Gunbarrel Highway
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Gunbarrel Highway
The Gunbarrel Highway is an isolated desert track in the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia. It consists of about of washaways, heavy corrugations, stone, sand and flood plains. The Gunbarrel Highway connects Victory Downs in the Northern Territory to Carnegie Station in Western Australia. Some sources incorrectly show the highway extending west to Wiluna. The road was built as part of Australia's role in the weapons research establishment called Woomera which included Emu Field and Maralinga, both atomic bomb testing sites. The name comes from Len Beadell's Gunbarrel Road Construction Party so named as his intention was to build roads as straight as a gunbarrel. History There were three main reasons for the construction of the Gunbarrel Highway. The first was to provide access for a future meteorological station which was needed to forecast upper winds prior to the testing of atomic weapons in South Australia. The second was for instrumentation ...
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Carnegie Station
Carnegie Station (25°47'45.0"S 122°58'31.1"E), or Carnegie pastoral lease, is located north of Laverton and east of Wiluna in Western Australia and is the most eastern of pastoral leases found on the Gunbarrel Highway. In some sources it is identified as Carnegie, with the features including a homestead, outstation, outcamp, woolshed, and Aboriginal outstation. The area of the station is also within the Wiluna Native Title Claim area, also known as the Martu claim that was clarified in 2013. The Carnegie Station Airport is located approximately west of the homestead. Located on the western edge of the Gibson Desert and the southern edge of the Little Sandy Desert, it is situated on the eastern side of the Lady Lawley Range, north of Lake Carnegie and is found at the western terminus of the original Gunbarrel Highway. The history of the station is related to the history of the Linke family. Due to its isolated location, artefacts from explorers and earlier travels ...
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Maralinga, South Australia
Maralinga, in the remote western areas of South Australia, was the site, measuring about in area, of British nuclear tests in the mid-1950s. In January 1985 native title was granted to the Maralinga Tjarutja, a southern Pitjantjatjara Aboriginal Australian people, over some land, but around the same time, the McClelland Royal Commission identified significant residual nuclear contamination at some sites. Under an agreement between the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia, efforts were made to clean up the site before the Maralinga people resettled on the land in 1995. The main community, which includes a school, is Oak Valley. There are still concerns that some of the ground is still contaminated, despite two attempts at cleanup. History Nuclear tests and cleanup Maralinga was the scene of UK nuclear testing and was contaminated with radioactive waste in the 1950s and early 1960s. Maralinga was surveyed by Len Beadell in the early 1950s. It followed the survey ...
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Ernest Giles
William Ernest Powell Giles (20 July 1835 – 13 November 1897), best known as Ernest Giles, was an Australian explorer who led five major expeditions to parts of South Australia and Western Australia. Early life Ernest Giles was born in Bristol, England, the eldest son of William Giles ( – 28 May 1860), a merchant, and Jane Elizabeth Giles, ''née'' Powell ( – 15 March 1879). Their family had been in comfortable circumstances but fell on hard times and emigrated to Australia. William Giles was living in North Adelaide by 1850 and Melbourne by 1853. William was later employed by Customs in Victoria, and his wife founded a successful school for girls in that colony. Giles was educated at Christ's Hospital school, Newgate, London. In 1850, at the age of 15, he emigrated to Australia, joining his parents in Adelaide. In 1852 Giles went to the Victorian goldfields, then became a clerk at the Post Office in Melbourne, and later at the County Court. Soon tiring of town life Gi ...
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Giles Weather Station
Giles Weather Station (also referred to as Giles Meteorological Station or Giles) is located in Western Australia near the Northern Territory border, about west-south-west of Alice Springs and west of Uluru. It is the only staffed weather station within an area of about and is situated mid-continent and near the core of the subtropical jetstream. This means it plays an important role as a weather and climate observatory for the country, particularly eastern and southeastern Australia, and particularly for rainfall predictions. The station is on the Great Central Road and the nearest township is the Warakurna Aboriginal settlement (population 180), North. Giles is within the Shire of Ngaanyatjarraku and is in the foothills of the Rawlinson Ranges. A staff of three operates the remote station on six-monthly tours. Giles Airport, a airstrip services the station and the Warakurna community. Tourists are invited to watch the daily release of weather balloons and browse throug ...
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Land Rover
Land Rover is a British brand of predominantly four-wheel drive, off-road capable vehicles, owned by multinational car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), since 2008 a subsidiary of India's Tata Motors. JLR currently builds Land Rovers in Brazil, China, India, Slovakia, and the United Kingdom. The Land Rover name was created in 1948 by the Rover Company for a utilitarian 4WD off-roader; yet today Land Rover vehicles comprise solely upmarket and luxury sport utility cars. Land Rover was granted a Royal Warrant by King George VI in 1951, and 50 years later, in 2001, it received a Queen's Award for Enterprise for outstanding contribution to international trade. Over time, Land Rover grew into its own brand (and for a while also a company), encompassing a consistently growing range of four-wheel drive, off-road capable models. Starting with the much more upmarket 1970 Range Rover, and subsequent introductions of the mid-range Discovery and entry-level Freelander line (in ...
