The Great Victoria Desert is the biggest in Australia, a sprawl of roughly 348,750 square kilometres stretching more than 700 kilometres from the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia to the Gawler Ranges of South Australia. It is not the flat nothing the word desert suggests. It is a restless mix of long red sandhills and grassland plains, salt lakes that flash white under the sun, and gibber plains - stretches of ground packed so tight with pebbles they look paved. Rain is rare and unreliable, but the sky is not always calm: the desert sees fifteen to twenty thunderstorms in an average year, towering and violent, dumping water that vanishes almost as fast as it falls. Summer days climb into the thirties and beyond; winter nights can be sharp and cold.

Only the toughest things grow here. Hardy spinifex grasses spread in spiny clumps between the dunes, scattered with mulga and desert eucalypts like the marble gum, Eucalyptus gongylocarpa. The animals are masters of scarcity. Emus and red kangaroos range the open country, but the desert's real specialists are smaller and stranger: the great desert skink digging its communal burrows, the endangered sandhill dunnart, and the southern marsupial mole, a blind, gold-furred creature that effectively swims through the sand. The water-holding frog waits out the dry years sealed underground in a cocoon of its own skin. Overhead and underfoot live the predators - the dingo, free here on the northern side of the great Dingo Fence, and the perentie, Australia's largest monitor lizard, big enough to stop a traveller in their tracks.

Long before Giles, this was Aboriginal country, and it remains so. The desert is the homeland of peoples including the Pitjantjatjara, the Mirning, the Kogara, and the Spinifex People - Pila Nguru - whose connection to this land reaches back many thousands of years. The story here is not one of disappearance but of endurance and return: Aboriginal populations across the region have been growing, and communities are actively keeping culture alive, with young desert people working through programs like Wilurarra Creative to carry language, art and law forward. When the Spinifex People sought legal recognition of their country in 2000, they made their case partly through paintings - vast canvases mapping their homeland - and won native title over tens of thousands of square kilometres. The desert that explorers crossed in terror has always been, to its first peoples, a place of belonging.

For all its isolation, the desert is threaded by a few brutally rough tracks - the Connie Sue Highway and the Anne Beadell Highway among them, both cut by the surveyor Len Beadell in the 1950s and 60s and named, in his sentimental way, for his daughter and his wife. But Beadell's roads served a darker purpose too. They opened the country for the British nuclear weapons tests carried out at Maralinga and Emu Field, on the desert's southern edge, in the 1950s and early 1960s. Those tests drove Aboriginal people from their land and left ground contaminated with plutonium-239 and other long-lived radioactive material - a wound the desert still carries. It is a hard counterpoint to the desert's otherwise untouched character, a reminder that even the most remote places were not beyond the reach of the twentieth century.

Set against that scar is an unusual fact: the Great Victoria Desert is one of the least-disturbed large landscapes left on the continent. Too dry for farming, it was mostly spared the clearing and grazing that reshaped so much of Australia, and roughly 31 percent of it now sits within protected areas - nature reserves, conservation parks, and a network of Indigenous Protected Areas managed by traditional owners themselves. Recognised as a distinct ecoregion by the World Wildlife Fund, the desert holds its dunes, its spinifex, and its remarkable specialised wildlife in something close to their original state. New species still turn up here - the Central Ranges taipan was first described as recently as 2007. In an age when wild places are vanishing, this enormous red expanse remains, against all odds, mostly itself.