From the TVTropes page on “Australian Wildlife,” section “PESTS/NOXIOUS WEEDS/FERAL ANIMALS/TARGET PRACTICE”:
Well, all very much too bad, a cautionary eco-tale, etc. But, rabbits themselves are edible aren’t they? And not that hard to trap. Should be the cheapest meat in any Aussie supermarket, by now. When life hands you rabbits, make hassenpfeffer. In fact, I would have expected the Aussies to have come up with all kinds of new rabbit-recipes, by now. Have they?
I don’t remember rabbit ever being on the menu when I was in Australia, and I ate some pretty usual meats. I doubt there’s alot of people wanting to eat an animal that the government is deliberatly creating virus & bacteria to kill.
Underground mutton was a staple around the time of the Depression.
One of the Sydney Rugby League teams are called the “Rabbitohs” i.e. the hawkers who used to sell them.
Coming off a reasonably substantial grazing property we tried to keep rabbits down to as close to zero as possible. But any rabbit we got was used as dog food. I doubt I’ve ever eaten rabbit.
Selling the skins on the other hand were a regular source of pocket money.
There would be the odd specialty & game meat butcher who’d stock rabbit in the cities but Australians would eat more goat meat than rabbit.
No - you can get rabbit meat but it’s not popular at all. Myxomatosis probably has something to do with that. Also yield vs effort.
Rabbit used to be pretty popular and the rugby league team Russel Crowe used to be involved with was even called the Rabbitohs, this was the cry from the vendor who in depression and war times would call out when selling them door to door.
The simple reason it is not consumed widely is that we can afford steak and to be honest rabbit is gamey and tough if not cooked properly. We are a pretty rich country and rabbit is seen as poor peoples’ meat but during rationing or tough times we have looked to the rabbit as a source of cheap protein.
The exception are sporting shooters who go out rabbit hunting and then consume the meat. A rabbit stew over a camp fire in the Victorian Highlands on a cold night is bliss!
I don’t mind a feed of rabbit but the government took away my .22 semi automatic assault weapon, just too much trouble to get another rifle,you can bake it or stewed up up with pearled barley was traditional aussie meal.
There are still rabbits about but nowhere near the quantities like my granddad would sell skins by the wool bale
Forty years back there trappers who supplied your local butcher shop but you’d be arrested for having a steel tap nowadays , the rabbits in the butcher shop are farmed.
I’m Australian, and I’ve never eaten rabbit. Now, I have a pet rabbit and am sentimental, so I wouldn’t eat it anyway, but I’ve never been offered rabbit meat or seen it for sale. Judging from things my grandfather has said, it was more common when he was young (he’s 87), but not these days.
I’m from NZ, a country with a similar rabbit problem to Aussie (although we never introduced myxomatosis).
Rabbit as a food-stuff is pretty rare. Some people do hunt and eat rabbits (and the other major pest, brushtailed possum).
However, there are issues with TB (rabbits and possums are a bovine TB reservoir in NZ), poison exposure (Dept of Conservation and farmers regularly make 1080 poison drops to kill rabbits and possums, possum trappers use cyanide) and now Rabbit Calicivirus (although it is safe to eat infected rabbits, I would be pretty wary of eating such a rabbit).
Also, at the end of the day, a wild rabbit is pretty slim eating for the work. But I wouldn’t say no to a good, slow-cooked rabbit (or possum) stew.
Si
My grandfather (d. 2005) commented in the last years of his life that when he was a lad, rabbit was pretty much the staple of their diet. Chicken was a rare treat, but rabbit was a meal for every day. Nowadays it’s the other way around. Chicken is cheap enough to eat daily, but rabbits are so rarely eaten that they’ve become a specialty dish and you’ll pay through the nose if you want to buy them.
Hunting them should be easy, there are millions of the little buggers (I can look outdoors of an evening and easily spot 4 or more wild ones running around my yard). If you’re not a hunter and you want to buy rabbit to cook, it’s going to cost you and you’ll have to shop around.
