DESERT DELIGHT

The Great Victoria Desert, Australia's largest, defies expectations. Visibly rich in biodiversity, it challenges preconceptions about how a desert should look.

- DON FUCHS

FOR FIVE DAYS I’ve been travelling along the straight line of the 1325km-long Anne Beadell Highway. This somewhat grandly named – but deteriorating – bush track stretches from the opal town of Coober Pedy in South Australia to Laverton in the Western Australian Goldfields. Along the way it traverses the Great Victoria Desert (GVD), which straddles the border between SA and WA. With a staggering size of more than 400,000sq.km – about twice the size of Great Britain – the GVD is Australia’s largest desert, covering about 5 per cent of the continent.

The term “desert” usually connotes images of dry, barren landscapes, recalling harsh and desolate wastelands. But so far these clichés don’t relate. The heavily corrugated and intermittently washed-out Anne Beadell leads through surprisingly dense vegetation, contradicting the common wisdom that deserts are characterised by a lack of plants, notably trees.

Andrew Dwyer, owner of the Diamantina Touring Company, with whom I’m travelling, has been roaming Australia’s deserts for 36 years. The GVD, named after Queen Victoria in 1875, is his favourite. “The space, the solitude, the pristine nature, the location, and the fact that it is in between the [ranges of] Central Australia to the north and the Nullarbor to the south” make the GVD a very special place for him. For this experienced desert veteran, however, the GVD does not seem like a typical desert. “It’s an arid region,” he says, adding that dictionaries define deserts as “dry and lifeless” places. “There is nothing dry and lifeless about [this],” he adds.