Salt lake

As my previous post was of snow, I thought it would be fun to indulge in a little visual pun.

This is Lake Hart, in South Australia. It’s one of the smaller salt lakes in the Lake Eyre basin, a vast region covering a sixth of Australia. It’s a harsh landscape; the deserts of this region are thought to be the largest source of airborne dust in the southern hemisphere. Rain is intermittent, but when there is enough to create rivers they have nowhere to go as the basin does not drain into the sea. They can only flow into the many salt lakes and evaporate.

Despite being in this huge and unforgiving landscape, Lake Hart is not quite as remote as you might think. The south tip of the lake is skirted by both the Stuart Highway and the famous Ghan rail line as they head out across the stony plains and into the desert, on their 3,000 km trip from Adelaide to Darwin. In the middle of the 20th century it was mined for salt, and later the north of the lake became the centre of rocket launching and missile testing for the military base at Woomera.

All this activity aside, the lake itself is quite stunning, a pristine stretch of sparkling white under the wide blue sky. As the salt dries it cracks into plates leaving zig-zag ridges across the surface. It is blindingly white under the hot midday sun, and the crystals crunch underfoot as you walk across the brittle crust.

The photograph above I took looking back to shore, where the fertile land becomes a ribbon of rusty colour between the salt and the sky. It becomes a sliver of habitation between the two extremes, while the streaks of cirrus clouds echo the cracks running across the salt. Across the land you can see the line of the Ghan railway which carries a passenger service twice a week.

Turning round to face across the lake, all signs of land disappears and the landscape becomes an alien world of blue and white. The distant shoreline becomes a dark line on the horizon. With just sky, salt and that strip of blue hill the image becomes a simple statement of space.

It’s a reminder of the forces of drought and salination, two issues that confront Australians as they try to balance river use for irrigation with an ecosystem suffering from severe water shortages.

Both images are available as fine art prints; I would recommend a C-type print on Fuji Crystal photographic paper to capture the richly saturated blue of the sky. For sizes, papers, mounts and prices, click through on the images.

These two photographs of the salt lake are available also for commercial use under a rights-managed licence. For quotations, click through on the images. I have made another image of the salt lake available under a royalty free licence; see this post for details.