Great Victoria Desert

Australia's largest desert, covering about 348,750 square kilometers of Western Australia and South Australia between the Eastern Goldfields and the Gawler Ranges, with sandhills, grassland plains, gibber pavement and salt lakes under 200 to 250 millimeters of annual rainfall. Spinifex grasses, mulga acacia shrubs and hardy eucalypts support red kangaroos, emus, the great desert skink and burrowing specialists such as the southern marsupial mole and the water-holding frog, while dingoes and large monitor lizards such as the perentie and sand goanna sit atop the food web. About 31 percent of the desert lies within reserves and Indigenous protected areas, though residual plutonium-239 contamination remains from British nuclear weapons tests at Maralinga and Emu Field in the 1950s and 1960s.