How to Actually Use The Rabbits in a Classroom or Book Club
The Rabbits by John Marsden and Shaun Tan is one of those books that looks simple on the surface and destroys you on the second read. It won the Human Rights Award in 1999 and is taught in Australian schools from year 5 through year 10. If you are trying to use it effectively, most people fail because they treat it like a regular picture book and spend all their time on the illustrations without engaging the text, or vice versa. I ran a unit with this book once and spent two weeks going nowhere because my students were stuck on the literal level. They kept asking why the rabbits looked like rabbits and what the colors meant without actually moving into thecolonization framework. What fixed it was flipping the order and starting with the voice.
Understanding The Rabbits By John Marsden And Shaun Tan
The book tells the story of colonization through the eyes of an Aboriginal narrator whose land is invaded by a race of giant, technologically advanced rabbit-like beings. Marsden wrote the text. Tan handled the artwork. The text is sparse, almost deceptively simple, which is exactly why people underestimate it. The real work lives in the images, and the images do not mirror the text line by line. They contradict it, complicate it, and add whole layers of meaning that are not present on the page as words. For example, one of the most discussed spreads shows the rabbits planting flags and building structures while the narrator watches from the edges. The text says something fairly straightforward about change arriving. The illustration shows the native animals displaced, the sky darkened, and the narrator shrinking in the frame. That gap between what is said and what is shown is the entire engine of the book. If you are trying to get students or readers to see that gap, do not start with symbolism. Start with observation. Have them describe what they see in the artwork before reading the text on the same spread. Then have them read the text and write down every place where the image and the words disagree or add something the words do not say. That exercise alone usually takes about forty-five minutes and produces more discussion than a full hour of lecture-style analysis.
One practical problem I ran into was that students would fixate on the rabbits being "just aliens" and treat the book as science fiction rather than a historical allegory. I solved this by bringing in a short primary source document alongside one of the spreads. A photograph or a journal entry from the colonial period paired with a Tan illustration made the allegory click almost immediately. The metaphor stopped feeling abstract when they could anchor it to something concrete.
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Reading Strategy That Actually Works
Read the book twice before doing any heavy analysis. The first read is for emotional impact. The second read is where you catch the details you missed. Tan packs the illustrations with small references that only show up on a second pass. A bird in the corner. A child holding an object that echoes something from an earlier page. These are not decorative. They are structural. When analyzing the book, focus on three specific elements rather than trying to cover everything at once. The first is perspective. The narrator is consistently placed on the margins of the page or framed through windows, doorways, and fences. This is not accidental. It tracks the gradual removal of the narrator's people from their own land. The second element is technology as invasion. The rabbits do not arrive with swords. They arrive with machines, roads, telegraphs, and weapons. Tan depicts this as a slow suffocation rather than a single battle. Each technological introduction is paired with an environmental cost that gets worse on each spread.
The third element is the recurring motif of birds. Birds appear throughout the book in changing conditions. Early spreads show them freely. Later spreads show them confined, replaced, or absent. Tracking the birds across the book takes about ten minutes and gives you a complete arc of ecological disruption without needing a essay to explain it. A counterintuitive point that beginners miss is that the book is not actually about guilt. It is about grief and complicity. The narrator does not accuse the reader directly. The rabbits never speak. This silence is what makes the book work. If the rabbits had dialogue, the book would become a debate. Without it, the reader is forced into the position of witness, which is a different and more uncomfortable role. The main weakness of using this book in a classroom is that it can overwhelm younger students. The imagery includes violence, displacement, and environmental destruction that some readers find distressing. I have seen sessions where students needed a break halfway through because the tone was too heavy. If you are using this with younger readers, prepare a clear content warning and plan a lighter follow-up activity. Do not dump the book on a group and expect them to process it without support.
Another limitation is that the book assumes some prior knowledge of colonial history for full comprehension. Students who have never encountered the concept of terra nullius or frontier violence will miss large portions of what Tan and Marsden are doing. Pairing the book with a brief historical overview beforehand usually takes twenty minutes and prevents that confusion.
Where to Get a Copy
The Rabbits is in print and available through major retailers. You can find it at Booktopia, Angus & Robertson, Amazon, and through your local library. The paperback edition runs about thirty-two pages and retails around eighteen to twenty-five dollars depending on the retailer. The hardcover exists but is harder to find and usually costs more. If you are ordering for a classroom, the paperback is the practical choice. There are also teaching guides available through Scholastic and some state education departments that include discussion questions and activity sheets. Those are worth reviewing before you start the unit so you know what resources are already mapped out. I have found that reading the book aloud to a group changes the experience significantly compared to silent reading. Marsden's text has a rhythm that works well when spoken. It slows people down and makes them sit with the gaps between sentences. I usually do a single read-through aloud first, then hand the books out for independent second readings where students annotate the margins.
One edge case worth noting: if you are using this book outside Australia, students may not connect the themes to local history. The colonial dynamics are universal, but the specific references land differently depending on where the reader is from. In those cases, drawing parallels to the reader's own local history of colonization or displacement makes the book much more accessible. I have used this approach with international groups and it consistently works better than trying to force the Australian context on readers who have no frame of reference for it. The book stays relevant because it refuses to offer resolution. The final spreads do not show redemption or reversal. They show loss and a thin possibility of change. That ending is why the book stays with people. It is also why it can feel unsatisfying if you are looking for a neat conclusion. You are not supposed to leave this book feeling resolved. You are supposed to leave it feeling unsettled, which is the point.
