Easter in Australia

Easter is a relatively new thing, a product of the great Australian rabbit plagues of the 1940's when wabbits wan wampant across the countryside, destroying cities, bonking anything in their path and conducting smash and grab raids on vegetable wholesalers. To combat this growing problem, the Government of Australia sent in a specially trained army division which was obliterated in the 'Battle for Bunny Crossing' in the spring of 1947.

Desperate, the Australians called on their friends the British who, more than eager to help, dropped an atomic bomb at Maralinga just before Christmas. Millions of rabbits were killed, and so was anything else near the blast. The surviving rabbits were forced deep underground where they copulated furiously and plotted their revenge. Well aware of this, the Government needed something even more extraordinary than a gift from the British to rid the country of this fast breeding, now dangerously mutant menace. But it wasn't until the summer of 1950 that an answer to the problem was found.

The CSIRO had had considerable success combating flaura and fauna problems by introducing predator species from overseas. These included the domestic cat (to hasten the extinction of native species), the Cane Toad (to help combat outbreaks of sugar cane), the cabbage- eating moth (cabbages were responsible for 427 suspected deaths in 1939), the sheep (to combat a shortage of sexual partners in early outback Australia), the locust (to combat the profits of greedy farmers) and Godzilla (a mythical monster with a soft spot for the meat of Japanese tourists).

After mumerous long lunches and several intensive wage increases, scientists at the CSIRO decided to release a disease it hoped would wipe out the remaining rabbits. This disease was myxomatosis, which was carried under the armpit by small tics who liked nothing better than to spend their days climbing in and out of rabbits ears. But myxomatosis didn't actaully kill the rabbits itself, it merely gave the females a splitting headache and so curbed their voracious sexual appetites, which led to the saying "not tonight dear, I've got a headache."

This was a very frustrating time, especially for the male rabbits who soon developed severe anxieties and acute mental complexes. In fact they became downright angry, which led to the condition 'Hot-cross Bunnies' which, over the years, has been shortened to hot-cross buns by deranged linguists who like nothing better than destroying language. Naturally enough, money-minded bakers, cashing in on the enormous publicity, named some of their wares after this condition. Today it is still a popular custom for Australians to eat hot-cross buns after their sexual advances have been turned down.

Realising their quest for world domination had been well and truly thwarted, the rabbits were forced to sue for peace in the summer of 1976. As a condition of this complex treaty, the tics carrying the myxomatosis disease were offered attractive separation packages, the CSIRO scientists received increased funding, and the rabbits were issued with a lifetime supply of condoms, which they promised to use.

There is another, more tragic element to this story however, which involves Floppy, a deranged and extremely frustrated rabbit who, unable to control his urge bonked everything that moved, producing several new and interesting species of creature, the skeletal remains of which are kept in a secret vault in an unnamed museum. For his crimes, Floppy was chastised, spat on, betrayed, blamed for everything wrong in the rabbit world and nailed to a stake. Floppy became a martyr for the rabbit cause, and led a fundamentalist splinter group from Australia in 1982 to make its new home on Easter island.

URL: http://www4.tpg.com.au/users/chrisba/easter_fun.htm