Deserts of Australia

s cover about, or 18%, of the Australian mainland, but about 35% of the Australian continent receives so little rain that it is practically desert. Collectively known as the Great Australian desert, they are primarily distributed throughout the Western Plateau and interior lowlands of the country, covering areas from South West Queensland, the Far West region of New South Wales and Spencer Gulf in South Australia to the Barkly Tableland in Northern Territory and the Kimberley region in Western Australia. Parts of the Mallee in Victoria are named as deserts; the region is described as semi-desert.
By international standards, the Great Australian desert receives relatively high rates of rainfall, around on average, but due to the high evapotranspiration it would be correspondingly arid. No Australian weather stations situated in an arid region record less than of average annual rainfall. The deserts in the interior and south lack any significant summer rains. The desert in western Australia is well explained by the little evaporation of the cold sea current of the West Australian Current, of polar origin, which prevents significant rainfall in the interior of the continent. About 40% of Australia is covered by dunes. Australia is the driest inhabited continent, with the least fertile soils.
In addition to being mostly uninhabited, the Great Australian Desert is diverse, where it consists of semi-desert grassy or mountainous landscapes, xeric shrubs, salt pans, gibber deserts, red sand dunes, sandstone mesas, rocky plains, open tree savannahs and bushland with a few rivers and salt lakes, which are mostly seasonally dry and often have no outflow in the east. The desert is among the least modified in the world. The Australian desert has the largest population of feral camels in the world.

History

Geological

The area's geology spans a geological time period of over 3.8 billion years, therefore featuring some of the oldest rocks on earth. There are three main cratonic shields of recognised Archaean age within the Australian landmass: The Yilgarn, the Pilbara and the Gawler cratons. Several other Archaean-Proterozoic orogenic belts exist, usually sandwiched around the edges of these major cratonic shields. The history of the Archaean cratons is extremely complex and protracted. The cratons appear to have been accumulated to form the greater Australian landmass in the late Archaean to meso-Proterozoic,.
Chiefly the Capricorn Orogeny is partly responsible for the assembly of the West Australian landmass by connecting the Yilgarn and Pilbara cratons. The Capricorn Orogeny is exposed in the rocks of the Bangemall Basin, Gascoyne Complex granite-gneisses and the Glengarry, Yerrida and Padbury basins. Unknown Proterozoic orogenic belts, possibly similar to the Albany Complex in southern Western Australia and the Musgrave Block, represent the Proterozoic link between the Yilgarn and Gawler cratons, covered by the Proterozoic-Palaeozoic Officer and Amadeus basins.

Aboriginal

have lived in the desert for at least 50,000 years and occupied all Outback regions, including the driest deserts, when Europeans first entered central Australia in the 1800s. Many Indigenous Australians retain strong physical and cultural links to their traditional country and are legally recognised as the traditional owners of large parts of the Outback under Commonwealth Native Title legislation.
Aboriginal tribes and clans have been nomadic in the desert areas for thousands of years. They subsisted on the local flora and fauna, now known as bush food, and made sure that their sources of drinking water remained intact. The nomads moved in clearly demarcated tribal areas. For example, important tribes living in the desert areas include the Arrernte, Luritja and Pitjantjatjara. The latter tribe's sphere of influence extended from Uluṟu to the Nullarbor Plain. The Dieri tribe lives in a large area of the Simpson, Strzelecki and Tirari deserts.
The rock art and archaeological site at Karnatukul was, until recently, estimated to have been inhabited for up to 25,000 years, and known as the site of the oldest continuous recorded occupation in the Western Desert cultural region. Karnakatul shows one of the earliest uses of firewood, and habitation continued through times of extreme climate change, when the desertification occurred as the polar ice sheets expanded. The oldest examples of rock art, in Western Australia's Pilbara region and the Olary district of South Australia, are estimated to be up to around 40,000 years old. The oldest firmly dated evidence of rock art painting in Australia is a charcoal drawing on a small rock fragment found during the excavation of the Narwala Gabarnmang rock shelter in south-western Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory.
The isolated desert areas remained undeveloped for a long time. For example, the Spinifex people first had contact with whites in the 1950s, when they were expelled from their tribal lands because of nuclear weapons testing by the British and Australian governments. The Pintupi Nine, a group of nine Aboriginal people of the Pintupi tribe, lived a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the Gibson Desert until October 1984, when they first encountered whites as they left the desert. Both discoveries were sensations at the time.
Large parts of the Australian desert areas are part of the Desert Cultural Area. Important cultural sites include Uluṟu and Kata Tjuṯa. Aboriginal Australians of the desert produced many important artists, one of the first and most famous being Albert Namatjira, who was born in Hermannsburg in the Great Sandy Desert. About a third of Australia's deserts are now Aboriginal lands. A very large part of it is managed by them as a nature reserve. A number of tribes have land use rights for almost all other desert regions. Today, numerous Aboriginal peoples live in settlements in the deserts.

