When was rabbit proof fence built

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To the left was a line of shops divided by vacant allotments. Behind Bony, beyond the railway, were other houses, a motor garage, and the school, for the railway halved this town. As a fence runner Arthur Upfield had to look after miles of fence line from Camel Station to Burracoppin.

He had a dray pulled by two camels. The pace was slow. Upfield would walk along side the dray. He had to clear fallen trees, replace rotted fence posts and repair damage to the netting. Water was obtained from wells and an occasional rain tank 14 mile gate. It was virgin bush most of the way. The first sign of farming country was about 60 miles from Burracoppin and the first road crossed the fence 40 miles out.

On reaching the town he would spell the camels at the Government farm, spend two days in the town then start north again on the 14 day return trip. He was inspired by the sun shining on the silver chain of his watch as he sat in his camp miles south of Burracoppin in Since the Silver Chain have been helping the sick and needy in both the city and the country. Completed in , the kilometre rabbit-proof fence No. The shortest fence, No. These three fences took hundreds of labourers five years to build and consumed hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Workers carved the fences and the maintenance tracks that ran alongside them out of virgin bush by hand, digging the ditches, cutting down trees and shaping the posts as they went.

Now only selected sections of the fences are still used for their intended purpose, with wild dogs, foxes and emus now the target rather than rabbits. The officially maintained sections of what is now known as the state barrier fence are off-limits to all but maintenance crews. Great swathes of the original fences have been taken over by farmers to mark boundaries and other sections have fallen into disrepair. A significant piece of history is slowly disappearing.

Allan Rogers, a farmer who has spent his life beside fence No. As president of the Cunderdin Historical Society, Allan leads the campaign for a rabbit-proof fence commemorative project to be set up there. Cunderdin, on the Great Eastern Highway, is where trains arrived from Fremantle with supplies to build fence No. But Allan is in his 80s, and he and a small group of supporters have been trying without success to gain funding for the project for more than a decade.

Worthy as it may be, commemorating the fence is clearly a concept not everyone has been able to grasp, not helped by the fact the fences traverse 34 shires. As we drive north through the wheatbelt country hunting for No.

At Wubin, No. Next to the fence just outside town we find the grave of a worker who succumbed while it was being built. But for the most part the fence is unnoticed and unmarked, not even listed on all maps. Every now and then we find an original section, distinctive with its jam tree posts, white gum strainers and hexagonal wire buried six inches into the ground to foil the burrowing rabbits.