Shirley Wong

I want to stand next to it and see if it goes above my head.

I think it should.

I'm 5'4".

Okay, I'm like about the same height as it.

I am standing on... Okay, fair enough.

The fence starts here in the middle of a cattle pasture, and from there it runs all the way across the continent.

Just goes on and on and on, all the way to South Australia.

The dingo barrier fence is a remarkable piece of infrastructure, and not just because of its length.

This simple wire structure has actually transformed the entire ecology of Australia.

It has split the continent in two, separating animal populations and changing the landscape so much that you can see the effects from space.

When British colonizers came to Australia in the late 18th century, they wanted this new place to feel like home.

And so they took the plants and animals of Europe with them.

This is Thomas Newsome, an ecologist and associate professor at the University of Sydney.

The most destructive invader was surprisingly the rabbits.

People tried to hunt them and cull them, but there were just too many.

And so in 1901, the government created a rabbit department and hired an inspector to study the rabbit population.

He found that rabbits hadn't yet crossed into certain agricultural areas, and that gave him an idea.

They built three different fences in an effort to seal off a large portion of the continent as a rabbit-free zone.

But the rabbits managed to find a way around all of them.

Other states built rabbit fences during this period that also failed.