The Goldfields - Lake Ballard

Bender with a small statue on Lake Ballard

Well, I showed you Gwalia already, so I figured I should show you some more places that we went to when we lived in the Goldfields town of Kalgoorlie, Western Australia.

A friend of mine came from Perth to stay with us for a while, so we took her on a day trip to Lake Ballard. The place has lots of statues on a big salt lake that is dry most of the time.

The “Inside Australia”: exhibition was commissioned to mark the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Perth International Arts Festival in 2003, and an idea of internationaly reknowned artist, Antony Gormley. Apart from 2 or 3 passers-by the 51 sculptures are derived from laser scans of the inhabitants of Menzies. The sculptures stand scattered over 10 sqare kilometres of the salt lake, named ‘Lake Ballard’, approximately 55km west from the townsite of Menzies.

One of the statues standing proud on the lake.

There is a lot of walking to do - some people rode their bikes on the salt lake - you can tell cos you can see the tyre tracks until the next rains.

More walking!

Bender found some treasure.

It was an exhausting day, but Bender enjoyed it - apart from us stopping him from peeing on the statues. It's not that anyone would notice, but it just seemed disrespectful. It was so so hard for him not to pee on them as they were the only things sticking out of the ground on the huge salt lake flats.