The dog fence is Australia’s version of the Great Wall of China, erected to keep hostile invaders, in this case hordes of yellow dogs. The empire it preserves is that of the woolgrowers, sovereigns of the world’s second largest sheep flock, after China’s-some 123 million head-and keepers of a wool export business worth four billion dollars to the national economy. It matters little that more and more people, conservationists, politicians, taxpayers, and animal lovers - say that the construction of such a fence some sections of it almost one hundred years old, built by bushmen travelling with camels, the dog fence has become as must conservationists ruefully admit, "an icon of frontier ingenuity’.
The dog fence is an unusual outback monument and to meet the people whose livelihoods depend on it. I spent part of an Australian autumn travelling the wire. For most of its prodigious length the fence winds like a river through a landscape that, after heavy rain has fallen, is scarce to find rivers. It marks the traditional dividing line between cattle (outside) and sheep (inside). Inside is where dingoes, legally classified as vermin, are shot, poisoned, and trapped.