The Tanami Desert (Warlpiri: Jarnami) is a desert in northern Australia, situated in the Northern Territory and Western Australia.
It has a rocky terrain and small hills. The Tanami was the Northern Territory's final frontier and was not fully explored by Australians of European descent until well into the twentieth century. It is traversed by the Tanami Track.
The Warlpiri (/ˈwɑːrlbri/ or /ˈwɔːlpəri/) language is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken by close to 3,000 of the Warlpiri people from the Tanami Desert, northwest of Alice Springs, Central Australia. It is one of the Ngarrkic languages of the large Pama–Nyungan family, and is one of the most widely-spoken Aboriginal languages in Australia in terms of speakers. One of the most well-known terms for The Dreaming (an Aboriginal spiritual belief), Jukurrpa, derives from Warlpiri.
Warnayaka (Wanayaga, Woneiga), Wawulya (Ngardilpa), and Ngalia are regarded as probable dialects of Warlpiri on the AUSTLANG database, although with potentially no data; while Ngardilypa is confirmed.
The Kimberley is the northernmost of the nine regions of Western Australia. It is bordered on the west by the Indian Ocean, on the north by the Timor Sea, on the south by the Great Sandy and Tanami deserts in the region of the Pilbara, and on the east by the Northern Territory.
The region was named in 1879 by government surveyor Alexander Forrest after Secretary of State for the Colonies John Wodehouse, 1st Earl of Kimberley.
The Great Sandy Desert is an interim Australian bioregion, located in the northeast of Western Australia straddling the Pilbara and southern Kimberley regions and extending east into the Northern Territory. It is the second largest desert in Australia after the Great Victoria Desert and encompasses an area of 284,993 km (110,036 sq mi). The Gibson Desert lies to the south and the Tanami Desert lies to the east of the Great Sandy Desert.
The Gibson Desert is a large desert in Western Australia, mainly in an almost pristine state. It is about 155,000 square kilometres (60,000 sq mi) in size, making it the fifth largest desert in Australia, after the Great Victoria, Great Sandy, Tanami and Simpson deserts. The Gibson Desert is both an interim Australian bioregion and desert ecoregion.