Inside Australia's arid Zone : Initiated, Book 53, Australians Outback Impressions from Broken Hill, Fowlers Gap, Lake Mungo, Lake Eyre and the Simpson ... to loosing the use of his painting arm.)

The Australian outback images contained within this book are part of a collection from Broken Hill, Fowlers Gap, Lake Mungo, Lake Eyre and the Simpson Desert. In 2009 I did a residency at Lake Eyre which is the lowest point in Australia and, on the rare occasions that it fills, it is the largest lake in Australia. The project was made possible with the support of Trevor Wright of Wrights Air. The basis of this body of work was an investigative study into the ecology, geology and deep time history of the region that is featured on my website www.sciart.com.au. The lake was named after Edward John Eyre who was the first European to sight it in 1840. It is located in the deserts of central Australia, in northern South Australia. The Eyre Basin is a large endorheic system which means it is a closed drainage basin that retains water and allows no outflow to other bodies of water such as rivers or oceans. The lake is surrounded by a salt pan caused by the seasonal expansion and subsequent evaporation of the trapped waters. The reflection of the clouds on the lake is incredible as are the painted hills which mark the edge of the ancient Eromanga sea.
The original inspiration for this work was a photograph that I took outside of the town of Broken Hill in 2008, a ring of ancient rubbish that has accumulated over the past 100 years or so and in it you can find everything, including the kitchen sink. Massive glaciers once covered this ancient landscape and I have walked on the edge of the vanished inland sea with a geologist from Fowlers Gap. I looked to the arid mountains on my left and imagined the bygone tropical forests. I looked to my right and beheld an empty low-lying expanse which was once the bottom of the Eromanga Sea. I looked along the sand bar directly in front of me and saw a dinosaur walking along the beach. Broken Hill has incredible sunsets which I regularly photographed from the edge of town. Some of the images are reminiscent of Heyson’s paintings from the Flinders Ranges. I manipulated my photo to depict the remains of a mountain range after the bite of this glacial event millions of years before the present.