Qualla: Deserts of Australia

Deserts of Australia: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Stand on Big Red, the towering dune just west of Birdsville, and the Simpson Desert unrolls in front of you as wave after wave of parallel red ridges, more than a thousand of them, running off toward the centre of the continent. This is one corner of something vast. Australia's deserts cover about 1.37 million square kilometres, roughly 18 percent of the mainland, and around 35 percent of the continent is so dry it is desert in all but name. Collectively they form the Great Australian desert, a red heart that has shaped how the whole country imagines itself.

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Deserts of Australia: Ten Deserts, One Red Heart

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robertew100, CC BY-SA 4.0. There are ten major deserts here, and they cluster into two great families. In the west, a near-continuous arid expanse joins the Great Sandy, Little Sandy, Tanami, Gibson and Great Victoria, the largest of them all. In the east, a smaller group gathers the Simpson, Sturt, Strzel...

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Image: Robertew100 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Deserts of Australia: Ancient Beyond Reckoning

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gypsy Denise, CC BY-SA 4.0. The land beneath all this sand is staggeringly old. Its geology spans more than 3.8 billion years, and the great cratons that underpin it, the Yilgarn, the Pilbara and the Gawler, hold some of the oldest rocks on the planet. The dunes themselves are young by comparison, sculpted ...

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Image: Gypsy Denise | CC BY-SA 4.0

Deserts of Australia: Homelands, Not Wastelands

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Letnic, CC BY-SA 4.0. It is tempting to call this country empty. It is not, and it never was. Aboriginal peoples have lived in these deserts for at least 50,000 years, occupying every region including the driest, and many remain the recognised traditional owners of vast tracts of the interior today. T...

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Image: Mike Letnic | CC BY-SA 4.0

Deserts of Australia: Explorers, Camels and Hard-Won Names

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mark Marathon, CC BY-SA 4.0. European exploration came late and at a price. Charles Sturt pushed into the Strzelecki and Sturt Stony deserts in the 1840s chasing a fabled inland sea that did not exist. Ernest Giles named the Gibson Desert in 1874 for Alfred Gibson, who vanished in it and never came out. Pete...

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Image: Mark Marathon | CC BY-SA 4.0

Deserts of Australia: Life in the Margins

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Teckez, CC BY-SA 4.0. For all its severity, the desert teems in its own restrained way. Australia's arid zone holds more species of lizard than anywhere else on the planet, more than forty in a single area, alongside thorny devils, perenties up to two metres long, and woma pythons. After rare heavy ra...

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Image: Teckez | CC BY-SA 4.0