1. The land is a map: the Aboriginal relationship to the desert
2. Forms, images, imaginings: European myths of the desert
3. The 'hideous blank': imperatives for discovery
4. Geography is never innocent: or, what the explorers thought they saw
5. Perspectives on the desert: the art of exploration
6. 'On the tracts of thirst and furnace': dead explorers and national identity
7. Ripping yarns at the outpost of empire: the desert as adventure
8. From 'dead heart' to 'red centre': travellers' tales and the lure of gold
9. Seeing red: twentieth-century art of the desert
10. A gothic desert: psychodrama in fiction and film
11. Revisioning the explorers in twentieth-century art
12. Transforming myths: the explorers in twentieth-century literature
13. Seeing through biology: contemporary artists examine the desert
14. The desert in the Age of Aquarius: environmentalism and renewal
15. The art of reconciliation.
