99% Invisible - The Longest Fence in the World

Episode Date: February 24, 2026

How a fence meant to protect sheep transformed the entire Australian landscape. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and a whole week early. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Over the years in this job, I've learned a lot of cocktail party facts about the built environment. For example, the tallest building in the world is the Birch Khalifa in Dubai. But the largest building in the world by volume is a Boeing airplane factory in Everett, Washington. It's 472 million cubic feet. The longest bridge is in China, as is the longest wall. No surprise there. But what about the longest fence?

reporter Shirley Wong traveled deep into rural Australia to find it. The longest fence in the world begins just a few hours north of Brisbane on the outskirts of a small town called Gindawi. Jindawi has a hardware store, an accountant's office, a butcher shop, a beauty salon, and a small hotel on top of a pub. Oh, I've got a meat tray raffle. I love those. But I wasn't here to win a meat tray. I came to Jindawi to meet Doug Henning. He's a former tourism officer who agreed to give me a tour of the fence his town is famous for. Hi, so nice to meet you.

Yeah, thank you. I've been watching the weather. Amazing. The clouds are going that way. So we should be lucky this afternoon. Okay, great. I met up with Doug outside the Jindawi Cultural Center right in the middle of town. And he was standing next to an almost seven foot tall sculpture of a dog.

It's all made from small pieces of metal, welded together. This metallic hound is a dingo, an animal that can only be found on the island continent of Australia. Dingoes are Australia's apex predator. They are smaller than wolves but can run just as fast. They are lean and extremely athletic. They have reddish blonde fur, white bellies, and pointy ears. They look kind of like, I don't know, buff, Shiba Inus. Given this giant prominent statue, you might think that the people of Gendawi worshipped the mighty dingo.

But Doug informed me this is very much not the case. So there's not a lot of dingo fans in town? Not a great lot. In fact, Jindawi's famous fence was built to keep dingoes out. It's called the dingo barrier fence, and it stretches across the southeastern corner of the continent, separating dingoes from the part of the country where the vast majority of Australians actually live. And it is the longest continuous fence in the world. At over 5,000 kilometers, the dingo barrier fence is longer than the distance between San Francisco and New York City.

And in a field just outside of Gendawi is where the fence starts. That big tree there is the true start of the fence and that goes that way. To be honest, it's not much to look at, just a regular wire fence that's about six feet tall to prevent dingoes from jumping over. I want to stand next to it and see if it goes above my head. I think it should. I'm 5'4. Okay, I'm like about the same height of it. You are standing on a 12-inch mound. I am standing on, okay, fair enough. The fence starts here in the middle of a cattle pasture, and from there it runs all the way across the con.

It just goes on and on and on all the way to South Australia. Yeah, yeah, that's lovely. The dingo barrier fence is a remarkable piece of infrastructure, and not just because of its length. This simple wire structure has actually transformed the entire ecology of Australia. It has split the continent in two, separating animal populations and changing the landscape so much that you can see the effects from space. When you drive around Australia, fences are everywhere. are everywhere. They're used to control the movement of a lot of different kinds of animals. In fact, the dingo fence was originally built to manage a different creature altogether.

When British colonizers came to Australia in the late 18th century, they wanted this new place to feel like home. And so they took the plants and animals of Europe with them. And a lot of these species were actually brought in, in a lot of cases, for hunting, to allow people to go hunt these animals that they're used to going to hunt in their home country. This is Thomas Newsom, an ecologist and associate professor at the University of Sydney. So foxes, for example, were brought in so people could hunt them. Cats were brought in, they were kept as pets and they established wild populations. But in Australia, we've got other species that were brought in, deer, pigs, goats.

They were all brought in for some form of a purpose. But that didn't turn out so well. Because of Australia's island geography, the native plants and animals there evolved in relative isolation, which made them particularly vulnerable to invasive species. And without a large number of natural predators, many of these new European creatures ran riot. Unfortunately, all of those, ones I've listed and many more, have created devastating effects on our fauna. The most destructive invader was surprisingly the rabbit.

Rabbits came to Australia all because of one man, Thomas Austin, whose brother shipped him 24 rabbits from England as a gift. Over the next three years, those 24 animals bred like, well, rabbits. And soon, there were thousands. The rabbits damaged crops, overgrazed grasses, spread diseases, dug holes, wherever they pleased. Basically, they were the worst gift ever and made one man go down in Australian history as the guy who caused the rabbit plague. People tried to hunt them and call them, but there were just too many.

