Australia and the cold deserts

A large part of Australia is desert or arid (very dry), so much so that the whole area has been called the Great Australian Desert, made up of several deserts including the Great Victoria Desert.

Its wildlife includes reptiles, skinks, wallabies, bilbies and feral camels, with dingoes, large lizards, cats, foxes and snakes as predators. Rare animals such as the sandhill dunnart, marsupial mole and mallee fowl are struggling to survive.

The camels are there for a historical reason: they were brought from places like India and Afghanistan in the 19th century to help exploration and colonisation, and their descendants now live wild (feral).

The Spinifex are an indigenous people who have lived in this desert for over 25,000 years, a length of time worth pausing on. Their way of life and culture are being kept alive by younger generations, and now attract visitors too.

Then the chapter corrects an idea most people carry.

The word 'desert' makes us think of a very hot, dry place. But what defines a desert is dryness (very little precipitation), not heat.

So there are cold deserts too. And the largest desert on Earth is Antarctica, covering over 14 million square kilometres, more than four times the area of India.

It is also the coldest desert on Earth, colder even than the Arctic, the planet's other polar desert.