Border protection high on the national interest | OPINION

From a biosecurity perspective, that is.

I mulled this over (yet again) as my wife and I went away for a very pleasant break on the West Coast, starting and ending in Strahan.

This included a cruise up the Gordon River but that's not relevant to this column

Strahan is a port town halfway up the West Coast and was once thought destined to be the birthplace of the industrial capital of Tasmania, but it didn't work out that way.

It is on the North end of Macquarie Harbour (entrance through aptly named "Hell's Gate") which is the second largest one in Australia and it's easy to guard this frontier.

Not that there's any biosecurity threat here.

REGULAR readers of this column will remember that I came here from WA, and it took me a while to get used to the small scale of things here - you can drive from any A to any B in a couple of hours.

Not so in WA, and there's one frontier which has become a legend.

It's the rabbit proof fence.

In 1859, Thomas Austin thought that "the introduction of a few rabbits could do little harm and might provide a touch of home, in addition to a spot of hunting".

He was completely wrong.

Australia had ideal conditions for rabbit population explosion and there were virtually no local predators.

So it was decided to build a fence to stop their spread.

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This took six years (1901 - 1907).

There were in fact three fences but the longest was 1833 km and was modified for years, until it became the longest unbroken fence in the world.

The post spacing was 3.7 metres (12 feet/), so it took almost half a million (495,676 to be precise).

It cost $18,906/km (adjusted to today's equivalence) but to add insult to injury, myxamatosis which spread in the 1950s solved the problem.

We've still got a bit of a rabbit problem in our market garden but it's kept as a minor one by our son, who lives next door and is a very good shot.

WE couldn't avoid hearing updates on the Ukrainian/Russian war when we were in Strahan.

This is obviously across the frontier between two countries.

I doubt if biosecurity is being considered at all, let alone enforced, which is a tragedy because the Ukraine is considered to be one of the world's largest agricultural producers and exporters.

It has been described as the "Breadbasket of Europe".

This is in large part because it possesses 30 per cent of the world's richest black soil.

The census data speaks for itself:

And so on it goes.

The figures are immense; the sunflower seed crop weighs in at 14.1 million tonnes.

Back home, Tasmania is an island state so we have no internal frontiers to guard and only a few points of entry for North Islanders to be searched at.

We are privileged.

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