And so in 1901, the government created a rabbit department and hired an inspector to study the rabbit population. He found that rabbits hadn't yet crossed into certain agricultural areas, and that gave him an idea. Through years and years of trying to trap these animals, which was unsuccessful, the next step is to try and create a barrier. Rabbits can't climb very easily. They hop, but not particularly high. And so the idea was that they would stop the rabbits with a fence. So rabbit-proof fences were established to try and stop and contain the spread of rabbits throughout Australia. They built three different fences in an effort to seal off a large portion of the continent as a rabbit-free zone. But the rabbits managed to find a way around all of them.

It wasn't successful. Rabbits ended up going all throughout Australia. Other states built rabbit fences during this period that also failed. And so in the end, the government had all these rabbit fences across the country that were serving no purpose. Over the years, the fences began to disintegrate. But around this time, another European animal was taking over Australia. And soon, all those rusty rabbit fences would be given a new purpose. In the 1800s, wool was a critical material for the British textile industry.

But Great Britain didn't have enough land to produce the sheep themselves. So they turned to their colony down under. In 1802, Lord Hobart, who's one of the pooh bars of the British colonial administration, he says, you know, absolutely we want to encourage these colonists to develop fine wool that can suit our manufacturers. That's Trish Fitzsimmons, co-author of the book Fleeced, unraveling the history of wool and war. Trish says that for the first time ever, the reddish landscape of Australia began to be dotted with little white sheep. And over time, the little white dots multiplied.

By 1880, there were 100 million sheep in Australia, nearly 50 times the number of people. Australian wool was particularly critical for the British military. Wool was the best material for the battlefield because it was waterproof and flame resistant. And by the time World War I rolled around, it was clear that the countries with access to wool had a huge strategic advantage. World War I has got so many more soldiers than any previous war. I want to say 60 or 70 million. Each of those men need something like 20 sheep to support them, keep them alive, keep them warm, just in one year. World War I cemented wool as the foundation of the Australian economy.

But as the industry continued to grow, farmers needed more land for grazing. And so they started to breed sheep that could survive in these super dry marginal regions of the continent. And it was there that the economic superstar of Australia, the sheep, met its great adversary. The dingo. As the wool industry gathers ahead of steam, the areas of the continent, where sheep are grown, starts to expand out into the continent. Those sheep are vulnerable to dingoes. For dingoes, the expansion of sheep into the interior was like a free buffet.

But for farmers, the situation was a nightmare. Dingoes are highly effective pack hunters. They are pretty much Australia's version of the big, bad wolf. And farmers would wake up and find that dozens of their sheep had been killed or maimed in dingo attacks. Because of the size of the flocks and their remote locations, it wasn't a simple problem to fix. The whole wool industry itself is set up,

so you can't have predators. It's not financially viable to be out there protecting the sheep. That's Dr. Justine Philip, an environmental historian. We need to be able to put out these flocks of sheep, which number, you know, at least 2,000. You're not talking about a small flock. You're talking 2,000 and upwards, you know, 20,000. 100,000 sheep.

And they basically put them out to pasture and they don't supervise them. So you can't do that without being pretty confident that you've got rid of all the predators in the surrounding area. Farmers wanted to completely eliminate this threat. And because the wool industry was so politically powerful, they got their wish. Australia went to war with the dingo. First, they created incentive programs that encourage farmers to kill dingoes. Soon, there were professional dingo hunters and trappers who were paid bounties for every dingo they killed.

And then, after World War II, Australia ramped up its assault. A newspaper headline from 1946 read, D-Day for dingoes, above an article describing a plan to drop over 300,000 poisonous dingo baits across the landscape. And so that really brought the whole system up a notch, because instead of having to do ground baiting and doing everything on foot, they actually took the air on these airplanes, which had come back from the war and rent-in-use, and they had lots of pilots that were available for work. And so they started doing enormous aerial baiting projects across Australia.

But at the same time they were slaughtering these animals, the wool industry was developing a different strategy, a plan to keep dingoes and sheep permanently separate. They would take all of those defunct rabbit fences and use them for dingoes instead. And so the rabbit-proof fences were given a dingo renovation. They joined the old rabbit fences together and raised them up to a height that could keep dingoes out. Eventually, they had a big dingo fence, which was once actually 9,600 kilometers long, and it's now still huge, five and a half thousand kilometers long. That's around 3,400 miles, cutting across scrublands and desert.

