They Shoot Dingoes, Don’t They?

Picture the scene: no sheep to be found, no farm to protect, nothing but a stretch of arid Australian bush. And there, on the edge of the track, strung up by the neck from a sign, the desiccated carcass of a dingo, “hung out as a trophy.” This deeply unsettling photograph closes Ten Eighty, published by Tall Poppy Press, the imprint Matt Dunne has run since 2021.

Trained as a teacher, with a background in history before photography, Matt Dunne now runs photobook-making workshops. His work explores ecology, colonialism and mythology through the country and seeks to make the widespread war on the animal visible: first the wedge-tailed eagle, whose slaughter he traced in The Killing Sink, published in 2022, now the dingo.

Since the arrival of white settlers, the publisher notes, the dingo has been one of the most persecuted animals in Australia, targeted by shooting, trapping and poison alike. Federal law nonetheless classifies it as a native species, on a par with the kangaroo and the koala and the other species present in Australia before the sixteenth century. Why, the photographer asks, do we still treat as a pest an animal essential to the balance of the ecosystem?

The book’s opening pages unspool photograph after photograph of the Dog Fence: over 5,500 kilometres of wire fencing running from the South Australian coast to Queensland, a distance longer than that between Los Angeles and New York, or between Paris and Moscow. North of the line, where cattle graze largely unbothered by the dingo, the animal is at home; south of it, where the first flocks of sheep arrived with colonisation, that same animal, rebranded a “wild dog” by the authorities, is an outlaw.

“We find, in this fence, not just a physical barrier, not just an environmental barrier, but a convenient division for what is legal and what is not,” Matt Dunne writes. This category of “wild dog” serves precisely to sidestep the animal’s federal status. “The term ‘wild dogs’ is a euphemism,” he notes, “with dingoes being the only actual wild dogs in Australia.”

“Sheep farming advocacy groups, policy documents, hunters and poison manufacturers continue to use the phrase ‘wild dog’ to mislead the public, masking that a native animal is what’s being targeted,” the photographer continues, and his book is built against the grain of that hazy language. He borrows from critic Colin Pantall the notion of the exploded view, the technical diagram that shows an object’s parts pulled apart.

Alongside Matt Dunne’s photographs sit a painting by George Stubbs from 1772, images of hunts held in full costume in the 1830s, and receipts issued to Aboriginal stockmen in exchange for dingo pelts. The book’s title, Ten Eighty, names the lethal, antidote-less poison used to wipe the animal out: 1080, sodium fluoroacetate, banned across most of the world.

In Australia, it is dropped from the air over pastoral land and loaded into capsule baits that burst the instant the animal bites down. Matt Dunne photographs the arsenal with the coolness of an inventory: a five-litre blue jerrycan, white buckets stacked under a brand called De-K9, a bottle of strychnine labelled by a manufacturer in Saint-Ouen, France.

To Australia’s First Nations, the author reminds us, the animal is sacred. Their national declaration, an excerpt of which he reproduces, leaves no room for doubt: “Killing Dingoes is killing family.” Himself descended from a line of settlers, Matt Dunne unsettles his own people’s conscience from that very position. The book closes on the question that the sight of that dingo, strung up on the wire, leaves him asking: “Is this really the best we can do?”

**Ten Eighty by Matt Dunne is published by Tall Poppy Press, 2026.
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