Rating: **** 4 stars

John Marsden, illustrated by Shaun Tan,
The Rabbits.
Simply Read Books.

Marsden, one of Australia's foremost writers for young people, tends to engage in an uncompromising way with difficult issues. This large format picture book opens with a vision of a pristine wilderness of sky and stone, where reptiles watch the first tiny signs of newcomers, 'the rabbits'. Throughoutu the rest of the book, the wilderness vanishes as the rabbits, which resemble cloned destructive mechanisms, overspread the landscape in a campaign of environmental and cultural obliteration. A despairing narration by one of the pre-invasion survivors suggests that this is an allegory of colonialism and ecological assault. The dreamtime vistas and use of the rabbit as a symbol of the invader obviously works towards such an interpretation in an Australian context; however, other readers in other contexts might construe this book differently: for example, as a plea for cultural or ethnic 'purity', for the sealing of borders and the repulsion of the alien 'other'. This is an intriguingly and troubling polysemic text, its layers of meaning visually represented in collage-like overlays of print and picture. It is thus a fascinating resource for collaboritive reading and interpretation.

George Hunt