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Established in the central Australian desert in 1947, as a test range for the development of British missiles and other weapons under the Anglo-Australian Joint Project, Woomera Rocket Range acquired a “glamorous” media profile—especially in Australia—as a high-tech research center, where all manner of cutting edge and exotic aerospace research was carried out. Further enhancing its mystique was the Cold War secrecy that surrounded the remote facility, only accessible to authorized personnel and carefully approved media representatives. The idea of a vast, remote rocket launch base quickly caught the imagination of science fiction and adventure writers, comic creators, and scriptwriters. Although space research was not among the reasons for the establishment of the Range, fully a decade before the first sounding rocket was launched from Woomera, a spaceport in central Australia had already been envisaged by, among others, a young Arthur C. Clarke, in the early stages of his distinguished career as a science fiction author. Other writers, inspired by its aura of Cold War secrecy imagined the Range as a location for intrigue and espionage, targeted at its missile and envisaged space research programs. This article will consider the vision of Woomera as a spaceport in British and Australian imagination. It will examine the creation of the “mystique” of the Woomera Rocket Range through media reports, technical journalism, and the activities of space promoters, such as the British Interplanetary Society, and how this was transformed, via science fiction and popular entertainment (comics, radio plays, and television), into a general assumption within the British Commonwealth that Woomera would become a hub of space activities, such that journalists could seriously propose the possibility that the first satellite launches and early human space missions might be launched from Australia. It will focus on the period from 1947-1980, the lifetime of the Anglo- Australian Joint Project, after which it was obvious that the facility would never achieve its anticipated space-launch potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]