Canned rabbit, once a dinnertime delicacy, now consigned to the burrows of history
Exploded cans of rotting rabbit meat blanketing a scarred jetty is where the tale of the canned cottontail cuisine culminated for the port of Kingston in South Australia.
But despite the local industry's grisly end, tinned rabbit was once in demand on the dinner plates of London's diners.
The stench of the 1906 explosion in Kingston made the local newspaper and helped bring rabbit canning in the town to a standstill.
But in its four years of operation, Kingston's cannery produced some 800,000 tins of rabbit meat for the export market.
It was one of a collection of canneries operating in south-eastern Australia during the peak of the rabbit industry at the turn of the century.
Others opened at Euroa-Longwood, Port Fairy, Portland, and Colac in Victoria, at Port Augusta, Kapunda, and Eudunda in South Australia's mid north, and in the south east at Millicent and Robe — which also canned snipe and swan for export.
"The Longwood cannery was founded in 1891 where it produced rabbit for the dinner table by canning one-and-a-half jointed rabbits in a tin with brine, which was then boiled for canning and sealed with lead solder.”
Between 1870 and 1970, more than 20 billion rabbits were trapped or poisoned in South Australia and Victoria for commercial purposes.
And by the late 1920s, the rabbit industry was reported to be the largest employer in Australia.
The canned rabbit industry was sustained by military orders from Japan, the British Admiralty, and the British and Australian governments during World War I, but had largely disappeared by the 1920s.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-04/canned-rabbit-history-in-south-eastern-australia/103532810
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