Watching The Wire

Traveling through the Nullarbor at dusk, you’ll often find a wedgetail eagle hunkering down on road kill for its final feed of the day before taking off, slow and steady, like a jumbo jet into the wind. Doug Pekin, 66, has something of the eagle’s noble bearing as he goes about his business, looking for signs of strength and weakness in the landscape, keeping the wilder forces of nature at bay. “On the pay slips I’m a boundary rider,” he says, when quizzed, “but the locals call me a dogger.”

For this soft-spoken gentleman, the term doesn’t do justice to the quiet watchfulness of his profession. But a dogger he is and his frontier is the dingo fence—not the 5,400-km great wall of wire that runs from the Great Australian Bight to Queensland’s Bunya Mountains, but a mere 500-km stretch bordering one of the Nullarbor’s largest sheep stations, near Cocklebiddy. His painstaking task is to patrol and repair its parameter of chicken wire, laying dog baits as he goes. Little escapes his eagle eye: the other week, marauding camels charged through the fence in two places, while the sudden greening of vegetation from recent rains has caused its own problems. “The actual dingo doesn’t do much damage,” he insists. “The fox is cunning. It will dig under it.”

These days his vehicle might be a four-wheel-drive rather than a horse, but Pekin remains an old-fashioned upholder of pastoral civilization. That he is doing his job is clear from the statistics: lamb survival rates are 85% inside the fence; 60% outside it. And there’s no doubt which side he’s on. Brought up on a farm in Victoria’s Western District, Pekin took off on holiday in 1990 “and never went back.” A hired hand on stations from Cameron Corner to the Pilbara, the dogger has fallen in love with the lure of long distance. “Oh, it’s beautiful,” he says. “When I camp out at night the skies are clear.” One senses he is happiest when he can see forever.