Australia’s biggest desert was crossed for a queen’s name
The Great Victoria Desert, Australia’s largest, spans Western and South Australia with dunes, gibber pavements, grasslands, and salt lakes over 700 kilometres wide. Ernest Giles first crossed it for Europeans in 1875 and dedicated the emptiness to Queen Victoria.
David Lindsay’s expedition crossed it from north to south in 1891, after Ernest Giles had made the first European crossing. Both the WWF and Australia’s biogeographic regionalisation treat it as a distinct region, a landscape of sand ridges, gibber plains of wind-polished pebbles, grasslands, and salt lakes stretching more than 700 kilometres from west to east.
Most residents are Aboriginal, including the Kogara, Mirning, and Pitjantjatjara, and numbers have risen as young people return to country. Rough routes such as the Connie Sue and Anne Beadell highways are the main ways across. Britain tested nuclear weapons at Emu Field and Maralinga between the 1950s and the early 1960s, leaving patches contaminated with plutonium-239 and other radioactive material.
Only the hardiest plants cope with the heat and sparse rain. Between the ridges, wooded steppe carries marble gum, Eucalyptus youngiana, and mulga over tough spinifex, and one endemic, Eucalyptus concinna, is known as the Victoria Desert mallee. Large animals are few, chiefly emus and red kangaroos, but lizards abound, among them the vulnerable great desert skink.
Because farming barely touched the region, many habitats remain intact, and 31 per cent of the desert lies in protected areas. The largest in South Australia is Mamungari Conservation Park, which was once officially called Unnamed Conservation Park before taking an Aboriginal name. Friends groups and the South Australian environment department have produced field guides to the desert’s shrubs and trees for visitors and rangers.
Source: Great Victoria Desert
