Lake Ballard: Inside Australia

About a hundred miles into my trip, I started to feel I was drowning in a kind of “gold fever” from the history of Europeans arriving over a century ago in a mad search for gold and how the whole area grew because of that drive. The development of Western Australia around Perth inwards is a story of the race for gold gone mad. Actually, it was kind of getting nauseating.

That’s why it was so refreshing to visit a place called Lake Ballard, about 27 miles west of Menzies, a former gold town.

At that location is an art installation named “Inside Australia,” created in 2003, from a British sculptor name Antony Gormley. Now here was a picture of Australia worth seeing.

On the expanse of the salt lake are 51 metal figures, made from metal derived from the ores of Western Australia. The lake itself is a huge lake, essentially a dry salt bed (although when I was there, there was a little water further out because of recent rains), with the 51 figures spread throughout the western section of the lake. Of course, I couldn’t go to all of them (they are too far apart), but what I did see was captivating.

The figures themselves are derived from laser scans of 51 real citizens of Menzies, with the body mass removed from its depiction. Supposedly– I really don’t understand what “removed body mass” means; that’s just what I’m told

But seeing the installation in real life was awe-inspiring. To me, it was like people standing in a huge expanse of Australia (figuratively depicted by the lake), lost in its humongous mass, yet also not lost. That is just what I saw (I think the artist allows people to arrive at their own interpretations). But Gormley did say: “I am trying to … unite a notion of the interior of this continent with the notion of an interior of the population.”

But then again, I am no artist. Maybe I liked it simply because it was like a fresh shower after an mud-splash of gold fever.

Still, I felt my spirit refreshed from being there. It was an enthralling visit.