Hi,everyone thought I would discuss the problem I have to
see if anyone could shed some light it for me, because it doesn't make sense.I currently hunt along the N.S.W border pigs,foxes that sort of thing,also have an R-licence with the game council of NSW.I have rural background working on properties many around far SE QLD.Now my son and I dont get to spend much time together so when we do we go bush.Latley we have been trying to get some access to hunt rabbits a few hours from Brisbane as the price of fuel a everything else has gone up.Everyone I have spoke to says NO,I know where the farmers are coming from as they are protecting their land and lively hood,but all shooters are not the same,some of us just enjoy being out in the bush,spending time with our kids and family,fishing and camping.So at the end of the day when you have honest ,responsible people that just want to do the right thing and help out the farmers buy controling a few bunnies.Maybe thats why the country will never get on top of our feral aniamal problem,maybe the farmers and land owners should have a good look at their pest management programs before they go knocking back the next bloke that comes along to do a bit of pest control.I hope I havn't upset anyone buy writing this but I think we should all get on the same page.Thanks for reading Glen.

It's a tough one Glen and no matter how many knock backs you get, there's always two things you have to keep on doing: you have to keep trying and you always have to put yourself in the farmers shoes.

A lot of farmers, particularly those within reach of the cities, have had very bad experience with morons (they're not even worthy the title of shooters) shooting stock, trashing paddocks and damaging fences or leaving open gates. At the end of the day their land is their livelihood and their family's livelihood. Would you let a stranger into your place of work and trust that they wouldn't screw around with the goings on of the business? Because that's what you're asking of a farmer.

I've spent most of my life hunting private property and recently public lands under the Game Council scheme. The most important thing for successfully hunting private lands is trust. Once you have built up the trust - and providing you never do anything to dismantle it - you should be in for as long as you can keep going there; it'll also open a lot more doors on neighbouring farms.

It would be safe to say that most landholders would do anything for a regular, reliable and efficient method of controlling pests; their existance costs the farmers money after all. But a hunter who wants to head out only a few times a year, when it suits them, isn't necessarily what a farmer is looking for and why it doesn't make much difference if they do or don't let a hunter onto their property. I've been a part of a dedicated pest animal control group and to be honest it's hard work and not what I'd call hunting. The reason we did it was that it was a way of building the trust and giving the farmers a reason to let us onto their property to hunt the critters we wanted to hunt, when we wanted to hunt them. The pests in question were also doing a hell of a lot of damage environmentally and financially. We were happy to help them out.

As for your problem. The only things I can suggest are:
- Use another 'in' to approach a farmer; fishing, a place to camp with your kids etc. For me I use photography. This gives the farmer the opportunity to get to know you with as little risk posed to him as possible. Then once the trust has built, that's when you ask if next time you can bring along a 22 to barrel some of the rabbits you saw.
- Target a small local area, don't spread yourself over a huge area. Farmers talk, small communities talk and if you get onto one property, do all the right things, help out the farmer from time to time, then you can either use him as an unofficial reference or your reputation as a good bloke will spread by word of mouth.
- Don't have the attitude that you're there to do the farmer a favour. He's gone on this long without it, he can go on longer. He's doing you a favour and never you forget it. In return always offer to help out around the place, give him reports of anything untoward you've seen or come across. Don't spend all your time hunting.

Persistance is the key and if you stick with it you'll eventually get yourself access to a property.

Good luck!

Awesome post BW. Your point about not stressing that the shooters are doing the land holders a service stands out for me. At the property where I go shooting out west we always take something out for the farmer, nice fresh seafood, give him a hand with some fencing, let him know of any damage to fences etc etc. The biggest thing that puts a smile on his face is when you knock over a dingo, he really couldn't give a rats about pigs which is what we go after. I reckon shooters really need to get over themselves to a certain degree in this regard. I don't think any of us would hunt ferals if it didn't have some element of fun in it. Actually, if you want to ask someone about how much fun it is to go shooting, hit up a roo shooter lol. Most of them are over it! Doesn't dent my enthusiasm though!

In the last thirty years there has been a very large shift in farmer sentiments towards shooters and access to their properties.
Unfortunately that has created a situation where highly responsible shooters are now lumped in with the nasty types of big city shooters that many farmers have had unfortunate and bad experiences with.

Quite a few years ago there were a number of court cases where farmers were sued by illegal trespassers when those trespassers injured themselves while trespassing on a property.
The trespassers won their cases in a few instances until the law was changed.
At one stage it appeared that any injuries from barb wire fencing would make a farmer liable for those injuries even when trespassers illegally entering the property for criminal reasons injured themselves while climbing over the barb wire fence.
The law was eventually changed but there is still considerable potential liabilities for the land owner and operator even if the intentions of the trespassers are to commit a criminal act.
Grossly biased laws and regulations from the OH & S that are heavily biased against owners / operators have not helped the owner / operator either.

The real problems started with the large influx of southern Europeans and middle eastern ethnic type migrants some 40 years ago.
In some of those European and middle eastern regions regions there are long held traditions now promulgated into laws that allow hunting across privately owned land.
These ethnic types from these regions just assume that they can and do come onto any private property here in Australia and can just start blasting away at anything and everything regardless and I am talking about wide open grain growing areas and paddocks.
Carloads of them just use to just drive anywhere onto a property and start blasting away.
They quite often became very nasty and threatening when ordered off the property
I personally have evicted a number of these "shooters" over the years.
All had the same standard lying answer, we asked the guy up the road there if it was alright to shoot here and he said yes!
Most go eventually but on a couple of occassions it became nasty and in one instance one of the group started to point a gun a me until one of the others jumped in front of him and screamed at him.
This was far from an isolated case as many neighbors have had similar experiences with ethnic types from the big city, Melbourne in this case which is 300 kms away, where they were threatened when they tried to evict shooters who were trespassing on their properties.

