Heart of the Nation: Lake Tyrrell, Victoria

During the golden hour on this salt lake, water, horizon and sky meld into one. But what’s that strange object?

Lake Tyrrell, Victoria. Picture: Anne Morley

It pays to look over your shoulder when you’re photographing landscapes, says Anne Morley – you never know what you might see. This image from her book Lake Tyrrell: An Ever-Changing Landscape (Ten Bag Press, $49.99) is a case in point: she’d been facing the other way, capturing a sunset, but then glanced behind her and clocked this curious object.

Morley, 61, practised for 30 years as an architect but these days is enjoying a second career in photography. It has always been a passion, since a family road trip to Queensland in 1969, when her father gave her a Box Brownie and a couple of rolls of film. “My dad was from the Mallee district of north-west Victoria, where Lake Tyrrell is located, and loved wide open spaces, big skies, big horizons. I inherited that from him,” she says. In the past few years this ephemeral salt lake, a few hours’ drive from her home in Gippsland, has been her happy hunting ground.

It’s a dynamic landscape: when the lake is dry, you crunch around on a flat, pink-white expanse of salt crystals that’s like a moonscape. After rain, when the lake fills, it’s something else altogether – on calm days you get the “sky mirror” effect, where the salt-laden, slightly viscous water perfectly reflects the sky. Wade out during the golden hour at sunrise or sunset – the lake is only ever shin-deep, she says – and you’re in a surreal space where water, horizon and sky meld into one.

And this curious object? It’s a piece of tumbleweed, about knee high, that had blown onto the lake. (If you at first thought it was much bigger – an upside-down tree, say – you wouldn’t be the first. “I just played with the perspective by getting down really low and close to it,” Morley says.) Those pink clumps on it are salt crystals; the pink hue is from an algae that sometimes blooms in the lake. Salt crystals accumulate and clump on anything that touches the water, she says. “After a couple of hours at the lake, even my gum boots are covered in them.”