Sky Mirror, Lake Tyrrell: Heart of the Nation
When conditions are just so, a startling visual effect happens at Lake Tyrrell, an ephemeral salt lake in Victoria’s Mallee region.
When conditions are just so, a startling visual effect happens at Lake Tyrrell, an ephemeral salt lake in the Mallee region of north-west Victoria. You want about 3cm of water depth and a sunny, still day. When that happens, the entire lake – 23km long and 10km across – becomes a perfectly reflective surface. Clouds appear at your feet, and all your spatial reference points dissolve. Locals in the nearby town of Sea Lake have an evocative name for the effect: they call it the Sky Mirror.
It takes photographer Anne Morley six hours to drive to Lake Tyrrell from her home in Gippsland, but she’s been making the trip four times a year since her first visit in 2016. The lake is her artistic muse, her obsession. “I’m addicted to the place,” says the 63-year-old, who shot this image of her friend Robyn on a recent trip.
The title of Morley’s book, Lake Tyrrell: An Ever Changing Landscape, is a nod to “how it’s always different from one trip to the next”, she says. Sometimes, the water turns pink as a result of naturally occurring algae. Salt crystals will quickly engulf any objects blown onto the lake, until rain washes them clean. At sunrise and sunset, a palette of colours transforms the place from one minute to the next. And in summer, the lake dries out completely and you can crunch around on a carpet of salt crystals, admiring a desolate, lunar-like landscape.
Sea Lake (pop 619) has been the base for many salt-harvesting operations at Lake Tyrrell over the years, but for the past ten years the most important cash crop has been tourists. That’s largely down to Julie Pringle, manager of the visitor information centre, who in 2014 posted images of Lake Tyrrell on the Chinese social media platform WeChat. Within weeks, coach tours were disgorging hundreds of snap-happy Chinese tourists, and “thanks to social media it has just snowballed from there”, she says. These days it’s just as popular with Aussie travellers, who combine it with a tour of the nearby Silo Art Trail. And right now, there’s a few centimetres of water in the lake – perfect conditions for the Sky Mirror effect to switch on. Says Pringle: “We’ve hit the jackpot for the school holiday season!”
To see more of Anne Morley’s photography go tohttps://www.instagram.com/photography_by_anne_morley/
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