In the 50's and 60's there were no real problems with shooters as they nearly always sought and got permission before shooting. They understood the land owner's situation as in those days nearly everybody still had some connection with the land as they all had relatives in rural areas or had some sort of rural experience or background so knew the psychology of land owning and and owners.

The sheer arrogance of some of these mostly southern European and middle eastern ethnic types when it comes to trespassing and shooting on properties is almost unbelievable.
In one local case, the farmer had not visited a somewhat distant paddock for a couple of weeks.
When he did so he found large commercially printed signs on the gate to the paddock ordering all other shooters away as this was reserved for shooting by a particular group, which is the first that the farmer knew about any shooting on his property.

After the Port Arthur massacre, the gun laws and particularly the law that requires written permission from the land owner / operator before somebody is allowed to shoot over the property has almost eliminated the ethnic and blast away trespassing type of nasty shooter as it has given a firm legal base and a good level of legal protection to the farmer against this type of activity.
The other big factor in reducing what was an increasingly serious problem for us farmers was the police pressure on the publishers of the ethnic news sheets to publicise just what the Australian and state legal requirements were for shooters and what the potential legal consequences were for trespassing and illegal shooting without written permission from the land owner / operator.

For my part while still farming, although not at all into shooting and hunting myself, I welcomed the local shooters and those I knew who were after foxes, rabbits, cats and similar vermin.
The introduction of these vermin into Australia is one of the biggest blights and reflections ever on the intentions and intelligence of those who persisted with these introductions in an attempt to make Australia just like Old England

I did not allow quail shooters and other similar game shooters as I like birds and other native animals and tried to protect them.
And don't call me an environmentalist as I detest the hypocrisy of most of them.

It is very unfortunate that those genuine and responsible hunters and shooters who are only hunting vermin, cats and introduced pests of all types should have been classed along with the arrogant, trespassing and often criminal and deliberately damaging, totally irresponsible mostly city origin shooters that have no affinity for rural areas nor any understanding of farmers or any respect for the rights of the farmers in protecting their property and ownership rights.
Unfortunately it is nigh impossible for a farmer to differentiate between the well intentioned shooter that he does not at all know and the irresponsible and casual shooting riff raff who have the potential to cause him much grief.
And even with the well intentioned shooter, while everything is going along OK then good but if something does wrong, often somebody who may appear in every way to be a reasonable and responsible person will turn nasty if they think that they can get some money to "compensate " them when things have gone wrong while they are on another's private land.

Oakey, I know exactly where you are coming from and I and I suspect a lot of farmers are sympathetic but in the end it is simply not worth the risk of losing your farm if you are sued by some out of nowhere shooter who has injured himself while on your property and decides that there is a nice little compensation package to be had if he sues you, the farmer.

Shooting rabbits is ineffective at controlling their numbers, unless you have an army out with lights every night for weeks. I looked into that option for my rabbit problem a while back, but apparently it doesn't eliminate them or even control their numbers very well.

Resorted to Pindone. That worked.

I have a mate who does a lot of shooting and he doesn't have a problem finding properties to shoot on. He caretakes properties as a part time job so the owners can have a break, go on holidays, get medical treatment, or manage the place when it is being sold etc. This way he gets to know the owners/agents and as part of his duties he will offer to assist in feral control. He mainly works Townsville west to NT border and north to the Gulf. This has put him in good stead with a fair few property owners but he refuses to allow shooters on to properties he is managing. He is, after all, responsible for someones livelyhood.

That maybe an option for a few people to take up. There are a number of property caretaking businesses that you may be able to contact and see if that is suitable for you to look after somewhere for a couple of weeks.

OK, so he's single now and has a grown family, ex military (Infantry but I'll get to that later) and has tickets to drive most plant and equipment so he can put in a new road with a dozer and then finish it off with a grader, has no problems with dam excavations and that sort of stuff. Is a dab hand at fencing, much as he hates it, and can turn his hand to mechanical repairs, a bit of carpentry and some bush plumbing.

He also gives a detailed briefing to the clients when he leaves including photos, stock reports, grass heights, fences, gates, dams, tanks, bores, roads, rainfall or lack thereof, creeks etc. This is something we learned as an infantry soldiers and that is to observe the area immediately around us and to be able to make a pretty decent report on what we saw. (It becomes second nature after a while that you unconciously note things that you can recall at a later date like all the creeks flow in a certain general direction or that a series of hills run in a certain orientation, the types of ground, the types of trees and their average heights etc) He also keeps very accurate records of anything he shoots, where (GPS Marks)and when and why. On one of the properties he looked after a few years ago he spent 3 months tracking and shooting a number of feral deer (from his records its 35+). He won't tell me where it is because he keeps getting invited back each year to do another cull and doesn't want anything to jeopdise this property or his invite.

In other words he becomes an asset for the owners not a liability.

Be prepared to do some homework about the area you want to shoot in. Find out what the local problems are, drought, crop prices, weeds, ferals, etc and talk to the property owner and see if you can come to a mutual agreement about what you can use his property for and what benefits you can offer to them if they allow you onto the place.