'The Dog Fence' is a wonderful book about an epic journey by the bestselling author of 'The Wollemi Pine' and 'The Secret Life Of Wombats'.
At 5,600 kilometres, Australia's dog fence is the longest barrier ever built. It begins on the Nullarbor Plain, near the Western Australia-South Australian border, and ends near the tropical waters of the Queensland coast. Its purpose is to keep the dingo away from the farms and pastoral holdings of the south-east. Some parts of the fence are more than a century old. James Woodford travelled across four deserts, as he followed the full length of a fence that separates one half of the continent from the other.
James meets the boundary riders and pastoralists who maintain the fence and encounters the dogs themselves. He explores the natural environment covered by the fence - a land of sand, water and wind, of salt lakes, gibber plain, and vast underground caves. The fence passes through nuclear test sites, uranium mines, places where Aborigines were massacred and where explorers perished.
