What is the rabbit disaster that occurred in Australia that began in 1859?

In 1859, a man named Thomas Austin, a landowner in Winchilsea, Victoria, imported 24 wild rabbits from England and released them into the wild for sport hunting. Within a number of years, those 24 rabbits multiplied into millions. By the 1920s, less than 70 years since their introduction, the rabbit population in Australia had swelled to an estimated 10 billion, breeding at a rate of 18 to 30 per female rabbit per year. of trees and reduced agricultural yields. For most of the nineteenth century, the most common methods of controlling feral rabbits were to trap and shoot them.