Qualla: Great Artesian Basin

Great Artesian Basin: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit State Government Photographer, CC0. Stand on the cracked clay of the Queensland outback and you would never guess what lies beneath your boots. Below the dust and the spinifex, under a fifth of the entire Australian continent, sits an underground ocean. The Great Artesian Basin holds water that fell as rain when this country was a different world, water now so old that some of it has been creeping through buried sandstone for nearly two million years. It is the largest and deepest artesian basin on Earth, and for the people of the dry inland it has been, quite simply, the difference between life and death.

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Image: State Government Photographer | CC0

Great Artesian Basin: An Ocean Made of Stone

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kdliss, CC BY-SA 3.0. The numbers are hard to hold in the mind. The basin sprawls across more than 1.7 million square kilometres, underlying most of Queensland and reaching into the Northern Territory, South Australia, and New South Wales. In places it plunges 3,000 metres down, and it is estimated to...

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Image: Kdliss | CC BY-SA 3.0

Great Artesian Basin: The Mound Springs and the Songlines

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frank Vincentz, CC BY-SA 3.0. Long before any drill bit touched the sandstone, the basin had its own outlets. Across the arid south, the water seeped upward through natural vents, depositing minerals over millennia to build strange conical hills with pools at their summits, the mound springs. Places like Witj...

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Image: Frank Vincentz | CC BY-SA 3.0

Great Artesian Basin: Liquid Gold and the Cost of Drilling

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit user:kdliss, CC BY-SA 3.0. When colonists learned in the late 1800s that the same water lay everywhere beneath the inland, they drilled, and the dry country was transformed. Bores brought water to the surface across enormous distances, and pastoral settlement spread into land that had been impossible to ho...

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Image: user:kdliss | CC BY-SA 3.0

Great Artesian Basin: Capping the Bores

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit user:kdliss, CC BY-SA 3.0. The story did not end there. From the late 1970s onward, governments and landholders began the long, unglamorous work of repair: capping free-flowing bores and replacing thousands of kilometres of leaky open drains with sealed pipe. By 2018, this effort had absorbed around 240 mi...

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Image: user:kdliss | CC BY-SA 3.0

Great Artesian Basin: Steam in the Desert

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit user:kdliss, CC BY-SA 3.0. To grasp how alive this buried water is, consider the town of Birdsville. A bore drilled 1.2 kilometres into the basin brings water to the surface at 98 degrees Celsius, hot enough that for years the town ran an experimental geothermal plant on it before the cooled water was pipe...

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Image: user:kdliss | CC BY-SA 3.0