Lake Ballard

9th – 12th September 2023

The drive will take you through the little town of Menzies, once a bustling town of ten thousand, now a home to a meagre 103 residents. There is a lot of history here and of course, they still have a pub and the beer is icy cold. 🙂

Lake Ballard is just another Salt Lake, so why is it so popular? I’d say ethereal sculptures (placed strategically over ten square kms of Lake Ballard) are the draw card. These fifty one sculptures, created by Sir Anthony Gormley, seem alien in nature. Couple that with some striking hills, perched on the otherwise flat salt pan and you have a landscape with a distinctly off-world feel. The lake is mostly an ochre colour but if you get the lighting just right, it turns a delicate shade of pink.

If memory serves, all fifty one sculptures are based on residents of Menzies, plus a couple of ring-ins. Each had a full body 3D scan (naked). The data from these scans was reduced to 1/3 actual size and used to create the steel alloy statuettes. We walked to twenty four of the statuettes, and viewed forty one from the hill top.

The first day we arrived, we had glorious weather, with a sky that screamed…”Shoot me”. So, I did. Along with the statues and the landscape. In a way it’s a shame that the area is so popular. When the statues were installed, the lake was a clean white salt bed, (I saw some photos) but now, with all the foot traffic, the salt has been replaced with dry, ochre/pink dust.

That first day, we also had a lovely sunset to enjoy, all in all, we had a lot of fun and we were up early the next day to enjoy the sunrise. Yes, I know that’s unusual for us but the photos below are proof – we even got the early moon being chased by Jupiter.

The weather wasn’t so kind the following two days. It was hot and windy. Each day, between 10:00 and 10:30, the wind arrived. The atmosphere was full of fine salt and sand particles…so was the caravan. But we still went out and had some fun.

We took the opportunity to fly the drone from the hill top, and we got some decent shots. It’s a shame drones are banned in so many areas, because you don’t often get a chance to see an area from a birds eye view.

There hasn’t been a lot of wildlife around, but there have been a few lizards, and I have to say, the WA lizards have a bit of attitude. These little guys, about twenty centimeters from nose to tail, are not afraid to stand their ground.

After playing with the drone, I thought I’d get my Lens Ball out. You get some good effects with this, and I had a bit of fun with it. Hugo even managed to drag himself out of the caravan, though the wind was causing him a bit of grief, he didn’t want to miss out on meeting the “aliens”. I swear, that bear will believe anything you tell him.

We would have stayed longer, but the fourth day showed no reprieve from the wind. We’d worn our broom down to a nub with all the sweeping, and we were getting tired of eating sand/salt/dust, (it was that bad) so we stowed away our goodies and hit the road again.

See you out there somewhere

On tow and on the go!