2023-12 Rabbit Sweep Meeting Report

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Subject: 2023-12 Rabbit Sweep Meeting Report
Date: 19 December 2023 11:08:06 am AEDT
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 Rabbit Sweep
- a BLG Rabbit Action Group Project.

This newsletter is for those interested in the development of a whole-of-peninsula rabbit control project. If you do not want to receive the newsletter, please let us know.

Thursday 14th December 2023, Meeting Report

Thank you to everyone who was able to join the meeting. We were a small group wth a lot of different ideas which is a great strength of the group.

We had, as our agenda, working on comments about the two 'white' papers - one now being seen as the
• Rabbit Sweep Infrastructure paper
and the other as the
• On-ground Works Management paper.
Instead of working directly on these papers, we had a wonderful chance to hear important suggestions as to how we should develop our project.

Please do not feel worried about the papers right now because after that meeting, there is a lot of thinking and catching up to be done. Some of the ideas from the meeting urgently need to be brought into focus so that will happen before we do more writing. You will receive a newsletter telling you what we are doing in the next few weeks but please enjoy your summer break in anticipation of the newsletter!

Of course, you are most welcome to read the current versions of the papers if you wish, and your comments will be most welcome. Comments should be sent to

The meeting resulted in some thinking about the following points in particular :
• we are asking many landholders from a large region to join with us in improving the environment we all enjoy - so we need to think carefully how to structure our activities so we hear everyone's concerns and ideas. Our chosen approach is to mobilise the community so sovereignty belongs with the community, not Landcare;
• we recognise that many people do not know much about how to work on rabbit populations and they have very different attitudes and resources available for such work (there is a wide range of methods that can be chosen from, according to the landholders' circumstances, but they need to be identified and clearly explained);
• most significantly, we have First Nations people living on our peninsula and we want to learn from them how the community might come to understand and further their interests in what we can do, and how we can include this in our community development work;
• in particular, we need to know how to communicate with and engage peri-urban landholders in our community development;
• we need to find out how people would like to access information, resources, etc. so they need to be asked how they might be best informed;
• to reduce the rabbit population (and maybe do some other things) the 'hows' and 'whys' need to be clear and accessible to everyone wanting the information (so many different decision-making and disbursement approaches will be needed};
• we want to share what we think is good practice but we also want to explain why we might reject some practices and make sure the range covers the breadth of landholders' circumstances (we are planning to work with the Victorian Rabbit Action Network to provide the widest range of information); and
• experts tell us all the time that the devil is in the detail - this is complex work and practitioners seem best informed when they can easily communicate, work with and learn from each other.
As a result of our meeting we have offers for help with all of these aspects of our work. We will try to make sense of all these important ideas and come back to you early next year.

We would like to acknowledge the offers of help especially from:
Michael Robinson, Travis Turner (CoGG), Sophie Small (Bellarine Landcare), Gus Donaldson (Barwon Water), Pearl McMillan (Rotary), David Lucas and Richard Weatherly.

We have been alerted to another funding opportunity coming on board from the Dept Ag. Doug May sent us this and it is with him that we need to work on an application. We will contact him early in the new year.. We think it is time to get help by employing someone to work with us on community engagement. We will need your input and support for this application which will need to be completed by early February.

So we have a lot to do - if there is anything in particular to which you'd like to contribute, please let us know, and also if there is something we should have included but failed to think about.

Both papers are available now:
paper 1 - https://testing.bellarinemac.org.au/index.php/white-paper
paper 2 - https://testing.bellarinemac.org.au/index.php/y
If you have news, ideas, queries, or otherwise, please feel free to share them.
We are keen to hear from you at /

Please note that you can see the Miro board on which Together Apart display what we are doing: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVNDWlwJY=/?share_link_id=250805616819 The Miro Board items change as they are worked on...

contact: rabbits @ Bellarinemac.org.au