Perth, capital of the state of Western Australia, is one of the remotest cities anywhere, on the far side of the immense continental desert, closer to Jakarta than to Sydney.
It encompasses immense plains, deserts, tundra, and forests, as well as tall mountains, rivers, and thousands of miles of ocean shoreline.
But, in the nineteen-nineties, the government began to invest seriously in its infrastructure, irrigating immense tracts of desert between the Yellow River and the Helan Mountains, much as the phoenix had done.
This immense coastal fog desert in Namibia encompasses large shifting sand dunes, covering over three million hectares of the Namib-Naukluft Park.
Jim Mangan, for example, has documented the isolation of driving with a series of aerial photographs depicting one lone car surrounded by immense and desolate desert.
The coast is muddy and malarial; the west, seen from the air, is an immense brown mat of desert; the centre is scrubland munched by cattle.
Yet the city owes its existence to the fact it was once in a "northern desert of immense marshes, overhung with fog".
That idea distinguishes her from male contemporaries like Michael Heizer, whose immense voids in the desert reduce the human body to puny insignificance.
The potential for generating solar energy from the Sahara desert is immense.
Even so, the Sonoran desert can feel immense and hostile, with sand and scrub stretching into the horizon.
