What are Australia's deserts?
Answer
Arid regions covering central Australia
Explanation
Australia's deserts cover about 18 per cent of the continent, or roughly 1.37 million square kilometres, across the centre and west of the country. They are central to Australian national identity, having shaped Indigenous cultures over tens of thousands of years and later filled the country's exploration narrative, art, and self-image with images of red sand, dry watercourses, and immense distance.
Ten named deserts make up the country's arid zone: the Great Victoria Desert (the largest), the Great Sandy Desert, the Tanami Desert, the Simpson Desert, the Gibson Desert, the Little Sandy Desert, the Strzelecki Desert, the Sturt Stony Desert, the Tirari Desert, and the Pedirka Desert. These regions are home to enduring Aboriginal communities, including the Pintupi, Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara, Warlpiri, Anmatyerre, and Walmajarri peoples, whose languages, ceremonies, and art continue to shape the country's cultural life.
The deserts produced some of the country's most famous tragedies and triumphs of European exploration. Robert O'Hara Burke and William John Wills died in 1861 trying to cross the continent from south to north, and their fate became one of the foundational stories of colonial Australia. Ernest Giles, John McDouall Stuart, Peter Egerton Warburton, and David Lindsay all crossed or mapped sections of the desert through the 1860s and 1870s. The 1929 disappearance of Lewis Lasseter while searching for a fabled gold reef has become an enduring Australian myth.
Modern desert culture includes contemporary Aboriginal art from Papunya, Yuendumu, and the APY Lands, the Birdsville Races held each September, the cattle stations of the Channel Country, and the Royal Flying Doctor Service founded by John Flynn in 1928 to provide medical care across the inland. Tourism is significant: visitors travel the Stuart Highway between Adelaide and Darwin, the Tanami Track between Alice Springs and Halls Creek, and the Birdsville Track between South Australia and Queensland. The Outback, an imagined rather than precisely defined region, draws on the deserts as much as on the wider rural inland.
Why this matters for your test
The deserts cover almost a fifth of Australia and host some of the most enduring Indigenous communities and exploration stories, and naming the major ones gives new citizens a working sense of the inland.
Source: Australian Citizenship: Our Common Bond (2024)
