The Nullarbor Plain ( NUL-ər-bor; Latin: nulla feminine of nullus 'no' and arbor 'tree') is part of the area of flat, almost treeless, arid or semi-arid country of southern Australia, located on the Great Australian Bight coast with the Great Victoria Desert to its north. It is the world's largest single exposure of limestone bedrock, and occupies an area of about 200,000 square kilometres (77,000 sq mi). At its widest point, it stretches about 1,100 kilometres (684 mi) from east to west across the border between South Australia and Western Australia.
History Historically, the Nullarbor was seasonally occupied by Indigenous Australian people, the Mirning clans and Yinyila people. Traditionally, the area was called Oondiri, which is said to mean 'the waterless'. The first Europeans known to have sighted and mapped the Nullarbor coast were Captain François Thijssen and Councillor of the Indies, Pieter Nuyts, on the Dutch East Indiaman 't Gulden Zeepaert (the Golden Seahorse). In 1626–1627, they charted a stretch of the southern Australian coast east of Cape Leeuwin and extending to longitude 133 30'E. While the interior remained little known to Europeans over the next two centuries, the stretch of coast adjoining the Great Australian Bight was named for Nuyts, and maps subsequent to 1627 bore the legend "Landt van P. Nuyts" or "Terre de Nuyts". That survives as two geographical names in West Australia: Nuytsland Nature Reserve and Nuyts Land District, and in South Australia as Nuyts Reef, Cape Nuyts and the Nuyts Archipelago. Edward John Eyre became the first European to successfully cross the Nullarbor (from East to West) in 1841. In writing about Eyre's voyages in 1865, Henry Kingsley wrote that the area across the Nullarbor and Great Australian Bight was a "hideous anomaly, a blot on the face of Nature, the sort of place one gets into in bad dreams". Eyre departed westwards from Fowlers Bay on 17 November 1840 with John Baxter and a party of three Aboriginal men. When three of his horses died of dehydration, he returned to Fowler's Bay. He departed with a second expedition on 25 February 1841. By 29 April, the party had reached Caiguna. Lack of supplies and water led to a mutiny. Two of the Aboriginal men killed Baxter and took the party's supplies. Eyre and the third Aboriginal man, Wylie, continued on their journey, surviving through bushcraft and some fortuitous circumstances such as receiving some supplies from a French whaling vessel anchored at Rossiter Bay, some 36 kilometres (22 mi) east of Esperance. They completed their journey in Albany in June 1841. In August 1865, while travelling across the Nullarbor Plain, Edmund Delisser in his journal named both Nullarbor and Eucla for the first time. A proposed new state of Auralia (meaning "land of gold") would have comprised the Goldfields, the western portion of the Nullarbor Plain and the port town of Esperance. Its capital would have been Kalgoorlie. During the British nuclear tests at Maralinga in the 1950s, the Australian Government removed the Wangai people from their homeland. Since then, they have been awarded compensation, and many have returned to the general area. Others never left. Some agricultural interests are on the fringe of the plain including the 2.5-million-acre (1-million-hectare) Rawlinna Station, the largest sheep station in the world, on the Western Australian side of the plain. The property has a short history compared to other properties of its type around Australia, having been established in 1962 by Hugh G. MacLachlan, of the South Australian pastoral family. An older property is Madura Station, situated closer to the coast; it has a size of 1.7 million acres (690,000 ha) and is also stocked with sheep. Madura was established prior to 1927; the extent of the property at that time was reported as two million acres (810,000 hectares). In 2013, a huge area of the Nullarbor Plain, stretching almost 200 km (120 mi) from the Western Australian border to the Great Australian Bight, was proclaimed as the Nullarbor Wilderness Protection Area under the Wilderness Protection Act 1992 (SA), doubling the area of land in South Australia under environmental protection to 1.8 million hectares (4.4 million acres). The area contains 390 species of plants and a large number of habitats for rare species of animals and birds.
Geology and geography The Nullarbor Plain is a former shallow seabed, as indicated by the presence of bryozoans, foraminifera, echinoids and red algae calcareous skeletons that make up the limestone. The region is also the location of "Nullarbor limestone" and it has a reputation as a significant karst region with Oligocene and Miocene cave formations. The sequence within the limestone includes five formations:
the upper formation is the Nullarbor Limestone which is early middle Miocene in age; the Mullamullang member of this formation is a paraconforming member, being separated by 5 million years; the third member is the Abrakurrie Limestone that was formed in a central depression of the earlier formation; this is late Oligocene to Early Miocene in age and does not reach the edge of the plain; the last two formations are conforming formations; the late Eocene Toolinna Limestone lies on the Wilsons Bluff Limestone which is mid- to late Eocene in age; and the Toolinna Limestone does not cover the whole Nullarbor and is extant only in the extreme east beside the Abrakurrie formation which lies in a depression. One theory is that the whole area was uplifted by crustal movements in the Miocene, and since then, erosion by wind and rain has reduced its thickness. The plain has most likely never had any major defining topographic features, resulting in the extremely flat terrain across the plain today.
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