The Rabbits (Marsden, 20102
) tells the story about the invasion of ‘rabbits’ into a strange and
foreign land. On a deeper level, the story is about politics and consequences of colonisation,
cultural assimilation, and the effect of humans on our environment. A powerful allegory,
about colonisation, bandicoots (rabbit-like marsupials from Australia in danger of extinction),
are used to represent indigenous peoples, and rabbits to portray explorers. The design of the
book cleverly integrates the words into the illustrations so that the two work as one. The
sparse text is narrated from the bandicoots, point of view and is used to accentuate, rather