Traveling Australia's Dog Fence
Photographs by Medford Taylor
Text by Thomas O'Neill
Proper respect must be shown the fence, the 3,307 mile long appendage of Australia’s four-billion-dollar (Australian) wool export industry. The dog fence is longer by almost a thousand miles than China’s Great Wall, snaking across the outback from the cold surf of the Great Australian Bight off South Australia all the way to the cotton fields of eastern Queensland, just shy of the Pacific Ocean. It was erected to keep out hostile invaders, to stop dingoes, Australia’s wild dogs and top predators, from killing sheep.
Never mind that more and more people—conservationists, politicians, taxpayers, and animal lovers—say that such a barrier would never be allowed today. With sections of it almost a hundred years old, built by bushmen traveling with camels, the dog fence has become, as conservationist Lindsay Fairweather ruefully admits, "an icon of Australian frontier ingenuity."
Icon of ingenuity or symbol of an unhealthy and overgrazed landscape? Travel the dusty roads aside the dog fence and listen to its protectors and critics.
NGM 1997/04