Great Victoria Desert
Australia's largest desert, a sweep of red sand and spinifex in the continent's heart
The Great Victoria Desert is Australia's largest, a remote band of sand dunes, gravel plains, and spinifex grassland sprawling across roughly 349,000 square kilometres from Western Australia into South Australia. Named by the explorer Ernest Giles in 1875 for the reigning British queen, it is a place of red earth and brilliant skies, sparsely vegetated and barely peopled, where the sense of distance is overwhelming. Despite its aridity it is not a barren waste but a living desert, rich in reptiles and resilient plant life.
The desert is a mosaic of long parallel sand ridges, clay pans, and salt lakes, with no permanent rivers and unpredictable rainfall that occasionally arrives in heavy bursts. Spinifex, a spiny tussock grass, dominates the ground cover and anchors the dunes, while mulga and marble gum trees dot the plains. The Great Victoria holds one of the highest diversities of reptiles of any desert on Earth, including the great desert skink and the slow-moving, thorny-skinned moloch lizard, alongside dingoes and rare marsupials clinging on in the sands.
The desert is the homeland of Aboriginal peoples including the Pitjantjatjara and Spinifex people, whose connection to this country spans tens of thousands of years and who returned to manage parts of it after being displaced. That displacement came partly through the British nuclear tests at Maralinga and Emu Field in the 1950s, which contaminated land in the desert's south and remain a painful chapter. Today vast conservation reserves protect the Great Victoria, one of the world's largest intact arid ecosystems.