Tooth and Nail

Tooth and Nail is an indispensable history of how Europeans, through the introduction of a single species, changed Australia forever.Tooth and Nail is a beautifully written and wonderfully entertaining history about human reactions to the rabbit. A survivor of drought, fire, flood, diseases, predators and poisons, this small and rather attractive creature has irrevocably transformed our environment and influenced social, political and cultural life in this country.Coman describes everything from nineteenth-century poisoning techniques to destroying rabbit warrens with explosives, from the many weird theories circulating as to how to destroy the rabbit to Louis Pasteur's attempts to infect Australian rabbits with chicken cholera. He tells the extraordinary postwar story of the battle against the rabbit, including the unprecedented impact of myxomatosis and rabbit haemorrhagic disease.Brian Coman was research scientist with the Victorian Department of Natural Resources for twenty-three years and is currently an Honorary Associate in Humanities at La Trobe University, Bendigo. He has been a contributor to numerous book and journal publications, and a collection of his essays, A Loose Canon, was published in 2007.textpublishing.com.au'Splendid...so deeply informed, so fair-minded and so well expressed.' Peter Ryan'colourful, clever and richly entertaining...an engaging read', Weekend Australian'beautifully written and filled with anecdotes collected over a lifetime', Tim Flannery, Sydney Morning Herald