Bingara, New South Wales, 1963: When I was seven years old, the baker’s daughter came to stay and for the first time I found myself sharing a double bed with a member of the opposite sex. In a desperate attempt to protect my boyish, personal space I hit upon an ingenious solution. I unfolded my parents’ banana lounge and placed it, on its side, down the middle of the bed between the pig-tailed trespasser and myself. I had built my very first fence.
East Jerusalem, 2003: Walid Ayad is renovating his hotel. But he has a problem. The Israeli government is building a 360 kilometre security fence it says is designed to protect its citizens from suicide bombers. If the fence goes to plan it will run right through the middle of his property, dividing the hotel from its gardens. Ayad’s life is only one of thousands that will be affected.
Fences are about territory. They are the way in which we see fit to order our world, the terms on which we are prepared to share it with others. And, from the 28 kilometers of razor wire surrounding the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to John Howard’s so-called ‘white picket fence’ view of society, they are always political.
A world without fences is almost impossible to imagine in a society that steadfastly believes that the planet can be divvied up between nations and land owned by individuals. The absence of fences from the Australian landscape before white settlement demonstrates a fundamental difference in this belief between indigenous and non-indigenous people. Fences are the marks white fellas like me have left on the country, the way we have attempted to tame the wilderness, transforming what we perceived as an empty, amorphous space into a peopled and parcelled place.
‘It is when we find ourselves in a landscape of well-built, well-maintained fences and hedges and walls,’ wrote the celebrated geographer John Brinckerhoff Jackson, ‘that we realise we are in a landscape where political identity is a matter of importance, a landscape where lawyers make a good living and everyone knows how much land he owns’.
We have chopped, sliced and diced the world’s rural and urban landscapes with millions of kilometres of fences. They form one of the most ubiquitous elements of our built environment. We might accept the Great Wall of China as architecture but fail to see any aesthetic value in the