Qualla: Munga-Thirri–Simpson Desert Regional Reserve

Munga-Thirri–Simpson Desert Regional Reserve: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tandrew22, CC BY-SA 4.0. From the ground, the Simpson Desert is a wall. You climb one ridge of deep red sand, slither down the far side, and there in front of you is the next - and beyond it the next, and the next, more than a thousand of them marching to the horizon in almost perfect parallel. This is the largest field of parallel sand dunes on Earth, home to the world's longest individual parallel dunes. The Wangkangurru Yarluyandi people, whose Country this is, call it Munga-Thirri: big sandhill country. It is the plainest possible name and the most exact.

Image: Tandrew22 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Munga-Thirri–Simpson Desert Regional Reserve: A Thousand Parallel Waves

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tandrew22, CC BY-SA 4.0. The dunes of the Simpson run southeast to northwest, raked into long parallel ridges by the prevailing winds over tens of thousands of years. There are more than eleven hundred of them. Some stretch unbroken for as much as 200 kilometres. The most famous, known to travellers as B...

Image: Tandrew22 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Munga-Thirri–Simpson Desert Regional Reserve: The People of the Sand

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tandrew22, CC BY-SA 4.0. For a long time outsiders believed the Simpson was simply uninhabitable - too dry, too vast, too hostile for anyone to live in its interior. They were wrong. The Wangkangurru lived deep within these dunes, sustained by mikiri: narrow native wells dug down through the sand, some a...

Image: Tandrew22 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Munga-Thirri–Simpson Desert Regional Reserve: What the Name Replaced

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tandrew22, CC BY-SA 4.0. The English name carries a smaller, stranger story. "Simpson" was bestowed in 1939 by the explorer Cecil Madigan, who led the first scientific crossing of the desert by camel - and who named it not for any feature of the land but for Alfred Allen Simpson, the Adelaide manufacture...

Image: Tandrew22 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Munga-Thirri–Simpson Desert Regional Reserve: Folded Into the Largest Park in Australia

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. The regional reserve no longer exists as a separate thing - and that is good news. In November 2021 the South Australian government combined the reserve with the neighbouring conservation park and reclassified the whole into the Munga-Thirri–Simpson Desert National Park: roughly ...

Image: Tentotwo | CC BY-SA 3.0