Bugged by Bunnies, Australians Hunt For the Easter Bilby
At a supermarket in Sydney, Australia, yesterday, Kate Stitt , a mother of two, tossed chocolate bilbies into her shopping cart. At Mosman Public School's Easter celebration, a first-grade class romped in the courtyard with bilby masks, complete with pointy noses, wide eyes and pinched faces. "Every Easter when shopping for chocolate, buy bilbies not bunnies," a group called the Australian Bilby Appreciation Society pleads, illustrating its point with a grinning chocolate rabbit that has a red slash through it.
The Easter bilby? It's an icon that Australian conservationists and farmers dreamed up as an alternative to the rabbits that were ravaging their land. Rather than honor their enemy, they chose a rare native marsupial that was in danger of extinction. Now, more than a decade after the movement began, it still has legs.
"In our family, the bilby reigns over the bunny," says Garry Carnegie, an accounting professor at Melbourne University Private who bought chocolate bilbies for his two children last week.
Introduced by European settlers, rabbits are blamed by the Australian government for more than $400 million a year in damage as they burrow into farmland and chew up cow pastures. The government has planted poison and even spread a virus a few years ago to wipe out bunnies.
The range of the bilby, a nocturnal member of the bandicoot family, once covered 70% of Australia. Today its numbers have dwindled to the hundreds as foxes and cats squeezed it out of its burrows and rabbits gobbled up its favorite foods such as termites, beetles and grasshoppers.
"In Australia the rabbit is a pest, and celebrating it in any form denies the reality of Australia's rabbit plague and the damage rabbits do to Australia's fragile environment," declares the Australian government's official Web site for culture and recreation. The government calls the bilby a "cute-looking creature with big eyes, big ears and a long tail."
Many fans credit Rose-Marie Dusting, a Queensland-based creative-writing teacher known as the "Bilby Lady," for helping the Easter bilby movement take off. In 1979, her 2-year-old son spotted a bilby in a book and cried out, "Easter bunny!" Ms. Dusting quickly began writing a book called Billy the Aussie Easter Bilby. She self-published it and sold 5,000 copies. Later she put out a line of chocolates.
In the mid-1990s, she says, she spotted a copycat chocolate called "Bush Billy Bilby" at a Coles Myer Ltd. store. She dashed off an angry letter. The name of the chocolate was changed to Bush Bilby and Coles later began donating portions of bilby profits to the cause -- more than $270,000 over six years.
The money went into the Save the Bilby Fund, which is co-run by Frank Manthey, a ranger with the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service. "My wife died in 1996 and I devoted myself to the bilby," explains Mr. Manthey, a former professional kangaroo hunter whose own six children were raised on the Easter bunny.
Mr. Manthey hosts "meet the bilby" nights at a local zoo and this week drove four live bilbies to the Royal Easter Show in Sydney. Few people have seen them in the flesh. "It's like the tooth fairy," Mr. Manthey says. "People wonder, do these things really exist?"
He has been lobbying Parliament for a National Bilby Day. A spokeswoman for Ian Campbell, Australia's minister for the environment and heritage, says the minister finds the proposal "strongly appealing." She added that the government has spent nearly $2 million on efforts to save the bilby.
Mr. Manthey runs the fund along with a zoologist named Peter McRae. With money raised from selling bilby hats, ice coolers, tea towels and the like, they have spent more than $300,000 building a 15-square-mile sanctuary for bilbies in Queensland's Currawinya National Park. They hope the few hundred remaining bilbies in Queensland, most of them now in zoos, can rejuvenate themselves there behind a predator-proof fence.
Several chocolate makers have thrown their weight behind the bilby. Darrell Lea Chocolate Shops Pty., which has 600 outlets nationwide, sold a bilby for every eight bunnies last year. Darrell Lea and Pink Lady Chocolates, another Australian company, donate some bilby profits to conservation. "The greenies in particular like them," says John Shellard, Pink Lady's general manager, referring to environmentalists.
But bilbies are still just a small piece of the $154 million that Aussies spend on Easter goods, according to the Confectionery Manufacturers of Australasia. "Ear Today, Gone Tomorrow as Easter Bunnies Continue to Outsell Bilbies," a recent bulletin from the trade group reports. It says that "Australia remains the world's top nation for the consumption of Easter eggs, consuming an average of twenty per head."
