The Mann Ranges are a

mountain range A mountain range or hill range is a series of mountains or hills arranged in a line and connected by high ground. A mountain system or mountain belt is a group of mountain ranges with similarity in form, structure, and alignment that have arise ...

in central Australia. It is located in the far northwest of

South Australia South Australia (commonly abbreviated as SA) is a state in the southern central part of Australia. It covers some of the most arid parts of the country. With a total land area of , it is the fourth-largest of Australia's states and territories ...

, with a small section running over the border into the

Northern Territory The Northern Territory (commonly abbreviated as NT; formally the Northern Territory of Australia) is an Australian territory in the central and central northern regions of Australia. The Northern Territory shares its borders with Western Aust ...

. It is part of the

geological Geology () is a branch of natural science concerned with Earth and other astronomical objects, the features or rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which they change over time. Modern geology significantly overlaps all other E ...

region known as the

Musgrave Block The Musgrave Block (also known as the Musgrave Province) is an east-west trending belt of Proterozoic granulite-gneiss basement rocks approximately long. The Musgrave Block extends from western South Australia into Western Australia. The Musgra ...

, which also includes the Petermann and

Musgrave Ranges Musgrave Ranges is a mountain range in Central Australia, straddling the boundary of South Australia (Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara) and the Northern Territory ( MacDonnell Shire), extending into Western Australia. It is between the Grea ...

. Mountains in this region were formed in the

Petermann Orogeny The Petermann Orogeny was an Australian intracontinental event that affected basement rocks of the northern Musgrave Province and Ediacaran ( Proterozoic) sediments of the (now) southern Amadeus Basin between ~550-535 Ma. The remains are seen to ...

(600–550 million years ago). This area is part of the

traditional country Classic country is a music radio format that specializes in playing mainstream country and western music hits from past decades. Repertoire The radio format specializes in hits from the 1950s through the early 1980s, and focus primarily on inno ...

of the

Pitjantjatjara The Pitjantjatjara (; or ) are an Aboriginal people of the Central Australian desert near Uluru. They are closely related to the Yankunytjatjara and Ngaanyatjarra and their languages are, to a large extent, mutually intelligible (all are va ...

nation. They associate it with the Dreaming of , a major

creation Creation may refer to: Religion *''Creatio ex nihilo'', the concept that matter was created by God out of nothing * Creation myth, a religious story of the origin of the world and how people first came to inhabit it * Creationism, the belief tha ...

spirit. He is said to have created the landforms while travelling through the area in the Dreamtime, and his route forms a network of

songlines A songline, also called dreaming track, is one of the paths across the land (or sometimes the sky) within the animist belief systems of the Aboriginal cultures of Australia which mark the route followed by localised "creator-beings" in the Dr ...

that are spiritually important to native people. The largest communities in the area are Kaṉpi and Nyapaṟi. The first European person to visit the area was William Gosse in 1873. With the help of local Aboriginal people, Gosse and his team explored the Mann Ranges after seeing the range from the top of

Uluṟu Uluru (; pjt, Uluṟu ), also known as Ayers Rock ( ) and officially gazetted as UluruAyers Rock, is a large sandstone formation in the centre of Australia. It is in the southern part of the Northern Territory, southwest of Alice Springs ...

. From the Mann Ranges, he went west to the

Tomkinson Ranges The Tomkinson Ranges is a mountain range in the northwest corner of South Australia. The range consists of sandstone hills, surrounded by spinifex grasslands. The range was named after politician Samuel Tomkinson (1816–1900) by the explorer W ...

, but turned back rather than trying to cross the

Great Victoria Desert The Great Victoria Desert is a sparsely populated desert ecoregion and interim Australian bioregion in Western Australia and South Australia. History In 1875, British-born Australian explorer Ernest Giles became the first European to cros ...

. He came back to the Mann Ranges and then went eastward to the Musgrave Ranges.

References

Mountain ranges of South Australia Mountain ranges of the Northern Territory {{australia-geology-stub