Qualla: Dingo Fence

Dingo Fence: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. It runs for 5,614 kilometres, a thread of wire mesh stitched across the belly of Australia from the farmland of southern Queensland to the cliffs above the Great Australian Bight. You could drive for days and never reach its end. The Dingo Fence is one of the longest structures humans have ever built, longer than the Great Wall of China is in any continuous run, and it exists to keep one animal out of the southeast. What it has actually kept out, and what it has let run wild, is a story still being argued today.

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Dingo Fence: The Longest Line in Australia

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Narraburra, CC BY-SA 4.0. The fence begins at Jimbour on the Darling Downs near Dalby and ends west of the Eyre Peninsula, on the Nullarbor cliffs near Nundroo. Most of it stands about 180 centimetres of wire mesh, unremarkable up close, staggering in aggregate. It was once even longer. Until 1980 the bar...

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Image: Narraburra | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dingo Fence: Keeping the Patrol

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Hill, CC BY-SA 4.0. A barrier this long does not maintain itself. In Queensland the Wild Dog Barrier Fence is worked by crews including two-person teams who patrol 300-kilometre sections twice a week, running out from depots at Quilpie and Roma. On the New South Wales side, a team of around thirteen...

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Image: John Hill | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dingo Fence: The Ecology of an Absence

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JulieMay54, CC BY-SA 4.0. The fence has reduced sheep losses, but the cost has been written into the land itself. Ecologist Mike Letnic has documented what happens where the dingo, Australia's top predator, is removed: biodiversity falls, and native mammals grow scarcer. Without dingoes to check them, kan...

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Image: JulieMay54 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dingo Fence: A Barrier With a Shadow

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Maelgwn, Public domain. The fence's history is not only ecological. When construction began in the 1880s, exclusion barriers like this one served the pastoral expansion that dispossessed Aboriginal people of their Country, and researchers such as Dr Justine Philip have argued that the fences also functi...

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Image: User:Maelgwn | Public domain