Some rabbits came to Australia with the First Fleet, but they were never released into the wild.
In 1859, a wealthy settler released 13 wild European rabbits on his property in Barwon, Victoria to make some shooting sport. Within 7 years, rabbit hunters had caught 14,000 rabbits on the Barwon Estate.
“By 1880 rabbits had crossed the Murray River to New South Wales and had reached Queensland by 1886. In 1894 they had traversed the Nullarbor and populated Western Australia.
To put the dissemination into context, the spread of rabbits over Britain took 700 years while the colonisation of two-thirds of Australia, an area 25 times the size of Britain, took only 50 years. The rate of spread of the rabbit in Australia was the fastest of a colonising mammal anywhere in the world.”
– National Museum of Australia