with them by those around me. Their faces (just a few stitches indicating eyes, a nose and a split lip) would fall off from the wear and tear of brushing against my cheek, and were sewn back on by my grandmother, each time, causing me a bit of distress as their faces changed. People bought me rabbit things, and my mum would read me stories of rabbit families.
Something warm, collaged and cradled, magic hidden inside the drawer with the biscuit tin and the long heavy scissors.
I could tell in my child mind that these rabbits were somehow different from the ones that turned local riverbanks into crumbling clay. Or could be seen bounding across dry Victorian paddocks and eroding dams. Those were cursed, killed, never held or swaddled. My rabbits came from a greener, prettier place, where they wore dresses and bowler hats and carried baskets in english fashion. After adopting a pair of rabbits at a later stage, I quickly summised that they don’t make great pets. They aren’t companion species, (in Donna Harroway’s language) as we have no reciprocal species partnership with rabbits, we are not symbiotes and they are not entirely domesticated. However, they certainly have sailed on our boats as captive fodder for sport hunting, as pets or for food, as test subjects in chemical products, in turn boosting their numbers on far and new corners of earth.
The introduction of rabbits into Australia was the fastest spread of any mammal, ever recorded, anywhere in the world. While a handful arrived with the first fleet, the species thumping along the riverbanks can be traced back to a group of 24 rabbits released for sport hunting by Thomas Austin in 1859, at his manor on Wadawurrung country, near Winchelsea. In what seems like a lie to himself, Austin stated “The introduction of a few rabbits could do little harm and might provide a touch of home, in addition to a spot of hunting.”
The banks of the creek are crumbling, the bait is rich, come help us eat!
‘A touch of home’ was exactly the delusion of the destructive Acclimatisation Society, who introduced various plants and animals to ease their contempt for this place where “trees retained their leaves and shed their bark instead, the swans were black, the eagles white, the bees were stingless, some mammals had pockets, others laid eggs, and it was warmest on the hills...” as Australian settler, J. Martin, complained.
Within 7 years, hunters bagged 14,000 rabbits on Austin’s estate in the span of a year. Within 30 years, the rabbit proof fence was spreading accross Queensland into the red centre, to curb the plague of rabbits, that had severely impacted the sheep farming economy.
During the depression era, Rabbits were a source of meat in lean years, many people shot or trapped rabbits for food, or even became rabbitohs – itinerant rabbit-sellers. At the end of the second world war, without people to cull them, the rabbit population peaked at around 600 million. The current population estimate is over 200 million.
Rabbits feed heavily on the seedlings of native vegetation, completely preventing new growth in some areas. They also form the base of a feral food chain, sustaining large numbers of cats, foxes and wild dogs.
They now threaten over 300 native species, and have played a role in the exinction of species including the lesser bilby, which inspired an easter chocolate campaign replacing the easter bunny with a chocolate bilby that raises funds for rabbit extermination.
When I walk through the supermarket and see the lines of golden Lindt bunnies wearing their bell collars, I don’t know what character I am looking at. Here where we celebrate the festival of spring in the middle of autumn, and myxomatosis-eyed rabbits buck in public parks.
Through attempts at nationbuilding, placemaking and conservation, native and introduced animals in Australia have been contorted into all kinds of mascots and myths. The Easter Bunny is the Easter Bilby, and the Tasmanian Devil rides a surfboard on a t-shirt.
In 1998, John Marsden and Shaun Tan painted rabbits in British redcoats, wrecking the land and subjugating the marsupial numbat-like creatures as a way of teaching children about the horrors of colonialism. They are the archetypal invader, uncomprimising and destructive, multiplying and multiplying.
“Rabbits, rabbits, rabbits, millions and millions of rabbits. Everywhere we look there are rabbits. The land is bare and brown and the wind blows empty across the plains. Who will save us from the rabbits?”
On a spring evening in Melbourne, the rabbit on the moon shines full over a lavender sky. I see them sitting on the bank by the river, in some kind of paradise, with oceans of invasive grasses to chew on. So cute and destructive, popping out of the rich brown soil. With all of their contradictive characterisations, rabbits chew at the thread between animal and archetype. As something strung out in the colonial gap between nature and culture, an abandoned species, among many abandoned species, they fend for themselves as a flimsy and flopsy symbols of fertility, deception, invasion and innocence.