And though the fence didn't effectively keep out rabbits, it did succeed in its second purpose. Thomas says the fence effectively sealed off nearly a third of the continent as a dingo-free zone. See, we're hitting this point here now, and it goes that way, then, that way, then it goes all the way. Oh, there's some wallabies over there. I see them galloping around. That's the kangaroo. Kangaroo, oh. Yep. I'm back in Jindawi in the eastern state of Queensland,

and I'm walking along the dingo fence with Doug Henning. Australia still spends big money on this fence, $10 million a year funded through state and local governments and a fence tax on sheep and cattle farmers. The fence is maintained by a team of patrolmen who divvy up the length and each take care of a section. Doug pointed to a hole that had been patched over. See this piece of mesh here?

Yeah. There's a hole underneath there. Okay, I see that, yeah. Something's got through here, so they've come along and put another piece in there. Okay, yeah. What kind of animal would have made that hole? Oh, it'd be very hard to say. I don't know, porcupine.

Or echidna? Not a porcupine. That's a different echidna. Sometimes we'll dig a hole like that under a fence. All along the fence, there are a large dents where the wire has been caved in. So what are the dents that we see in the fence? Mainly kangaroos. From running into it?

They run into it hard enough that it doesn't. They'll did the fence. The animals of the outback damage the dingo fence all the time. But that's nothing compared to the damage the fence does to them. The fence interrupts migration patterns and prevents animals from moving around in search of food or water. Emus, kangaroos, and wallopies all get stuck behind the fence. Some of these creatures play an important ecological role transporting seeds. and so the fence has impacted plant diversity as well.

But one of the biggest effects the fence has had on the environment was just removing the dingo from a massive chunk of the continent. As Australia's apex predator, the dingo kept other animal populations in check. And when the dingo went away, it set off a cascade of ecological consequences. The most visible effects are that when dingoes are removed, kangaroos in particular, their numbers explode. That's ecologist Thomas Newsom again. He says that because there are no dingoes eating them,

there are actually too many kangaroos in Australia. I mean, can there really be such a thing as too many kangaroos? Yes, it's gotten to the point where some of my vegan friends who are vegan for ethical reasons will make an exception for kangaroos because hunting them helps control the population. The excess number of kangaroos is a genuine problem in Australia. They end up overgrazing the landscape,

taking away the food and shelter that's available for small mammals and birds and reptiles. The population of red foxes and feral cats has also gone up in the absence of dingoes, which in turn has driven native Australian species like bilbies and bandicoots to near extinction. But the impacts of the dingo fence go beyond wildlife. On the dingo side, there are more grasses in leafy ground cover, while on the side without dingoes, there are more dry, woody shrubs. The fence has created essentially two different ecological universes on either side. So there's studies showing that you can see the effects of the dingo fence from space, both in terms of the vegetation that's there on either side, but also they've linked it to changes in dune morphology as well. In the desert on the dingo side of the fence, the land is looser.

with dunes that shift in the wind. It's closer to the way the landscape would have looked before colonization. All of this is the ecological price that Australia keeps paying year after year to keep a whole bunch of sheep safe. But the thing is, the wool industry isn't really what it used to be, and sheep are no longer the backbone of the economy. Which makes Australia's commitment to the dingo fence a little hard to understand. What are the conversations around the fence these days?

Like, do people want to tear them down? It's still a hotly debated topic, both among scientists, but also with people who are trying to run sheep or livestock operations in these areas as well. So it would be very difficult, for example, for a politician to come out and say, we're going to tear down the dingo fence. It turns out tearing down the dingo fence is a political third rail. It's not a topic that people would approach normally because it was considered political suicide to talk about removing the dingo fence.

Here's Justine Philip again. She says the fence is a symbol of Australia's agricultural heritage. And for politicians who want to show support for farmers, the dingo fence must be upheld. To suggest even that you take it down is considered very un-Australian. I have to admit I was a bit confused hearing Justine say this. I mean, sure, the fence is iconic, unique, totally awesome. Australian. But I kept thinking, so is the dingo. The thing is, the general public hasn't always seen the dingo as this one-of-a-kind

Australian animal like the kangaroo or the koala. In fact, for a long time, people thought dingoes were just regular domestic dogs that had gone wild. Growing up, even Justine believed this. I thought that they would be like a really wild feral dog. I had no idea that they were a separate species. People didn't start to appreciate the dingo until the 1960s when scientists, including Thomas Newsom's dad, Alan, began conducting in-depth research on how unique the dingo truly was.

