Australia’s Outback is remoteness, not just red desert
Australians treat the Outback as more remote than “the bush,” yet it stretches from northern monsoon coasts to southern temperate edges and the arid red centre. Low population density, largely intact country, and pastoral land uses knit the region geographically—and Aboriginal peoples have occupied every part of it for at least 50,000 years.
What ties the region together is a thin population, a largely intact natural environment and, in many areas, low-intensity uses such as grazing that depend on natural pasture. The Outback runs deep in Australian folklore and was a favoured subject of painters, especially in the 1940s, and in 2009 Queensland named its Outback one of 150 state icons as a natural attraction.
Europeans were slow to probe the interior. Gregory Blaxland’s party crossed the Blue Mountains behind Sydney in 1813, twenty-five years after the colony began, and John Oxley and Charles Sturt followed inland rivers. From 1858 so-called Afghan cameleers and their animals helped open routes and build infrastructure. John McDouall Stuart led six expeditions from Adelaide between 1858 and 1861, reaching the north coast without losing a man, unlike Burke and Wills, and the Overland Telegraph of the 1870s followed his path. In 1865 George Goyder drew a line of rainfall reliability across South Australia. In the 1950s Len Beadell surveyed and built roads serving the nuclear tests at Emu Field and Maralinga and the Woomera rocket range, and mineral prospecting continues.
Little industry has touched the land, so global wilderness reviews rank the Outback alongside boreal forests, tundra, the Sahara, the Gobi and the Amazon and Congo forests among Earth’s great intact natural areas. Its northern savannas are the largest intact savanna anywhere, and the Great Western Woodlands, covering 16 million hectares, more than England and Wales combined, are the largest surviving temperate woodland.
Landscapes range from the Kimberley, Pilbara and Top End savanna to the seasonal channels of western Queensland, ten deserts, the MacDonnell Ranges and the treeless Nullarbor. Red kangaroos and dingoes shelter in scrub through the heat of the day, flocks of budgerigars, cockatoos, corellas and galahs gather at waterholes at dawn and dusk, and snakes and lizards bask on open ground in winter.
Source: Outback
