The Dog Fence

I’M TRACKING THE Dog Fence from above in the front passenger seat of a Cessna 206. We took off in the tiny plane a couple of hours ago from the sandy airstrip that services the Wilpena Pound Resort and Old Wilpena Station Historic Precinct situated in the Ikara-Flinders Ranges National Park in South Australia. From up here, the fence looks like a hairline fracture as it traces a path over dunes, up breakaways and across stony downs before spearing away into the far distance towards rust-hued gibber plains. For graziers, this fine silver line represents the lifeblood of their industry. However, it also poses an immense obstacle to restoring Australia’s arid zone, which has suffered catastrophic biodiversity loss and is highly vulnerable to ecological collapse.

The United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which began in 2021 and runs to 2030, is gathering pace. The initiative is a rallying cry for the protection and restoration of global ecosystems to benefit people and nature and mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss. Australia is in a unique position to become a trailblazer in ecological restoration on a vast scale by considering the decommissioning of the Dog Fence as it’s known in SA. With plans afoot to extend and reinforce the fence and increase stocking levels within its marginal grazing lands, the UN initiative provides impetus for Australia to reconsider the fence’s existence.

AT 5614KM, THE Dog Fence is the longest barrier fence in the world. Built to keep dingoes out of grazing lands, its construction began in 1946 and was completed during the 1950s, when disparate existing fences were joined up. It’s a wire-and-wood structure separating eastern Australia’s sheep country, inside the fence, from the north and