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Rawlinson Ranges
Purli Yurliya or Rawlinson Ranges is a mountain range in the far east of central Western Australia, to the west of the Petermann Ranges, with which it is commonly associated. Both features were given their European names by Ernest Giles, the first European explorer to visit the area. The range runs roughly east from Lake Christopher for approximately . The Giles Weather Station is located a few kilometres further east. The area has been considered a possible site of the fabled Lasseter's Reef Lasseter's Reef refers to the purported discovery, announced by Harold Bell Lasseter in 1929 and 1930, of a fabulously rich gold deposit in a remote and desolate corner of central Australia. Lasseter's accounts of the find are conflicting and its .... References Mountain ranges of Western Australia {{WesternAustralia-geo-stub ...
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Mount Davies Road
Mount Davies Road is a remote unsealed outback track which runs from Mount Davies ( Pipalyatjara) in the far north-west corner of South Australia to Anne's Corner on the Anne Beadell Highway 397 kilometres to the south-east. It was built during 1956 and 1957 by the Gunbarrel Road Construction Party (GRCP) surveyed and led by Len Beadell, for the Weapons Research Establishment at Woomera, South Australia. Road survey As a result of British atomic tests at Emu Field in 1953, a weather station was needed to the far north-west of the test sites, to determine when suitable weather conditions existed for future tests. Len Beadell was given the task of selecting a team and constructing access roads from the test locality to the future weather station. The weather station was named Giles, after the explorer Ernest Giles who had explored that part of the remote inland. The access road began at Victory Downs in the Northern Territory and became known as the Gunbarrel Highway. The con ...
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Alice Springs
Alice Springs ( aer, Mparntwe) is the third-largest town in the Northern Territory of Australia. Known as Stuart until 31 August 1933, the name Alice Springs was given by surveyor William Whitfield Mills after Alice, Lady Todd (''née'' Alice Gillam Bell), wife of the telegraph pioneer Sir Charles Todd. Known colloquially as 'The Alice' or simply 'Alice', the town is situated roughly in Australia's geographic centre. It is nearly equidistant from Adelaide and Darwin. The area is also known locally as Mparntwe to its original inhabitants, the Arrernte, who have lived in the Central Australian desert in and around what is now Alice Springs for tens of thousands of years. Alice Springs had an urban population of 26,534 Estimated resident population, 30 June 2018. in June 2018, having declined an average of 1.16% per year the preceding five years. The town's population accounts for approximately 10 per cent of the population of the Northern Territory. The town straddles th ...
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Acacia Aneura
''Acacia aneura'', commonly known as mulga or true mulga, is a shrub or small tree native to arid outback areas of Australia. It is the dominant tree in the habitat to which it gives its name ( mulga) that occurs across much of inland Australia. Specific regions have been designated the Western Australian mulga shrublands in Western Australia and Mulga Lands in Queensland. Description Mulga trees are highly variable, in form, in height, and in shape of phyllodes and seed pods. They can form dense forests up to high, or small, almost heath-like low shrubs spread well apart. Most commonly, mulgas are tall shrubs. Because the mulga is so variable, its taxonomy has been studied extensively, and although ''A. aneura'' is likely to be split into several species eventually, there is as yet no consensus on how or even if this should be done. Although generally small in size, mulgas are long-lived, a typical life span for a tree undisturbed by fire is of the order of 200 to 300 yea ...
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Stuart Highway
Stuart Highway is a major Australia, Australian highway. It runs from Darwin, Northern Territory, Darwin, in the Northern Territory, via Tennant Creek and Alice Springs, to Port Augusta in South Australia; a distance of . Its northern and southern extremities are segments of Australia's Highway 1 (Australia), Highway 1. The principal north–south route through the central interior of mainland Australia, the highway is often referred to simply as "The Track". The highway is named after Scotland, Scottish explorer John McDouall Stuart, who was the first European to cross Australia from south to north. The highway approximates the route Stuart took. Route description Overview Stuart Highway runs from Darwin, Northern Territory, in the north, via Tennant Creek and Alice Springs, to Port Augusta, South Australia, in the south – a distance of . The Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia, Royal Flying Doctor Service uses the highway as an emergency landing strip and sections ...
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Coober Pedy
Coober Pedy () is a town in northern South Australia, north of Adelaide on the Stuart Highway. The town is sometimes referred to as the "opal capital of the world" because of the quantity of precious opals that are mined there. Coober Pedy is renowned for its below-ground dwellings, called " dugouts", which are built in this fashion due to the scorching daytime heat. The name "Coober Pedy" is thought to derive from the Aboriginal term ''kupa-piti'', which means "whitefellas' hole", but in 1975 the local Aboriginal people of the town adopted the name Umoona, which means "long life" and is also their name for the mulga tree. In the 2016 Australian census, there were 1,762 people in Coober Pedy. History Aboriginal peoples have a long-standing connection with the area. Coober Pedy is considered by the senior Western Desert people to be the traditional lands of the Arabana people country, but Kokatha and Yankunytjatjara people are also closely attached to some ceremonial ...
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Geodesy
Geodesy ( ) is the Earth science of accurately measuring and understanding Earth's figure (geometric shape and size), orientation in space, and gravity. The field also incorporates studies of how these properties change over time and equivalent measurements for other planets (known as '' planetary geodesy''). Geodynamical phenomena, including crustal motion, tides and polar motion, can be studied by designing global and national control networks, applying space geodesy and terrestrial geodetic techniques and relying on datums and coordinate systems. The job title is geodesist or geodetic surveyor. History Definition The word geodesy comes from the Ancient Greek word ''geodaisia'' (literally, "division of Earth"). It is primarily concerned with positioning within the temporally varying gravitational field. Geodesy in the German-speaking world is divided into "higher geodesy" ( or ), which is concerned with measuring Earth on the global scale, and "practical geodes ...
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