"What's a bilby? Is that one of those animals with long ears?" asks Ross Gilmour, a spokesman in Australia for London-based Cadbury Schweppes PLC, Australia's biggest candy seller. Although Cadbury sells some chocolate bilbies, its "Magical Land of Cadbury" Web site ignores the diminutive marsupial, instead promoting "The Tale of the Great Bunny."
Newspapers all over Australia have weighed in on the bilby-vs.-bunny controversy. Imre Salusinszky wrote in the Australian in 2003 that the Easter bilby represented "cultural nationalism gone off the rails."
A well-known local singer, John Williamson, wrote an Easter Bilby song in 2003 to raise money. "Oh we all love the Easter bilby/Pointy little snout/Close your eyes I'm sure she will be/Sneaking all about," it runs. Mr. Williamson says the song wasn't as successful as an earlier koala ditty that raised nearly $200,000.
狂热的澳大利亚人追捧复活节袋狸
周四，在澳大利亚悉尼市的一家超级市场里，身为两个孩子母亲的凯特?斯蒂特(Kate Stitt)将一些巧克力袋狸扔进了购物车。在Mosman公立学校的复活节庆祝活动中，一年级一个班的孩子们带著袋狸面具在操场上玩耍嬉戏，这些面具有著尖尖的鼻子，大大的眼睛，扁扁的脸。一个名为澳大利亚袋狸促进协会(Australian Bilby Appreciation Society)的团体呼吁人们每到复活节购买巧克力的时候都要买袋狸而不是兔子，他们在说明这一点的时候，还在一只咧著嘴笑的巧克力兔子身上弄出一道红红的口子来。
复活节袋狸？这是澳大利亚保守主义人士和农夫梦想以之取代肆虐他们土地的兔子的偶像。他们宁愿推崇一种罕见的、土生土长的、而且还濒临灭绝的有袋动物，而不是对他们的天敌－兔子顶礼膜拜。而今，在袋狸取代兔子的倡议开始的10多年后，这种想法仍然很有生命力。
私立墨尔本大学(Melbourne University Private)的会计学教授?卡内基(Garry Carnegie)说，在他的家庭，袋狸占了绝对的上风。上周，他还为两个孩子买了一些巧克力袋狸。
兔子是由欧洲移民引进到澳大利亚的，它们在农田里到处挖洞，还吃掉奶牛的牧草，澳大利亚政府埋怨兔子每年带来的损失超过了4亿美元。为了清除兔子，政府播撒了毒药，几年前甚至还传播了一种病毒。
袋狸是袋狸科夜间活动的动物，其活动范围一度涵盖澳大利亚70%的土地。今天，袋狸的数量已经减少到尽有几百只，狐狸和猫将它们挤出了地洞，而兔子吞掉了它们喜欢的白蚁、甲壳虫和蚱蜢等食物。
澳大利亚官方网站上的文化和娱乐部分有这样的内容，“在澳大利亚，兔子是一种有害动物，以任何形式对兔子进行庆祝都是无视现实的行为，因为澳大利亚饱受兔灾之苦，而且兔子给当地脆弱的自然环境带来巨大伤害。”。政府将袋狸描绘成一种样子可爱的动物，长著大眼睛、大耳朵和长尾巴。
许多袋狸爱好者把昆士兰州写作课教师罗丝-玛丽?达斯汀(Rose-Marie Dusting)誉为“袋狸女士”，以表彰她为推动复活节袋狸运动作出的贡献。当时还是1979年，达斯汀两岁的儿子在一本书上看到了一只袋狸，然后大叫道，“复活节兔子！”达斯汀很快便著手撰写一本名为Billy the Aussie Easter Bilby的书。她自己出版了这本书，并售出了5,000本。后来，她又推出了巧克力袋狸。
