Australian Deserts: Their Ecological, Social and Cultural Significance

Australia’s arid zone encompasses 5 million square kilometres, 70% of the continent, yet contains only about 2% of the Australian population. The red and grey-green immensity of these desert expanses simultaneously beckons and mystifies: the non-human scale often repels the settler Australian imagination, for there is little in the way here of normal amenity.

As an ecologist, along with numerous colleagues, Steve Morton has spent many years studying and thinking about this vast area, learning much about how the ecosystems work, in particular how two forces – erratic rainfall and limited soil fertility – govern their functioning and the lives of their plants and animals. These same drivers affect human occupation of the deserts, causing scarcity of economic opportunity and limiting attractiveness to settler Australians.

The consequences are, firstly, imaginative difficulty in feeling affiliation for the place, in contrast to lustrous Aboriginal belonging; and second, a ‘desert system’ where the local knowledge of remote Australians fails to gain a hearing and in which residents must live with the notions of coastal decision-makers.

Desert Australia resists most attempts to turn it to norms of productive use, and it seems destined to remain an implacable reminder of limits to the endeavours of people of Western cultures.

Dr Steve Morton is an Honorary Professorial Fellow with Charles Darwin University in Alice Springs. He is an ecologist who studied at the Universities of Melbourne, California and Sydney. He joined CSIRO in Alice Springs in 1984 to work in the desert environment that has long been his focus. From 2000 to 2010, based in Canberra and Melbourne, he helped lead CSIRO as Chief of Division and Executive Team member. His book 'Australian Deserts: Ecology and Landscapes' was awarded the Whitley Medal in 2022.

There will be a Q&A session following the presentation, then light refreshments.