Lake Ballard. I wanted to visit this place for a few years and now I’ve got a chance. We drove on Mount Ida unsealed road from Leonora for about 1.5 hours to Lake Ballard (both are part of the Golden Quest Discovery Trail, which is 965 km long). We made a brief stop on the side of the road (or rather in the middle of the road, because there were no other cars moving in either direction of our whole journey) to look at Copperfield (An abandoned town which in 1898 housed 500 people and had state battery. Now only the old machinery is the reminder of what existed before).
Copperfield
The view from the Snake Hill Lookout a bit further down the road was pretty, although you can only see a glimpse of the lake.
View from Snake Hill lookout
Lake Ballard offers an excellent free camp spot and we saw quite a number of self-sufficient and happily settled caravanners there, taking note that next time it could be our camping spot too.
Kids were the first to set off exploring. They were not impressed with the statues but were happy to climb the little hill closer to the carpark, while running a little competition on who was the fastest.
Lake Ballard is a salt lake (mostly dry and crispy but can be wet especially closer to the carpark area), 51 km from the nearest town Menzies. There are a lot of salt lakes that you can see in the outback. The Wongutha people (Natives of the Goldfields in WA) believe that the salt lakes were made by the tears of the silver-grey crows of long ago, when they cried because they felt not accepted by other birds and animals of the bush.
The main attraction and a sight of fascination of Lake Ballard is “Inside Australia” exhibit picturing 51 alloy cast sculptures derived from laser scans of inhabitants of Menzies. Created by artist Anthony Gormley, the sculptures reveal each inhabitant’s life passage. While the sculptures are of the height of a person, the cross sections are reduced by two thirds, making them look unrealistically thin. We didn’t have time to look at all 51 sculptures but those that we saw, were predominantly of women. Does it mean that the women outnumbered men in those days? Or their life was more interesting to an observer? I didn’t get an answer to that question, but judging from excessive curves of their spines, the life of those people must have been full of hardship. Some of them reveal severe cases of lordosis and kyphosis (they, obviously, didn’t know anything about yoga, which helps to reduce muscular tension and flatten those curves!).
Although the sculptures do look similar to an untrained eye, the way they are positioned on the lake, against the sun and the background, make lots of wonderful opportunities for a good photo shoot, especially in the sunset (or sunrise). We spend a couple of hours, catching perfects shots in the rays of the setting sun. Only near complete darkness drove us away from that magical and serene place, where you can just stand in the middle of the Salt Lake and enjoy true solitude.
It is a nearly 2 hour drive back to our camping spot where we left our caravan. We must hurry up, because tomorrow is our Aboriginal tour with Greg from Morapoi Station!
