A wire line built to keep dingoes away from sheep runs across the outback from Queensland to the cliffs of the Great Australian Bight. More than a century later, the land on either side has turned into two different ecosystems.
5,614 km
The length of the Dingo Fence (the Dog Fence), from Jimbour on Queensland's Darling Downs to Nundroo in South Australia. It is among the longest structures on Earth.
1.8 mstandard height of the mesh wall
1880sfirst sections built; joined into state barriers in the 1940s
3 statesQueensland · New South Wales · South Australia
Dingo side (outside)Sheep side (inside, dingoes culled)The fence
01 · The route
Three states, one line
Queensland's Wild Dog Barrier Fence and South Australia's Dog Fence account for most of the wire. New South Wales holds the corner where the two meet.
QueenslandWild Dog Barrier Fence
~2,500
South AustraliaDog Fence, Bight to NSW border
~2,150
NSW & border linksremainder, derived
~964
Kilometres. The NSW figure is the remainder of 5,614 − 2,500 − 2,150. Published lengths for the SA section range from 2,110 to 2,225 km depending on source and year.
02 · The split
Count the animals on each side
Researchers surveyed four sites in the Strzelecki Desert, two on each side of the wire. Where dingoes were gone, kangaroos had taken over.
Kangaroos counted
Insidesheep side
3,245
Outsidedingo side
8
~400× more kangaroos where dingoes are rare
Dingoes counted
Insidesheep side
1
Outsidedingo side
85
85 : 1 dingoes, outside vs inside
Totals across two sites per side (Morris & Letnic, Proc. R. Soc. B, 2017). Each panel uses its own scale. The ~400× ratio is calculated here (3,245 ÷ 8). The same study found less nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon in soils on the dingo-free side.
03 · The stakes
What the wire is guarding
The fence exists because of sheep. South Australia's own estimates show what the wire is worth to farmers.
20,000
sheep killed by wild dogs in South Australia in 2018, before the rebuild
PIRSA / AAP, 2024
$4M
yearly cost of those losses to SA's livestock industry
PIRSA / AAP, 2024
11.2M
sheep in South Australia, the flock behind the fence
AAP via InDaily, 2024
$56–113M
projected benefit of the SA rebuild over 20 years
AAP via InDaily, 2024
04 · The rebuild
Replacing a century-old wire
About 1,600 km of South Australia's fence was more than 100 years old. Work to replace it began in May 2020, and about 1,000 km had been rebuilt by late 2024.
Kilometres rebuilt in the SA Dog Fence. The line joins two reported points (AAP 2020, AAP/InDaily 2024). It is not a measured progress track.
05 · The timeline
Fourteen decades of one line
The fence started as farm netting, then became a state-run structure. More recently, scientists have treated it as a natural experiment.
1880sfirst dog & rabbit netting
1946–48SA Act · Qld scheme
1988Landsat record begins
2017–23count, dune & skull studies
2020–24~1,000 km rebuilt
Scale runs from 1880 to 2026. The colour deepens with time and carries no data value.
06 · The evidence
Visible in the dunes and from space
Taking out a top predator changes more than the animal counts. It also shows up in the shrubs, the sand, and the kangaroos' bones.
Illustrative cross-section, not to scale. It shows the direction of the effect Lyons et al. (2018) measured with drones in the Strzelecki Desert.
Dunes
2018
Drone surveys found denser shrubs on the dingo-free side. The shrubs slow the wind at ground level, so the dunes there are taller and their sand more compact.
Lyons, Mills, Gordon & Letnic · J. R. Soc. Interface
From orbit
32 yrs
Landsat imagery from 1988 onward shows vegetation responding differently to rain on each side of the fence. The difference is visible from space.
Fisher et al. · Landscape Ecology, 2021
Bones
2023
Young kangaroos outside the fence had longer feet, and young males had bigger skulls. One likely reason is faster growth through the size range where dingoes hunt them.
Weisbecker, Bradshaw et al. · J. Mammalogy
Why it matters · what to notice on the map
A border that ecology obeys
Follow the dark line. It cuts diagonally from the Darling Downs to the Bight, and almost every sheep district in the east and south sits on the sage side.
Find the dashed circle. The Strzelecki Desert, near where Queensland, NSW and South Australia meet, is where scientists compared the two sides directly. There were 3,245 kangaroos counted on one side and 8 on the other.
Notice what the fence doesn't fix. It protects about 11 million South Australian sheep, but every year inside it has meant more kangaroos, more grazing and poorer soils. Australia is now paying to rebuild the wire while scientists measure what it costs the land.