Dr. Justine Phillip

The whole wool industry itself is set up so you can't have predators.

It's not financially viable to be out there protecting the sheep.

That's Dr. Justine Phillip, an environmental historian.

You need to be able to put out these flocks of sheep which number, you know, at least 2,000.

You're not talking about a small flock, you're talking 2,000 and upwards, you know, 20,000, 100,000 sheep.

And they basically put them out to pasture and they don't supervise them.

So you can't do that without being pretty confident that you've got rid of all the predators in the surrounding area.

And so that really brought the whole system up a notch because instead of having to do ground baiting and doing everything on foot, they actually took to the air on these aeroplanes which had come back from the war and weren't in use.

And they had lots of pilots that were available for work.

And so they started doing enormous aerial baiting projects across Australia.

It's not a topic that people would approach normally because it was considered political suicide to talk about removing the dingo fence.

I thought that they would be like a really wild feral dog.

I had no idea that they were a separate species.

I did a master's in animal science and then I did my PhD.

And a lot of that was around this interest in their misrepresentation, basically.

And they were such beautiful creatures.

It seemed really strange that they had been greatly misrepresented.