The Big Rabbit Trap

Rabbits reached plague numbers across inland New South Wales from the late nineteenth century, stripping pasture to bare dirt and destroying the viability of runs across enormous areas. Trapping was not a hobby but an industry: professional trappers worked the country in their thousands, selling skins and carcasses, and for a great many families through the Depression rabbits were both the disaster and the income. The steel jaw trap was the standard tool, and it is now largely illegal.

So a giant rabbit trap on a pub roof in this district is closer to a monument than a joke – commemorating a pest, an industry and a way of surviving hard country, all in one object that most visitors will read simply as odd.

Current Lachlan Shire tourism, Destination NSW and the hotel's own material confirm the pub remains active at 1 Federation Street, and local tourism explicitly promotes the roof-mounted trap as one of Albert's Big Things.

For a village this size to have both a functioning pub and a catalogued Big Thing is a reasonable achievement.

The measurements, any date at all and an attribution: unknown.