The Great Victoria Desert is the largest desert in Australia. It was named by explorer Ernest Giles in 1875, after Queen Victoria of England.
It consists of sand dunes, small sandhills, grassland plains, gibber plains and salt lakes.
The desert covers a large area, about 420,000 square kilometres (about the size of Iraq) in Western Australia and South Australia. The distance from east to west is about 700 km. Rainfall is only between 200 mm to 250 mm each year. It is surrounded by other very dry areas – the Nullarbor Plain to the south, the Gibson Desert to the north, and Sturts Stony Desert to the east.
As in other Australian deserts camels, donkeys, horses and rabbits cause significant damage to desert ecosystems. Foxes, feral cats and wild dogs pose significant threats to mammals, reptiles and ground-dwelling birds in the Great Victoria Desert.
Between 1953 and 1957, the British exploded nine atomic bombs in the GVD – two at Emu and seven at Maralinga. The largest was the 26.6 kiloton Taranaki test at Maralinga on 9 October 1957. Up to 600 additional ‘minor’ tests involved the explosive scattering of highly toxic ‘dirty’ materials like plutonium, uranium and beryllium. Service personnel who were deliberately exposed to the tests have died. Massive cleanup operations have been undertaken with varying degrees of success.