Rabbits are poor conservers of energy. They can’t adapt to drought. Their diet is not diverse. All in all, they are not well suited to the Australian environment. But when it comes to reproduction they can’t be bettered. Mating takes 30 seconds, courtship included. In a single year, one doe can generate as many as 100 rapid-rooting offspring.
By 1950, the number of rabbits in Australia had reached 600 million. They devoured pastures and crops, ringbarked trees and spread erosion with their burrows. Shooting, poisoning, blasting, gassing, trapping, fencing, using...
Jacques Audiard's 'A Prophet' and John Hillcoat's 'The Road'
In A Prophet, a dazzling new film about innocence and power from Jacques Audiard (director of The Beat My Heart Skipped, 2005), 19-year-old Malik (Tahar Rahim) is about to embark on a six-year prison sentence for assaulting a cop. Polite and deferential, Malik is hard to read at first. The little we glean about his life is framed in terms of negatives: he has no contacts, no relatives; he didn’t grow up with his parents, but in juvenile centres. If he’s experiencing fear as he enters the chaos of the prison at Brécourt, he doesn’t show it. He’...
Millionplus Australian real estate for sale
