The Natural Regions of the Deserts of Western Australia
1969; Wiley; Volume: 57; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2258493
ISSN1365-2745
Autores Tópico(s)Pasture and Agricultural Systems
ResumoAny map of Western Australia bears well-known names of deserts in the eastern half of the State-the Great Sandy Desert, the Gibson Desert, the Great Victoria Desert. To this list may be added, for practical purposes, the Nullarbor Plain. When, however, one enquires into this situation more deeply it is found to be difficult or impossible to discover what the characteristics of these deserts are, where their boundaries lie, and in what way they are distinguished from one another and from other parts of Western Australia not popularly considered to be desert. These questions will be answered in the course of this paper after considerable discussion. As a starting point, the only satisfactory preliminary definition of the deserts seems to be that they comprise the country which is not under pastoral lease or agricultural occupation (Fig. 1.) Such country occupies the whole of the eastern half of the State south of the Kimberley, to a total of about two-fifths of the whole area, or 400 000 square miles (1 million km2). Until 1954 knowledge of the greater part of this area north of the Nullarbor Plain was minimal and derived from the observations of the few nineteenth century expeditions which had traversed it, but from that year progress in exploration was rapid. It is rather remarkable that even to the very dates there is a close parallel with the Antarctic Continent and its exploration, as the following quotation from Law (1967) will show:
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