Let us speak plainly of the mouse. Not the timid creature of children’s tales, but the seething, squeaking, grain-devouring legion that now sweeps across New South Wales and Queensland. This is not a natural disaster.
This is a judgement. A symptom of a civilisation that has forgotten how to husband its land, its people, and its pride. The Roman Republic fell not to barbarians at the gate, but to the rot within.
So too, I fear, does Australia face its own internal vermin: not just the mice, but the complacency, the bureaucratic inertia, the romanticisation of rural life. The plagues are back, and with them, the ghosts of 1993, of 1917, of a colonial past that knew how to fight nature rather than placate it with platitudes. The farmers weep, the government offers crumbs, and the mice multiply.
This is the price of a society that has traded grit for grievance. Solve the mouse plague? First, cure the plague of the soul.