I’m 36, and I’ve never tried rabbit.
There used to be a bloke in the Vic Market who sold just skunned rabbits. My dad was a frequent flyer there (loved a bit of bunny my old man) but both the rabbit-stall and my dad are now long gone.
Rabbit was historically very much ‘povo’ food here in Australia. Cooked up with some spuds and turnip, they were as tough as old boot leather, but provided a much-needed source of protein during the 1930’s depression especially, but also in later years. Kids could make decent pocket-money selling them to housewives, and they kept many families alive in those times, both with the meat and the money raised.
Nowadays, rabbit is a gourMET dish, with farmed animals gracing the menus of posh restaurants. Funny how times change.
I’ve eaten rabbit once. Not enthusiastic to do it again. 
I’m a Aussie, but I’ve never eaten rabbit. I’ve eaten beef, chicken, lamb, turkey, duck, kangaroo, venison, and various types of seafood, but never rabbit.
I used to cook it pretty regularly many years ago when it wasn’t popular. My friends and I would eat plenty of it, roasted over an open fire when we were out culling roos. It was easier to shoot dinner than carry it for days. It’s pretty good if you know what your doing with it, the main “problem” being that unlike stuff bred as food it isn’t full of fat.
The butcher near where I lived had them now and then, and there were a couple of recipes I used to make that everypne seemed to like. I don’t know that the rabbityness of the meat was ever mentioned though. I recall that I did the same thing with kangaroo until someone asked about the “beef” in the Asian salad.
Most wild rabbit in Australia is lean and tough. While in some areas there’s lovely green fields for them to nibble, a significant chunk of the country is dust and scrub. So there’s not lovely, plumptious bunnies, just lean rangy things.
Plus myxi and calicivirus. The animals may be gaining an immunity to the viruses, but nobody wants to eat virus-riddled meat.
Then there’s the fact that as mentioned above, rabbit was a staple for many poor people in the depression. So when times got better, they didn’t feed it to their kids because they grew so sick of it in their own childhood. So their kids never developed a taste for it, and their kid’s kids never did either.
Certain butchers will sell farmed rabbits. At least two butchers in the Adelaide Central Markets do, and I’m pretty sure I see them from time to time at the Foodland down the road.
I personally love rabbit, if it’s cooked correctly. But the cost for the farmed specimens way outstrips what you get back in terms of meat from it. They’re not really any cheaper than other farmed meats and depending on specials and stock prices, are sometimes even more expensive per kg.
I’ve seen plenty of turkeys, possums, kangaroos, and water dragons; glimpsed fox, rat, and koala, but never saw a rabbit around the few places in Australia I’ve been.
Then you weren’t looking hard enough. Any road trip of sufficient distance outside major urban centres will result in spotting several rabbit smears amongst the assorted carcasses.
There’s a defence facility just over the train line from my house. It’s got a lot of large fields and scrubby areas within its boundaries. I used to work there, and on my way in to work from the train station I’d see whole families of rabbits bounding around in the scrub and sunning themselves in the fields. And that’s just the other side of suburban Adelaide.
Is kangaroo any good?
Yes it is, as attested by the fact that I can find it in grocery stores locally, literally on the other side of the planet (it is yummy).
It’s pretty much the same deal with offal.
It can be. I don’t mind a bit of Roo, but I don’t eat it often because my wife won’t touch it. (I think in part because she can’t bring herself to eat Skippy).
It is very lean meat, so you only want to cook it to medium rare at the absolute most, otherwise it gets very tough.
I’ve never tried it after reading about a child that was born blind because the mother contracted toxoplasmosis from kangaroo meat while pregnant. Apparently roo meat is often contaminated with toxoplasmosis and because it’s got to be served rare (or it’s as tough as old boots), it isn’t killed by the heat of cooking.
Maybe that article overstated the risks; I don’t really know. All the same, it killed any appetite I may have had to taste roo.