Photos

Colours of the Great Victoria Desert

Travel to Australia's largest desert in these beautiful photos of the rich plant and animal life that lives along Googs Track taken by the Friends of the Great Victoria Desert conservation group.

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Kevin O'Connor didn't know that much about Australia's largest dune desert before he joined the Friends of The Great Victoria Desert Parks.

"I thought like most people it was in Victoria, but of course it isn't," says O'Connor, now president of the volunteer conservation group.

Named after Queen Victoria by explorer Ernest Giles in 1875, the Great Victoria Desert (GVD) covers around 420,000 square kilometres. Surrounded by arid areas, it stretches 700 kilometres east to west straddling the border between South Australia and Western Australia.

The desert provides an important wildlife corridor between the mallee scrub in the east and the west. The bioregion, which is mostly on Arangu Pitjantjatjara and Maralinga Tjarutja land, includes a number of conservation parks, such as the Mamungari Conservation Park, recognised by UNESCO as a World Biosphere Reserve. It also contains disused nuclear testing sites at Maralinga and Emu Field.

"You naively think of the desert as a flat plain and there's not much going on, but that's not the case at all. In fact it's the exact opposite," says O'Connor, who has now visited two different areas of the desert in the last four years.

"What blew me away? The variation of landforms, the richness of vegetation, the fantastic colour of the sand — it's that beautiful reddy-ochre colour — and how plants survive."

Visiting the desert with a group of people with skills in plant and animal identification as well as working with park rangers and traditional owners of the land has opened his eyes to the desert's rich life.

"You can stand in front of a bush and think it's a bush, but when you know what you're looking at it's like someone's turned the lights on."

"The interrelationship between things is just brilliant."

"You just have to listen, and look, and be amazed that the environment that's there isn't quite what you thought it was. It's much richer, much more exciting," he says.

Despite low rainfall — between 200 to 250 millimetres a year — the desert is home to a diverse range of plants and animals, including rare and threatened species such as Eucalyptus articulata, princess parrot, Major Mitchell cockatoo, malleefowl, and the sandhill dunnart.



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Established in 1994, the Friends of the GVD is one of over 130 Friends of National Parks volunteer groups that work with the National Parks and Wildlife Service to conserve parks in South Australia.

Each year, with permission from the traditional owners, the Friends of the GVD travel to a part of the desert to survey changes in plant and animal life in the desert as well as the impact of invasive pests and land use such as mining. The data from their trips is sent back to the South Australian Department of Environment and Heritage.

"We go out once a year, usually in first couple of weeks in September. That's mostly to do with the fact that the weather's reasonable, it's not too hot, but the flowers are out and there's an animal called the malleefowl that makes these huge mounds of sand and leaf litter about three metres in diametre and a metre high."

"It's quite fascinating — you see lots of tracks (see image 11) but trying to find the mound is a bit tricky," says O'Connor.

The group has recently returned from a trip along Googs track — a 250-kilometre 4WD track that snakes across the south-eastern corner of the desert from Ceduna to Tarcoola through sandhills (see image 2) , salt lakes (see image 14) and the stone country around Mount Finke (see image 16).

This year they focused on plotting vegetation — including looking out for invasive weeds such as buffel grass for the State Herbarium — and tracking mallee fowl with the Oak Hill Aboriginal community.

Conditions were much drier than when they last visited in 2009, they report. On that trip the area in front of Mount Finke (see image 17) was carpeted with white, pink and yellow everlasting daisies.

This year Eucalyptus youngiana (see images 20 and 21) were flowering at Nalara Rock (see image 22), but unlike 2009, the group did not see any Grevillia treueriana (see image 18) a plant that is endemic to Mount Finke.

"We were there later in the year, but even then there wasn't evidence that they'd been there. There'd been some but they were really sparse which really surprised us," says Fiona O'Connor, who has a particular interest in plants.

"There might have been rain in some parts of the desert more than others and I suspect that's what we were seeing," she says.

The group were luckier with birds, spotting 41 species including a flock of Major Mitchell cockatoos (see image 15) and an elusive scarlet-chested parrot. But the malleefowl eluded them. While none were sighted, there were plenty of fresh tracks — a positive sign they are surviving predators such as foxes and dingoes.

And they are very happy to report no evidence of buffel grass.

"Its relentless march south has not yet reached this corner of the Great Victoria Desert."

—Genelle Weule