According to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald titled "Their living gone, rabbitohs queue for compensation" (7/1/97) Rural Editor, ANTHONY HOY, wrote

"At the front of the queue for compensation for the death of the rabbit industry through the accidental release of calicivirus is Phil Newman of Rabbit Traders of Australia, one of the oldest firm of rabbitohs in the country.

A company offshoot, T.A. Sampson & Sons, started business more than 90 years ago, selling rabbits door-to-door in the streets of Surry Hills and Redfern.

The industry's history is intertwined with that of Sydney, with the South Sydney Leagues Club taking the name "Rabbitohs" from rabbit industry sponsorship and fundraising. "

In this article, Mr Hoy also wrote "Sampsons was a key player in the wartime effort supplying 50,000 pairs of rabbits a week to help cover Britain's anticipated food shortage. Theirs was the food of a generation.

That generation, 60s and over, stopped eating rabbit when the news broke of the escape of the calicivirus. Baby-boomers had never come to terms with rabbit cuisine.

Mr Newman's company was left with debts of $750,000 as demand for his product shut down overnight, from peak production of 6,000 pairs a week to zilch, and enough unfilled overseas orders for rabbit meat "to paper my walls".

He is claiming compensation of $4.3 million for loss of profits and loss of value of his business to the year 2020. And Mr Newman is only one of at least 29 rabbit industry entities with claims before the Federal Government."

The article also stated "An entire industry dependent on both the rabbits and the shooters for its estimated annual turnover of $50 million has virtually gone to the wall overnight.

Rated as the best rabbit country in the world, the bare red rolling sandhills of Quinabie Station and Bulloo Downs in Australia's "corner country" bankrolled generations of professional shooters.

Week after week, 12,000 carcasses a week were plaited into pairs by the back feet for a lucrative domestic and export meat trade.

Alcohol-free encampments of up to 20 crack shots, operating out of derelict homesteads and caravans, worked for four to six weeks without a break, earning as much as $400 for a night's work at the going rate of 80c a rabbit. The occasional wild breaks for leave in Broken Hill are legendary.

Just as the accidental rabbit calicivirus escape from South Australia's Wardang Island has virtually wiped out the rabbit populations on Quinabie and Bulloo Downs, so too has it ended the days of the shooting encampments."

Mr Hoy also wrote "The Federal Government is now coming to terms with the possible cost of any negligence resulting in the calicivirus escape.

A secret brief by the Federal Attorney-General's Department is being rushed through for the Treasury and Ministries of Primary Industries and Science and Technology, assessing liability and possible settlement options for the millions of dollars of compensation being claimed by the rabbit industry for loss of earnings through to 2010.

The shooters - characters like Menindee's Spring Watson, Aub Ali, Bluey Adams and Buck O'Neill - speak of the number of gun barrels they wore out, rather than the number of bullets fired.

Most of them cut their ammunition costs by stunning several rabbits with the one shot and chasing them down.

The rabbit calicivirus ended all that. Mr Adams, who had not in living memory ventured closer to civilisation than the Dingo Fence's Wompah Gate - where he delivered his kill and took delivery of the necessities of life - now works on a maintenance crew on the fence, the others having drifted off to pastoral chores in the Never Never.

Mr Newman said: "We have it on very good authority that the CSIRO had decided the calicivirus project on Wardang Island was to be terminated because of uncertainty about its wider biological impact on the mainland.