They started to understand their movements and behaviors and their diet, and that really formed the basis for understanding their ecological role, but also understanding, well, what are dingoes? because there's also a lot of interest in, well, what are they? Dingoes are a bit hard to classify. Experts say they are descendants of a primitive Asian dog that came to Australia, either with seafarers or by land bridge, somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 years ago. This has led to some debate about whether or not Dingoes should be considered native to Australia.

But the fact is, Dingoes evolved in Australia, and over centuries, they came to thrive in a range. of habitats all over the continent, from the desert to the tropical rainforest to the Australian Alps. They eventually spent enough time in Australia that they became genetically distinct from their ancestors, meaning the modern dingo has never lived anywhere else. Dingoes were shaped not only by the Australian landscape, but by the people who live there. Before colonization, dingoes had deeply intimate relationships with humans. To the Aboriginal people of Australia, they were partners in hunting and waterfinding.

Dingoes evolved as a crucial part of Aboriginal life and often resided in their camps, sometimes as protectors or sometimes as companions. Over time, the scientific consensus shifted and people began to understand the Dingo as a native Australian species. And as researchers highlighted the Dingo's origin story, it brought in a whole new generation of Dingo fans like Justine. I did a master's in animal science and then I did my PhD. And a lot of that was around this interest in their misrepresentation, basically. And they were such beautiful creatures. It seemed really strange that they had been greatly misrepresented.

I also have a lot of sympathy for underappreciated animals, including the dingo. I think it's probably because I watched too much Steve Irwin as a kid on TV. In 1996, Steve visited the... Dingo Fence for an episode of The Crocodile Hunter. We're here in southeast Queensland, and this is the start of the dingo fence. Now, the dingo fence was established in the... Steve drove along the length of the dingo fence, and he was disturbed by what he saw. Hunters and trappers had left dead dingo carcasses everywhere.

We find it very difficult to come to terms with seeing dead animals strung up in fences and tree. It's been 30 years. since Steve Irwin recorded that episode. The dingo fence still exists, and people continue to hunt these creatures to keep their populations down. But there is a growing sense in Australia that this is an animal worth protecting.

Coming up after the break, we take you to an island off the coast of Australia where dingoes run free, and where a recent tragedy has people asking whether dingoes and humans can safely coexist. When I finished touring the dingo fence with Doug, I was a little disappointed that apart from the metal sculpture, Doug and I hadn't actually seen a dingo. But there is another place in Australia where anyone who wants to see dingoes is likely to find them.

It's an island that was once called Fraser Island, but now goes by its indigenous butchella name, Garry. Garry is covered in tropical rainforest with long white sand beaches and a series of spectacular freshwater lakes. The island is home to a small population of dingoes that have evolved in isolation from the animals on the mainland. When Garry was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992, the dingoes on the island were officially named an indigenous species and provided legal protection, meaning they are allowed to roam free. The Butchola Aboriginal Corporation hires rangers to deal specifically with dingoes, which they call wongery.

It's a role that Butchilla people have played for Thassau. thousands of years long before colonization. They recognized dingoes as dangerous animals, but ones that were worth keeping around. And they developed non-lethal ways to manage them. For example, if a dingo got too familiar or audacious, they would ward him off with safety sticks. And the tips they give the visitors today are directly informed by the old ways. Like if you're in a camp area, you make sure if you see a wonger even looking or lurking around, you make him know that that's your camp area.

Tessa Waya is an officer for the Butchila Aboriginal Corporation, and she works with Park Rangers on Garry. A big part of her job is educating people on how to be safe around dingoes. You know, with a loud voice, shout, yell, he will know, because that's your being the dominant one. And I said, and he will just watch from a fuck, because he knows he's not welcoming there. And that's how that was managed back in the old times to now.

You know what I mean? Tessa told me she believed humans and dingoes can live alongside each other on gari peacefully, just like in the past. But there are real obstacles, including the sheer volume of tourists. Hundreds of thousands of tourists visit gari every year. Many of those people come specifically to catch a glimpse of a dingo. This animal that they've been fed. fenced off from on the mainland.

