Great Fences of Australia

The project GREAT FENCES OF AUSTRALIA maps the vast spaces of Australia. Since 2002, violinists Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor have travelled 35,000 kilometres playing and recording the unique sounds of hundreds of fences in every state and territory of the fifth continent, including the well-known 'Dog Fence' and 'Rabbit-Proof Fences'. Along with this video and audio material, the lives and histories of the people who build, look after or use the fences has also been documented.

Many people look at fences and see not much; Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor look and see giant musical string instruments covering a continent. The strings are so long that they become the resonators as well as the triggers for the sound. On straight stretches of a simple five-wire fence, the sound travels down the wires for hundreds of meters. The music is ethereal and elemental, incorporating an extended harmonic series (the structure of all sound); the longer the wire, the more harmonics become available. The rhythms of violin bows and drum sticks uncover a fundamental sonic world. The fence music encapsulates the vastness of the place. Music of distance, boundaries and borders. This, however, is not the songlines, or even the white fella's ironic version of it, but the unexpected and elegiac music of the Australian landscape 'sounding' its recent history. Fence construction has inadvertently given us a means of expressing musically, with a direct physical connection, the whole range of intense emotion tied up with the ownership of the land, from the outback to the backyard.

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