General News
26 June, 2025
Catch Up: with Bob Clifford on Nyngan’s rabbit industry
Rabbits may have almost collapsed Australia’s pastoral industry and were incredibly destructive to the environment, but for hundreds of people like Nyngan’s Bob Clifford their meat and skins earned a valuable living.
Bob and Joy Clifford’s property on the Bogan River was once home to a processing operation which at times employed as many as 20 people catching, skinning and freighting many thousands of rabbits for both the meat and skin trade.
Bob was one of the biggest names in the NSW rabbit industry for many decades until around 2001, when the supply became too depleted by biological control agents such as Calicivirus to make it worthwhile.
At one time, Clifford’s were the biggest single supplier of skins to the Akubra hat company in Kempsey, and in Sydney he earned the nickname “Bugs” for his efforts.
The spread of rabbits in mainland Australia began in 1859, when 24 wild-caught rabbits from England were released by an English settler for a touch of home and a ‘spot of hunting.’
They multiplied at an astonishing speed and overran vast areas of the countryside, seemingly unstoppable much to the despair of pastoralists and even governments.
But from this devastation also grew opportunity and many people earned valuable income trapping and selling the animals, particularly during eras of economic hardship.
Their meat was shipped to feed hungry Europeans after the world wars and also fed many Australians in both cities and rural areas, and their skins were prized for their fine leather and warm fur.
Bob’s father George Clifford came to Nyngan to work as an engine driver at the Warrigal Freezer Works on the eastern side of Nyngan.
The facility was originally built as processing works but following a fire in 1928 it was converted into a freezing plant which supplied ice by train as far as Bourke and Cobar.
“Dad’s brother-in-law, Arthur Jardine, got him to come up from Grenfell to look at the engine driver’s job, and he stayed as a bit of a jack of all trades.”
Bob was born in a maternity house on Mudal Street in 1944. His elder sisters June and Glad (Eldridge) apparently took him straight up to the school to show him off and he enjoys claiming to be the youngest pupil through the gates.
He was also taken to visit the Robinson family, who owned Warrigal Station, and it was Mrs Robinson (grandmother of Elaine McLaughlin) who suggested the unnamed baby “looked like he should be named Robert”. So prolific were the rabbits that the Warrigal plant began chilling them. George Clifford purchased the family’s block on Temples Lane near Nyngan and went trapping rabbits for a living.
“Dad worked with two Machin boys – father and uncle I think. There were a lot of them out doing it. It was just about the beginning of the motor age when everybody who worked in the bush had a horse and cart or an old Chevy or an old Ford.”
“They’d go out at night and the challenge was keeping the rabbits cool enough so they didn’t go off before they got them to the meatworks.”
“They have to be at Warrigal before the cut off at 10 or 11 in the morning. Dad used to tell me about the line ups they used to have there each morning. There’d be 40 or 50 horses and carts. They’d each get a docket for what they delivered and were paid cash in hand.”
At Warrigal the rabbits would be frozen and taken to Sydney by train to an abattoir at Homebush where all the skinning was done. The meat was purchased by butcher shops – or shipped overseas to post-war Europe, which was still struggling with food shortages. The skins were also sent overseas where they were made into fur coats and accessories, and to local hat manufacturers. “The fellas that couldn’t get the rabbits to the freezer in time would just skin them and dry the skins out. A skin buyer would come around on a regular basis.”
Sometimes as a boy, Bob would accompany his father on rabbit drives on outlying stations. The rabbits would be herded down a fence line into cages or yards and caught that way.
Bob left school in 1960 and went to work for Dalgety and Company Limited – a prominent pastoral and woolbroking firm. For three years he delivered merchandise out to stations and met many of the owners and managers.
So coveted was rabbit skin that even the large pastoral companies were buying and exporting meat and skins, and Bob was recruited as a skin buyer.
“I was at Dalgety’s for three years and they offered me a job of buying rabbits. I was getting two pounds seven a week, and they offered me a job for six pounds seven.”
Eventually Bob went out on his own and set up 16 cool rooms at locations between the Queensland border to east of Warren.
He had also built a rabbit processing works on his block on Temples Lane, and would buy from trappers as rabbit numbers increased.
The introduction of the Myxomatosis virus to Australia (in 1950) knocked the supply considerably, with scores of the animals not fit for market.
“They just died in thousands. There was another job going around the traps and that where they’re getting all the dead rabbits out and cart them away in truckloads and burn them.”
It was said the number of dead rabbits from myxomatosis and also from on-farm poisoning programs encouraged the population of the blowfly, which has continued to challenge woolgrowers long after the rabbit decline. With the lull in the rabbit trade, Bob trained as an electrician in the early 1970s under Stan White in Nyngan, and worked for the company for five years before forming a partnership with Brian Johnson and working as an electrical contractor.
Whenever the rabbit population increased again enough to make it viable, Bob would continue to trap, and process, with all the product taken to Sydney for distribution to butcher shops and skin buyers.
“We started off with just a Pantec with no refrigeration but when we got a bit more fair-dinkum we got a couple of refrigeration units. One would be bringing the rabbits in from all the chillers right out at the border fence to Nyngan for processing and the other would be running to Sydney.” As Bob tells the story, several cats emerge from his garden shed – a legacy of the time townspeople would drop cats off at the plant to eat the scraps.
“We had more than 20 here at one time but I’ve got them back to just a few now and they’re good for catching mice,” he said.
In the early years of rabbit processing the health and safety regulations on animals considered “vermin” weren’t strict, but during the 1980s they were tightened up, particularly for animals used for human consumption.
“We were getting inspected about once a month and they didn’t tell you when they were coming,” Bob said.
“It did make it increasingly difficult because there were so many regulations in the end.”
In its heyday, Clifford’s plant would be processing several thousand pairs of rabbits each week.
The skinners became remarkably efficient, taking only seconds on each rabbit.
Bob was on one of his delivery trips to Sydney when there was an issue between the auction house selling the meat and skins and the contractor engaged to take the skins from Sydney to Kempsey to the Akubra hat factory.
“That’s how I started with the skins. They asked if I’d do the run. We had a truck with a crate on it and just kept throwing them in. I think there was 2000 kilos of rabbit skin. When we got them all in we took it up to Kempsey.”
It resulted in an ongoing arrangement where Bob would bring skins back from Sydney to Nyngan, dry them on a bowline, pack them into woolpacks and deliver them to Akubra.
Each woolpack would hold around 2000 skins, and Bob remembers one of his final loads being 27 bales.
The 1990 flood was the beginning of the end for the Cliffords’ processing works. The plant was inundated when the Bogan spilled.
Despite this, Bob still kept his hand in for a while, collecting a load and filling backorders but the release of the rabbit calicivirus in 1996, was the final straw for wild rabbit harvesting and he eventually called it a day in 2001.
These days rabbits are commercially farmed to fill meat and skin orders, but Bob still keeps his ear to the ground where the wild populations are.
His days of harvesting them may be behind him, but he still has some leftover infrastructure such as cool rooms which he hires out to people having functions.
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