NAKED CITY – A PLAGUE ON YOUR MOUSES!

NAKED CITY – A PLAGUE ON YOUR MOUSES!

With Coffin Ed.

There is something about plagues of critters, be they rats, mice or other vermin, that is always biblical. They seem to appear from nowhere as if by some kind of existential control although it’s generally chemicals or biological warfare that drive them away – rather than prayers to God. That’s not to say they weren’t sent from above in the first place!

Plagues of both rats and mice have always been part of both the rural and urban Australian landscapes. Parts of South Australia are currently experiencing some of their worst ever mouse numbers as they devastate crops and invade houses and gardens. Many of us would have seen historical newsreel footage of similar plagues right throughout Australia from the 50s onwards. In 1993 the country experienced its worst ever mouse plague in South Australia when an estimated half a billion field mice gobbled up some 500,000 tons of wheat.

Rats have always been unwelcome citizens of the City Of Sydney, and in recent months have hit the headlines as they run riot throughout the CBD and inner city. Needless to say they posed an even bigger threat back in the early 1900s as carriers of the bubonic plague.

On a slightly lighter note in the 70s and 80s, I can remember a number of visits to Sydney’s Roma cinema in George Street, which stood directly on top of the underground train tunnel from Central to Town Hall. Not only could you hear the incessant rumble of trains beneath during movies such as Fellini’s Satyricon, but it was not uncommon to spot rather large rats running up and down the aisles  – invaders from the tunnels below in search of popcorn and other candy bar treats. It’s no doubt apocryphal but legend has it that one mohawked punk grabbed one of the tunnel rats during a screening of The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle and bit its head off.

Whilst rats are likely to be with us forever, the question arises as to what we can expect in the immediate future when it comes to a plague like invasion of rodents, insects and the like. The Bible, in the book of Exodus, talks about a plague of frogs in Egypt and suggests “they will come up into your palace and your bedroom and onto your bed, into the houses of your officials and on your people, and into your ovens and kneading troughs.”

Other than finding one in your favourite loaf of bread, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing – and a thousand or so frogs frolicking in Sydney’s Archibald Fountain would surely be a huge tourist attraction. Locusts on the other hand could be a real nuisance, especially if they “cover the face of the ground so it can’t be seen” as the Bible dictates. Sporting events would definitely be disrupted as playing fields all but disappeared underneath a carpet of swarming grasshoppers.

Laugh if you like but any overabundance of any insect can be a threat to modern day existence with the malaria spreading mosquito widely acknowledged as the biggest killer of them all. Throw in freshwater snails, fire ants and Assassin bugs and there’s a menagerie of creepy crawly, stinging nasties out there, just waiting to explode in numbers and invade the country like in some kind of Hollywood B grade movie.

There’s certainly some scary stuff in the Bible when it comes to plagues and maybe we should look to it as a source of genuine ecological prophecy. We should never underestimate the appetite that rats, mice and insects have for the food that we take for granted. You only have to look to Joel 1:4:

“What the gnawing locust has left, the swarming locust has eaten; And what the swarming locust has left, the creeping locust has eaten; And what the creeping locust has left, the stripping locust has eaten.”

Then again, we could always make a meal of the locusts themselves!

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