I visited Inside Australia the other day, an installation of 51 statues by Anthony Gormley (of Angel of the North fame) set up in a salt lake about 190 kms from Kalgoorlie, which is in turn a seven hour train journey from Perth. Kalgoorlie is a gold mining town, and everyone there is either working in the mines or looking for work in the mines. There weren’t a lot of backpackers travelling through anyway.
The only way to get out to Lake Ballard, other than on an organised tour once a week, is to drive there. The first part of the trip up to the town of Menzies is on a nice sealed road through the bush, but after that it’s a 50km trip on a gravel road – I was assured that a medium sized hire car would be fine for the journey though, so I hired my Hyundai Accord – not realising that I could have hired a Ute instead! cursing my lack of stereotypical Australian transport I had an early night ready for the adventure.
I started the day by going down to Hannan’s Hotel to get some breakfast. I walked in to find a bar full of miners and a barmaid wearing a negligee. I thought about asking her if she’d just got up, but wasn’t sure that being a smart arsed english guy in a room full of mine workers was a good idea. Being a rough and tumble frontier town many of the bars in town are ‘skimpies’, which basically means the barmaids aren’t going to be wearing much. I hadn’t expected the same service to be extended at breakfast, but I ordered my beans on toast regardless and kept a low profile.
Fully fed I picked up my car, bought a 4 litre bottle of water in case I got lost or broke down, and started out for Menzies. The 51 statues I was heading for are all based on laser scans of the inhabitants of Menzies, but after being scanned all the dimensions were gaussed and blurred till they resemble stick men and women. Originally there were going to be 100 statues but they ran out of money. I’m quite impressed they could actually find 100 people that live in such a small town, the main street consisted of the shire office, a hotel, a shop and the petrol station. It took me about an hour to get there on a road that consisted of a long straight drive to the horizon followed by another, and another, and another… It was a beautiful day though, and I passed mile after mile of red earth, eucalypti and dead kangaroos. At one point I thought I saw a dog on the road in the far distance but it turned out to be an eagle eating a kangaroo carcas. It didn’t fly off when I drove past it, and looked like it could do me and the car serious damage if it had a mind to.
After Menzies I turned left onto the gravel road and spent 45 minutes trying to keep my car heading roughly forwards. Some parts of the road were level and smooth, but mostly it was either covered in ballbearing like gravel or so bumpy I thought the little hyundai was going to be shaken apart. I saw about two other cars on the journey, or possibly the same one going somewhere and coming back – either way it was reassuring to know that even after all this travelling I wasn’t completely alone. The only other life around was more dangerous looking eagles and pink cockatoos.
Finally I saw a sign for Lake Ballard and pulled into the car park, not terribly surprised to be the only car parked there. I followed the path down towards the lake being bothered by persistent aussie flies, and reached a large flat expanse of orange earth that muddily sucked at my shoes as I walked across it. despite being slightly damp the lake itself was dried out and as far as I could see to the hills in the distance was flat, except for a huge hill right in front of me. Dotted around, very far apart were the sculptures. Roughly human sized they were stick thin, and in the bright sunshine looked like black silhouettes on the landscape. Part of the process of creating them seemed to have left all the female statues with elongated mushrooms for breasts, and frankly it’s hard not to snigger at that.
So I tramped through the sticky ground looking at the statues and started to think they were all pretty samey. From a distance it looked like some of the statues were stood in some water so I headed out towards them to see if they were any different. The water turned out to just be a mirage from the heat haze, but getting closer I realised that the orange earth I was walking across was just the edge of the lake, and that I was heading towards a mile of salt flats. The first statues was standing on a distinct orange-white dividing line and reaching it I walked onto a crunchy layer of salt crystals which sounded like snow underfoot. Now that I was this far out the scale of the place was just awesome. I kept walking towards the furthest statues only to realise that there was another one even further in the distance. After a while I was standing in the middle of an arctic landscape, and my only company was some distant skeletal figures – and in that setting you really did start to notice the differences between each one, especially after you’d spent ten minutes crunching your way across to him or her. I loved it, it was just huge and vast and impressive in a very australian way, but still personally based on a couple of dozen people from a little village on the edge of nowhere.
After all that excitement I drove up to snake hill to have my lunch, and then started the long drive back to Kalgoorlie. It had been a lot of effort to get out to see a couple of statues and a dried up lake, but it was completely worth it. Go and see them!
I’m in Melbourne now, which funnily enough has a couple more versions of the statues that are much, much easier to reach (they’re in the national gallery). It’s not the same though. Not without the dead kangaroos.