达斯汀说，90年代中期，她在一家Coles Myer Ltd.的商店里发现了一种名为'Bush Billy Bilby'的仿制巧克力。她立即写了一份抗议信。后来，这种巧克力的名字被改为Bush Bilby，Coles也开始将其中的部分利润捐给袋狸保护事业，6年来，其捐助的金额超过了27万美元。
些资金都捐给了拯救袋狸基金(Save the Bilby Fund)，弗兰克?曼泰(Frank Manthey)是该基金的两位运营者之一，他是昆士兰野生动物公园服务中心(Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service)的护林员。曼泰解释道，他的妻子于1996去世，随后他便全身心地投入到拯救袋狸的行动中去。曼泰曾是专业袋鼠狩猎人，他自己的6个孩子均是吃“复活节兔子”长大的。
曼泰在当地一家动物园定期主持“与袋狸相会之夜”的活动，本周他还开车将4只活的袋狸运到悉尼的复活节皇家农展会(Royal Easter Show)上展出。很少有人看到过真正的袋狸。曼泰说，“这就像牙仙子一样，人们不禁想，这些袋狸当真存在么？”（编者按：牙仙子的故事是说，小孩子换牙时，父母会告诉他把牙齿用信封装好，放在枕头底下，早上起来时牙仙子会用钱跟他换牙齿，钱当然是父母给的，用来鼓励小孩子拔牙。）
他一直在游说议会，要求政府设立全国袋狸日。澳大利亚环境和遗产部长伊恩?坎贝尔(Ian Campbell)的一位发言人称，坎贝尔发现这项提案“非常具有吸引力”。她补充说，政府已经花费了将近200万美元用于拯救袋狸的行动。
曼泰与一位名叫彼得?麦克雷(Peter McRae)的动物学家共同运营拯救袋狸基金。他们通过出售袋狸帽子、冰桶和茶巾以及诸如此类的商品筹集资金，并花费了30多万美元为昆士兰州Currawinya National Park国家公园的袋狸设立了一个15平方英里的保护区。他们希望昆士兰州尽剩的几百只袋狸可以在阻挡猎杀者的围栏后自我繁衍。这些袋狸多数原本都居住在动物园里。
数家巧克力制造商也为拯救袋狸行动推波助澜。在全国拥有600家分店的Darrell Lea Chocolate Shops Pty.去年每售出8只巧克力兔子就能售出1只巧克力袋狸。另一家澳大利亚公司Darrell Lea and Pink Lady Chocolates将出售巧克力袋狸的部分利润捐给了动物保护组织。Pink Lady的总经理约翰?谢拉德(John Shellard)说道，绿色组织尤其喜欢袋狸。他指的是环保人士。
不过据澳大利亚糖果制造商协会(Confectionery Manufacturers of Australasia)的资料显示，袋狸还只是当地复活节消费的一小部分，澳大利亚人在复活节商品上的花费高达1.54亿美元。这个贸易团体最近的一份报告显示，复活节兔子的销量仍高于袋狸。该团体称，澳大利亚仍是全球复活节彩蛋的最大消费国，人均消费量高达20个。
总部位于伦敦的吉百利食品有限公司(Cadbury Schweppes PLC)驻澳大利亚的发言人罗斯?吉尔摩(Ross Gilmour)问道：袋狸是什么？是那种长著长耳朵的动物么？作为澳大利亚最大的糖果销售商，吉百利虽然也出售一些巧克力袋狸，但是公司的“吉百利魔幻乐土”('Magical Land of Cadbury')网站对这种濒临灭绝的有袋动物只字未提，反而在宣传“伟大兔子的故事”。
澳大利亚所有的报纸均参与了有关袋狸还是兔子的辩论。伊姆雷?绍卢申斯基(Imre Salusinszky)于2003年在澳大利亚写道：复活节袋狸象征著“文化国家主义已经脱轨。”
为了筹钱，当地一位著名歌手约翰?威廉森(John Williamson)曾于2003年谱写过一首《复活节袋狸》的歌曲。歌中唱道，“ 哦，我们都爱复活节袋狸/它长著尖尖的小鼻子/闭上你的眼睛，我敢肯定她将偷偷摸摸到处乱窜”。威廉森称，这首歌曲不如之前的考拉小曲(Koala Ditty)成功，后者帮助筹集了近20万美元的资金。
