Australian Deserts
Australia is the driest inhabited continent on Earth. About 70% of the country is desert or semi-desert, called collectively the "Outback". Australia has ten officially named deserts, which together cover an area roughly the size of all of Western Europe. They are home to ancient Aboriginal cultures, unique wildlife found nowhere else, and some of the most distinctive landscapes on the planet.
- % of Australia that is desertapprox. 70%Most of the country
- Named deserts10Across central and western Australia
- BiggestGreat Victoria348,000 km²
- Hottest tempapprox. 50 °CIn summer
- Famous landmarkUluruGiant red rock in central Australia
- First peoplesAboriginal Australians60,000+ year continuous culture
Australia's 10 deserts by size
The Great Victoria is Australia's biggest single named desert. Several others (Tirari, Strzelecki, Pedirka) are smaller still.
The ten Australian deserts
Australia's ten officially named deserts together cover about half the continent. They are:
- Great Victoria Desert (approx. 348,000 km²): Australia's biggest desert. In Western Australia and South Australia.
- Great Sandy Desert (approx. 284,000 km²): Famous for long red sand dunes. In Western Australia.
- Tanami Desert (approx. 184,000 km²): In the Northern Territory and Western Australia.
- Simpson Desert (approx. 176,000 km²): Famous for parallel sand dunes. In Queensland, Northern Territory and South Australia.
- Gibson Desert (approx. 156,000 km²): Between the Great Sandy and the Great Victoria. In Western Australia.
- Little Sandy Desert (approx. 111,000 km²): Smaller cousin of the Great Sandy. In Western Australia.
- Strzelecki Desert (approx. 80,000 km²): In South Australia, Queensland and New South Wales.
- Sturt Stony Desert (approx. 30,000 km²): Famous for vast plains of polished stones called "gibbers". In South Australia, Queensland and New South Wales.
- Tirari Desert (approx. 15,000 km²): One of the smallest. In South Australia.
- Pedirka Desert (approx. 1,200 km²): The smallest Australian named desert. In South Australia.
Aboriginal Australian cultures
Aboriginal Australians have lived in the deserts for at least 60,000 years, the oldest continuous culture on Earth. Different desert peoples developed deep knowledge of their particular country: how to find water in dry waterholes, how to track animals across sand, which plants are edible and which are poisonous, where the seasonal foods grew. Traditional Aboriginal cosmology, called the Dreaming, sees specific desert features (rocks, waterholes, hills) as the work of ancestral beings whose journeys created the landscape.
European colonisation from 1788 was disastrous for Aboriginal peoples. Disease, violence and land theft devastated their populations. The last Aboriginal groups to make first contact with European Australians did so as late as the 1980s (the Pintupi Nine in 1984). Today many Aboriginal communities live on their traditional lands as part of native-title-recognised territories.
Uluru
The most famous landmark in the Australian deserts is Uluru (also called Ayers Rock), the giant red sandstone monolith that rises from the desert in central Australia. Uluru is sacred to the Anangu Aboriginal people, who have lived around it for over 30,000 years. The rock features in numerous Anangu Dreamtime stories. Climbing Uluru was banned in 2019 out of respect for its sacred status.
Unique desert wildlife
Australian deserts have wildlife found nowhere else on Earth. Red kangaroos are the largest marsupials in the world. Thorny devils are small spiky lizards that drink water through their skin. Bilbies are long-eared marsupials that dig deep burrows. Perenties are the fourth-largest lizards in the world. Dingoes, emus, echidnas and wombats all live in the deserts. The world's most venomous snake, the inland taipan, also calls the Australian deserts home.
Deeper dive: Aboriginal native title, fire management and unique evolutionary heritage
The legal recognition of Aboriginal native title over Australian land transformed Australian land law from 1992 onwards. Before that year, Australian law held that the continent had been "terra nullius" (empty land) before European settlement, despite the obvious presence of indigenous peoples. The 1992 High Court decision in Mabo v Queensland (No 2) overturned this fiction and recognised that Aboriginal peoples held a form of legal title to their traditional lands. Subsequent legislation has formalised the process by which Aboriginal communities can claim native title. Today around half of Australia's desert lands are owned or controlled by Aboriginal communities through native title, freehold ownership, or formal co-management of national parks.
Aboriginal fire-stick farming is one of the most studied examples of indigenous land management in the world. For tens of thousands of years, Aboriginal Australians used small, controlled, carefully-timed burns to manage their landscape. The fires were typically lit in cool weather and were small enough to be controlled, creating a mosaic of habitats of different ages across the landscape. The mosaic supported more plants and animals, made it easier to hunt (animals had to take refuge in unburned patches), and prevented the build-up of dry fuel that causes catastrophic mega-fires. The cessation of Aboriginal fire management in the 19th and 20th centuries contributed to the changed fire regime that produced disasters like the 2019-2020 Black Summer bushfires. Programmes to revive traditional Aboriginal fire management are now being implemented across northern Australia, partly through Aboriginal-led "savanna burning" projects that also generate carbon credits.
Australian desert wildlife is the result of approx. 50 million years of isolation. After Australia broke away from Antarctica around 50 million years ago, the continent drifted northward into the Pacific carrying its already-distinct fauna with it. While placental mammals took over on every other continent, in Australia marsupials remained dominant. The Australian deserts therefore contain marsupial versions of niches filled by placental mammals elsewhere: the marsupial mole (similar to a placental mole), the marsupial wolf or thylacine (filling a wolf-like niche before its extinction in 1936), the various dasyurid marsupials (similar to carnivorous placental mammals). Most Australian desert mammals are nocturnal to avoid the daytime heat, leading to one of the most unusual collections of wildlife on Earth.
The continent is Australia. The two biggest individual deserts are the Great Victoria and the Great Sandy.