Holding the Line

Description

‘Holding the Line’ describes the history of the Dog Fence Board and was commissioned to mark the celebrations of the first hundred years of Federation of South Australia.

The book was jointly funded by Centenary of Federation South Australia and the Dog Fence Board in recognition of the important contribution that the Dog Fence has made to a sustainable sheep industry in the State.

Simply, commercial sheep production cannot coexist with dingos. In the 1890s, in excess of 11 000 sheep were killed by dingos on one property in northwest South Australia – similar levels of predation by dingos on other properties as well, contributed to the abandonment of properties during that period.

Pastoralists initially responded, through the Vermin Districts Act 1894, to the threat by cooperatively building vermin fences to protect their livestock.

The history of the Dog Fence Board illustrates well these hardships faced by the early pastoralists and the hardships of their employees who built the first vermin fences, often in rugged terrain and under harsh conditions, in the late nineteenth century. It also shows the ingenuity, determination and resilience of the pastoral industry to reduce the dramatic losses of sheep caused by dingos and, to a lesser extent, foxes.

The concept of a buffer fence to protect the sheep industry across southern South Australia from dingos loomed as an urgent necessity during the 1930s. This necessity reflected the large number of proclaimed fenced districts at the time, each with its own perimeter fence. Consequently, the Dog Fence Act, 1946 was proclaimed in 1947 to provide for a Dog Fence Board to manage funds for and audit the maintenance of a single, continuous Dog Fence. The Fence linked vermin fences where possible and stretched across the northern edge of the sheep zone — some 2 200 kilometres from the Nullabor to the New South Wales border. The location of the current Fence has changed little from the original fence line.