The Longest Fence in the World

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 Burj 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 Jindawi. Jindawi has a hardware store, an accountant's office, a butcher shop, a beauty salon, 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 Centre right in the middle of town. And he was standing next to an almost 7 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.

are lean and extremely athletic. They have reddish blonde fur, white bellies, and pointy ears. They look kinda like, I don't know, buff Shiba Inus. Given this giant, prominent statue,

you might think that the people of Jindawi 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 Dingo's out. It's called the Dingo Barrier Fence, and it stretches across the southeastern corner of the continent, separating Dingo's 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 Jandawi is where the fence starts. That big tree there is the true start of the fence and it goes that way. To be honest it's not much to look at, just a regular wire fence that's about 6 feet tall to prevent dingo's 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 as it.

You are standing on a 12 inch mound. I am standing on the okay, Farina. The fence starts here in the middle of a cattle pasture and from there it runs all the way across the continent.

This 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. 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 all together. 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 used to going to hunt in their home countries.

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 the 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.