Australia: the land of fences
I'm obsessed with fencing and fences right now. I think that they are the most mundane expressions of a sense of inclusion, exclusion and control that most of us see daily.
From temporary fencing around a construction site, to a white picket fence around a family home, from walled military installations, to rambling barbed wire fences - Australia is just a cacophony of borders, designations, dominance and 'fuck off we're full' - a fence is control epitomised. The panopticon might have been Foucault's favourite metaphor, but I think the fence is more present. I wonder what architects think of fences - I wonder if, somewhere, there's even a textbook about the theory of fencing, the history of fences, the whole world of what a fence pretends to do (make life easy) and what is really does (carve up the land). If it exists, it'd probably be pretty dense and dull, unnecessarily so, I think.
More than what you might find in suburbs and construction sites, Australia is a country of fences and for fences. In fact, the longest fences in the world are in Australia and were built as a way to control the native animals in order to enable better farming for European settlers. The longest is the Dingo proof fence, stretching 5,614km (or more than three times the length of Germany, 2/3rds the length of the US/Canada border). The fence is so long it is longer than Australia is wide. At our widest point, we are 4000km from East to West, yet this sprawling, winding, constantly maintained and cared for fence is just massive. If you laid it end to end, it would be longer than China is. Insane.
The purpose of this fence is to keep dingoes moving from the wilder and less settled regions of Australia's interior into from the more arable sheep grazing districts in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. It's an absurd project, spanning an unfathomable length (still, to this day) in order to exert an incredibly powerful measure of geoengineering on the land. It is clear, always, that in Australia agriculture comes first - that was true when we were settled, and it remains true to this day. The bizarre value system that says we should completely slice our country in half so fewer sheep die is uncanny to me: it's familiar (I grew up knowing about it) but I cannot empathise.
The problem with decisions like this is that nothing in nature is actually separate: you remove one species from an area, suddenly other species change their behaviour, or suffer. You introduce another (sheep) and suddenly the plant life, and the animals that live in that ecosystem, are completely changed. Nature is a sticky, self-referential system and while it is resilient I think we are still learning that decisions seemingly as small as putting up a fence greatly warp so much about the ecosystem.
Another fence, the Rabbit Proof Fence, was constructed in Australia's West, as a way of attempting to stop rabbits, introduced in the East, from invading the arable farming lands as they steadily marched further and further to the west. Amazingly, this fence still stands today and regularly is a cause of death for native wildlife. Again and again, other forms of life pay the price for our settlement of Australia. I can empathise with anyone's desire to keep rabbits the fuck out of an area of Australia, yet this does seem to be a poisoned chalice.
Of course the Rabbit Proof Fence is probably somewhat more well known, thanks to the excellent book and film of the same name. In those stories, a group of three girls, taken from their parents as part of the Stolen Generation, escape and use the fence as a road to return home. That is a true story and just an immense mess of colonial and racist attitudes colluding to treat people and land as movable Tetris pieces, ignorant and unwilling to care about anything other than how to best manage a project.
Yet, in my art work, fences have taken on a more complex meaning recently. I've been spending time in areas that use predator exclusion fences as a barrier to re-introduce native animals and re-wild areas of Australia. So much of Australia is under threat from rabbits, horses, cats, toads, ants, goats, camels: introduced species that escaped captivity and thrived in an area with few predators. Cats, to this day, are enemy number one and decimate populations of native animals - about 3 billion Australian native animals die each year due to feral cats. If I had my way: cats would not be allowed to be pets in Australia unless they were neutered before being sold.
So a predator exclusion fence is also an immense structure: more than 2m high, it has a floppy top that prevents it from being climbed by cats or foxes, and is extended into the ground, so that it cannot be dug under. Wires run along the fence, electrified, so that animals attempting to scale or tear it are deterred. It bears resemblance to some sort of army device, yet is essential for making spaces safe for vulnerable Australian animals. In essence: we build a HUGE cage where native animals are protected from what we've made the outside to be.
I think there's extra grief there. We are used to stories of conservation being somewhat heroic: bringing back this cute animal from the overwhelming tide of extinction. And obviously, that's great. But the wider context: that we have to cage natives in from the world we've created, is exceptionally sad. Fences tear across the country, responding to and deepening the divide between native and introduced, extending agricultural interests, settler power and, to this day, physically enforcing the attitudes and designs of colonialisation. Yet, because of these exact things, we are a pioneering country in fence technology, building ever new and more elaborate ways of subdividing the country and the land, working tirelessly to enlarge the fencing areas in the attempt to build safe havens within danger zones.
There's so much contradiction at play, there's so many overlapping systems, designs and processes and, underlying it all, is the reality that we cannot control nature: that it resists and subverts our predictions and plans. Fencing is an attempt at control, but often used as a response to something we lost control of (if indeed we ever had it). Control is an illusion - no one is really a puppet master - and proceeding from the idea that we can or do have a form of power that we don't only leads to huge mistakes that are taking generations to undo.
So the next time you're out and about and you see a fence, perhaps you'll think about it differently, perhaps the belief in the control a fence gives us will seem a bit more slippery. Perhaps when you scale or jump over somewhere you're not 'supposed' to be you'll feel a bit more alive as you subvert not just an absurd form of signalling, but a problematic history of designation. Maybe you'll think the same thing I do: fuck fences.
Some things to think about:
I was talking to someone about the movie Rabbit Proof Fence and how the making of documentary is, in some ways, more powerful than the film. I don't know if I'd encourage people to watch this scene, but if you want a fairly bare-faced look at how history affects us today it's a pretty good encapsulation. Essentially this is a video about how they filmed a scene where three girls are stolen from their parents by a police officer - and of course the actors are affected by the acting and there's a ton of historical tension and nuance at play in filming a black and white scene. It's a tough watch.
Tim Winton's epic article about fencing and agriculture's arrogance: every paragraph holds a pace and weight that pummels and drives. His relentlessness matches the centuries' long punishment we have inflicted on the land, his writing doesn't let up because we have not let up. Brutal and evocative at every turn.