European

The Strzelecki Desert was named in 1845 by explorer Charles Sturt after Polish explorer Paul Edmund Strzelecki.
The first European to cross the Great Sandy Desert was Peter Egerton Warburton. He arrived on the Western Australian coast badly exhausted and blind in one eye. He owed his survival to Charley, an Aboriginal tracker. The British explorer Ernest Giles, who crossed the desert in 1875, gave it the name Great Victoria Desert. It is dedicated to Queen Victoria. From 1858 onwards, the so-called "Afghan" cameleers and their beasts played an instrumental role in opening up the Outback and helping to build infrastructure.
The Sturt Stony Desert was named by Charles Sturt in 1844, while he was trying to find the inland sea which he believed lay at the centre of Australia. In 1866 Peter Egerton Warburton's expedition reached the Tirari desert from the west. The Overland Telegraph line was constructed in the 1870s along the route identified by Stuart. In 1865 the surveyor George Goyder, using changes in vegetation patterns, mapped a line in South Australia, north of which he considered rainfall to be too unreliable to support agriculture. British explorer Ernest Giles named the Gibson Desert in memory of Alfred Gibson, who went missing during an 1873–74 expedition.
The Tanami Desert was named by explorer and prospector Allan Davidson. He only assigned the name on his second expedition to this desert region, which ended in 1900. "Tanami" was the original Aboriginal name for two rock caves with clear drinking water.
The Simpson Desert got its name from Allen Simpson, a geographer who ventured into this desert in 1845. The name was suggested by explorer and geologist Cecil Madigan. In 1936, Edmund Colson became the first white man to cross the Simpson Desert. Before that, the great Australian explorers Charles Sturt and David Lindsay had failed. While the early explorers used horses to cross the Outback, the first woman to make the journey riding a horse was Anna Hingley, who rode from Broome to Cairns in 2006.
The nuclear weapons trials carried out by the United Kingdom at Maralinga and Emu Field in the 1950s and early 1960s have left areas contaminated with plutonium-239 and other radioactive material.

Regions

A large contiguous desert area is formed by the Tanami, Great Sandy, Little Sandy, Gibson and Great Victoria Deserts in western Australia and a smaller one by the Simpson, Sturt, Strzelecki and Tirari Deserts in the east. Spatially isolated between the Great Victoria and Simpson Deserts lies the small Pedirka Desert, which spreads out over the geological Pedirka Sedimentary Basin. The Little Sandy Desert connects to the Great Sandy Desert and is similar in terms of landscape and vegetation. The Western Desert, which describes a cultural region of Australia's indigenous people, includes the Gibson, Great Victoria, Great Sandy and Little Sandy deserts in the states of Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia.
Most of the inhabitants of the area are Indigenous Australians. There are other areas in Australia designated as desert that are not related to the Australian deserts mentioned above. On Kangaroo Island off the coast of South Australia is an area of called the Little Sahara, a formation of several sand dunes on its south coast. In Victoria, about west of Melbourne, there is still the Little Desert National Park. The Painted Desert is northwest of Coober Pedy in South Australia.

Desert	State/territory	Area	Area	Area rank	% of Australia
Great Victoria Desert	South Australia Western Australia		1	4.5%	-
Great Sandy Desert	Northern Territory Western Australia		2	3.5%	-
Tanami Desert	Northern Territory Western Australia		3	2.4%	-
Simpson Desert	Northern Territory Queensland South Australia		4	2.3%	-
Gibson Desert	Western Australia		5	2.0%	-
Little Sandy Desert	Western Australia		6	1.5%	-
Strzelecki Desert	New South Wales Queensland South Australia		7	1.0%	-
Sturt Stony Desert	Queensland South Australia		8	0.3%	-
Tirari Desert	South Australia		9	0.2%	-
Pedirka Desert	South Australia		10	0.016%	-