We drive up the track to JW's painting camp next to the fence.

We walk south tracing it across a natural hollow, over a ridge.

We have no way of dating it; perhaps the style of the wire twists and loops and the four-wire pull is telling.

Nor can we guess why it was erected. It might have penned cattle or sheep; it would have been ineffectual against rabbits.

It may have been a boundary-marker.

One wonders how the fencers were able to make the posts firm enough to bear the tension.

It occurs to me that the fence was not broken up by human hand, but snapped under the swelling pressure of the dunes' migration. But this is fanciful.
How quickly does wire rust to dust?

In its fallen, broken and rusting state, laid out on the sand, we reflect that the fence has found a new role. Instead of marking the edge of clearing, it now articulates the progress of unclearing .

After the last bush fires, which largely ate up the surface cover, this tract of Mallee is regenerating. The charcoal rakes of Mallee are sprouting from their bases; there is a mosaic of flowering plants. The sandy labyrinth of tracks, patches and shadow-scattered middle-distances is seeded with debris of the fire, dry leaves, seed cases, charred twigs, and tracked by the day's migration of spiders, scorpions, ants and lizards.

The four-wire fence lies on its side through the regenerating sand. It sprawls along the surface, in places rearing up into tangles and splaying out. It seems to dip under the sand. It has been regularly severed.

Walking it, we have to put together with our footsteps the line that has gone missing.

This and sections 4, 7 and 10 are adapted from a diary of a visit to John Wolseley's painting camp at Round Swamp, south edge of Wyperfeld National Park, 16-18 November 2004.