Thursday, 11 January 2007

A really long, pointless fence....



After writing about rabbits in the last blog for some reason my mind was cast on the story of the Rabbit Proof Fence....the longest, and most pointless fence in the world.

The No 1 Rabbit Proof Fence was completed in 1907 (started in 1901) and stretches north to south across the state of Western Australia for a total of 1,837km and it provided little deterrent to the pesky bunnies. After this failure the WA Government decided to build another two fences (which had more success) bringing the total to 3,256km of fencing.

Seems that the No 1 Rabbit Proof Fence failed to keep rabbits out (they hadn't noted that rabbits can jump & burrow and some people even kindly left the gates open for them!), but it was quite handy for finding your way home if you were part of the 'Stolen Generation'
(Watch or read 'The Rabbit-proof Fence', both very good & unbelievable that such things happened so recently - although then again at the same time Hitler was about to come to power in Germany)

There's also a Dingo Fence but that's a story for another day....

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