I'm writing this from a bentwood chair in a Canberra pub, gin in hand, as the rodent apocalypse unfolds. The great Australian mouse plague, a biblical scourge that has turned the Outback into a writhing, squeaking carpet of vermin, has been described by local farmers as 'like a decaying body.' A fair assessment.
I've seen corpses on assignment, and the smell of a decaying mouse is worse. It’s the stench of failure, of a government that has left its farmers to drown in a sea of rodent filth. But hark!
Who should come galloping over the horizon but the British agricultural experts, brandishing their pest control solutions like knights in tweed. 'Fear not, colonials,' they seem to say, 'we have brought our decades of experience with mice, rats, and the occasional badger-worrying incident.' The Aussies are not amused.
'We don’t need your condescension,' one farmer snarled, his tractor seat stained with mouse urine. 'We need a church to burn down. A plague of fire to cleanse this land.
' Dramatic, yes, but when you’ve found a dead mouse in your breakfast cereal, you’d call for dragon fire too. The British solutions are, of course, a masterpiece of understatement. Traps.
Poisons. Cats. I can see it now: a regiment of Cheshire cats, grinning smugly as the mice multiply.
'We have a system,' the experts say, showing off their spreadsheets. 'Phase one: contain. Phase two: eradicate.
Phase three: sell our book on the subject.' But there is no containing a plague that has turned the sky black. The mice are not just in the fields; they are in the beds, in the toilets, in the dreams of every Australian.
The British government, sensing a chance to prove its relevance, has offered 'logistical support.' That’s code for sending a man with a briefcase and a PowerPoint on rodent psychology. The man’s name is Reginald P.
Thistleton, and he has a moustache that seems to absorb light. 'We have seen this before,' he told a press conference, adjusting his spectacles. 'In the Blitz, Londoners dealt with rats.
It’s a matter of morale.' The Aussies threw a cheese sandwich at him. I can’t blame them.
The plague is not just a crisis; it is a metaphor. It’s the stench of corruption, the squeaking of a political class that has turned a blind eye. The mice are the people, and the cheese is the government.
But nobody gets the joke. They just want the mice gone. And so, as I finish my gin and watch a mouse scurry across the bar, I raise a toast: to the British experts, who will, no doubt, produce a report in six months.
To the Aussie farmers, who will survive with grit and a flamethrower. And to the mice, who will inherit the earth. They’ve already inherited Australia.
The rest is just details.