And the tour operators use the dingo like a cute mascot to advertise their services. Here's an ad for a tour of the island featuring a strange dingo puppet narrator. Gatay, Darrell the Fraser Island Dingo over here to tell you about the absolute best Fraser Island tag-long tour, your money can buy. Boyd Blackman is a butchilla elder who has worked for 30 years as a ranger in the park. A few years ago, he saw a tour bus with an image of a particularly ridiculous-looking cartoon dingo. The actual dingo was wearing, you know, like a party hat and sunglasses, and he had sneakers on and with a wine shirt, and it said, come party with me. Boyd says that advertisements like this give tourists the wrong impression about these animals.

Sometimes tourists get too close, or even try to take a selfie with a dingo. You know, for a lot of those backpackers and people that come, I think they might have looked at it as, you know, a lot of people found out that koalas are cute and their cattali until they pull their claws out. The dingo, he's not a party animal. The message, I guess, is, you know, play it safe. These are naturally wild animals.

Tessa says that the volume of tourists has caused some of gari's dingoes to become habituated to humans. They eat from trash cans and hang around tourists' camps, sites, and that has led to some serious problems. There have been a number of high-profile dingo attacks over the years. You've probably heard about the famous dingo ate my baby case in the 1980s, which happened on the mainland. But there have also been attacks on Gari. In 2001, a young boy was killed by dingoes while camping with his family. After that tragedy, the government

culled dingoes and fenced in some of the largest townships on the island to try and keep people safe. But tourism has only increased since then. And while dingo attacks on people are rare, they've been happening more and more in recent years as the island gets more crowded. The Butchila Aboriginal Corporation wants the government to restrict tourism or even close the island altogether during times of the year when dingoes are particularly active. But so far, this has been a non-starter. And then, just as we were getting ready to publish this episode, we begin tonight with a tragedy on Garry. A young Canadian tourist named Piper James was found dead on the beach in Garry.

Her body was discovered, surrounded by a pack of dingoes, with significant bite wounds. The exact cause of her death is still unclear. An initial assessment suggests that she drowned, but also that she had been bitten by dingoes before she died. I called Tessa back to see how the community on the island was responding. The community is very shaken up and it's just distressing. Like, you know, I could only imagine what the parents, you know, are going through. And so, yeah, I mean, it's quite heartbreaking.

Tessa wouldn't be surprised if Dingoes had been involved in Piper's death. She says the Butchilla Aboriginal Corporation has been saying for years that something like this, might happen. Look, I can't, I was surprised, but wasn't so much a shock in that sense, because we've been actually telling the government that, you know, there needs to be a cap on the visitor numbers. And then they want to say, oh, are we so shocked? Well, no, you were warned. The tragedy on Garri made international news, and it has sparked a lot of fierce debates about how to respond. In the end, the government made the decision to euthanise the pack of 10 dingoes that had been found near the body, arguing it was necessary for public safety.

But several scientists have questioned that decision, arguing that previous dingo calls have not made the island safer. There are somewhere between 70 and 200 dingoes left on Garay, and scientists argue that killing any of these animals reduces critical genetic diversity and makes the population much more vulnerable to extinction. The Butchila Aboriginal Corporation says they were not consulted about the decision to called the dingos. And when Tessa found out that the animals had been killed,

she was devastated. So when we had found out, it was very sad. Everyone was sad. You know, because to the butchal of people, the wongarees are their family, you know, is like their brothers, their sisters. You know, like, so that's, you know,

how significant these animals are to them. These wongis, they're punished for doing what they do naturally. It's not right. Dingoes have a fraught history in Australia. They are an iconic, charismatic animal, but they are also dangerous predators, and have often been treated as a problem or a pest. Dingoes have been fenced out and killed off to make way for human activity. The Aboriginal history in a place like Gari shows that humans and dingoes can coexist, but coexistence in the modern world will require a complicated rebalancing of the relationship.

This is a difficult but necessary challenge because these are beautiful creatures and Australia is their only home. 99% Invisible was reported this week by Shirley Wong produced and edited by Emmett Fitzgerald with help from Kelly Prime mixed by Martine Gonzalez, music by Swanreale and George Langford. Fact-checking by Sona Avakian. Special thanks to David Murkumthura,

Madeline Shaw, co-author of the book Fleeced and Ronald Breckwald, author of the book Dingo. the true story of Australia's most maligned native animal. Kathy, too, is our executive producer. Kurt Kolstad is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Barube, Jason DeLeon,

Christopher Johnson, Vivian Lay, Lashemadon, Joe Rosenberg, Jacob Medina Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradley, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% of visible logo was created by Stephen Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building.

in beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as our own Discord server. There's a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.