Traveling along the remote back routes from Sydney to Adelaide, I find myself repeatedly drawn back to the vast, shimmering expanses of the Pink Salt Lakes within Murray-Sunset National Park. It is a landscape I return to deliberately, a quiet sanctuary where I can step away from the highway to walk the crusty edges, sit in the stillness, and draw. This immense, striking terrain is sacred Aboriginal land, encompassing the traditional Country of the Latji Latji, Ngintait, and Nyeri Nyeri Peoples. To sit on the edge of these dry, pink basins with a sketchbook in hand is to feel completely small against the immense scale of the Australian interior, exposed to a horizon that challenges how you perceive space, distance, and time.
The lakes carry a fascinating, layered history of human negotiation with their harsh environment. In a previous era, this unforgiving terrain was home to commercial salt mining operations, a brutal enterprise where early laborers and their animals had to endure extreme conditions. The salt crust was so aggressively corrosive that the working horses had to be fitted with custom-made, specialized canvas and leather hoof coverings; without this protective gear, the highly concentrated salt crystals would rapidly eat into and trouble their feet, crippling them within days. This industrial remnant highlights just how intensely unyielding and hostile this terrain can be to foreign, automated intervention.
However, when I am out there on the blinding pans working with graphite and charcoal, the memory of that brief, abrasive mining era completely fades away into the background. Instead, a much more ancient, permanent culture seems to hum vividly in the atmospheric play between saturated color and shifting desert light. The pale pinks, deep magentas, and stark whites of the lake beds aren’t static; they mutate constantly with the position of the sun, creating a living canvas that feels deeply spiritual. My drawings become an attempt to listen to that ancient frequency—capturing the profound, quiet resonance of a landscape that has been deeply known, cared for, and respected for millennia.
