Salt Lake & Silo Art in the Mallee

When you fall in love with a special part of your own country, it really is worth shouting about (or writing a blog post!)

We recently spent a few nights in Sea Lake in the wheat belt of the Mallee region of Victoria. It was a highlight of a two week jaunt around regional Victoria. Sea Lake is a 3-4 hour drive from Melbourne, depending on what part of Melbourne you live in.

I hadn’t been to the Mallee before. And for those of you that aren’t familiar with it, the Mallee is full of empty, straight roads with wheat and barley fields either side. Very small, little towns located every so often, with lots of open space and grain silos. Lots of grain silos!

Lake Tyrell

What’s so special?

We were blown away by this massive pink 120,000-year-old salt lake. It really exceeded our expectations and with both of us being into photography it gave us no end of opportunities!

Being just a 10 min drive from the town of Sea Lake, makes it easy to drive out to this 20,000 hectare lake at different times of the day. And it will be different each time you go! Some days will be still – perfect for the reflections; some days it will be bright pink, salmon pink or maybe a beautiful blue. Obviously the light will be different at sunrise (or early morning for us), sunset or during the day. The water level changes too! I’m not sure how but from day to day it can be quite different. We actually watched the tide come in. So it’s fed by underground water and also any wind can blow the water around, and rainfall will affect it too of course. But we didn’t have any rain whilst we were there so I’m not sure exactly what caused the marked changes in the water level.

And the Govt. has also recently put in new facilities for tourists: Viewing platform, information bay and walking path down to the lake edge. There is plenty of parking to so it all combines to make it an easy place to visit.

Once you get to the Lake’s edge you can just stay on the boardwalk but I would suggest going for a walk around the lake a bit. You can see and experience a lot more. If you’ve got your gumboots you may wish to walk in the shallow salty waters, otherwise some sturdy shoes around the dry salty surface will do.

Stargazing

Into stargazing? Lake Tyrell is regarded as one of the best places in Australia for star navigation, with the dark skies providing a great environment to view the southern skies. The newly constructed Star Lounge allows you to sit leaning back comfortably watching the skies. We didn’t do this ourselves, but I believe on a clear night it’s sensational!

When to go?

Probably more chance of getting water in the lake in the cooler half of the year. So probably not late summer I would say. But it’s really in the hands of the weather gods. We went in November, and over a few days, sometimes it had water sometimes not (you can see it in the distance). But we went at different times of the day and got some nice calm weather so we feel we got to experience her in her very varied moods!

Normally it gets lots of international visitors but obviously with the pandemic that has changed. So probably now is a good time for Australians to visit.

https://laketyrrell.com/index.php/lake-tyrrell/info

Silo Art Trail

Victoria and Australia as a whole now have Silo Art Trails throughout. We only explored a part of the Victorian Silo Art Trail in the North West of the state. But there are others around Victoria and Australia.

They are all really beautiful and are of an exceptional quality. It’s not until you are actually there standing next to these huge structures that you appreciate the talent of the artists!

There are about 50 silos currently in the Australian Silo Art Trail and quite of few of them in the area we visited. The Silo Art Trails only got started recently in Australia in 2015 and have brought tourists and a bit of economic benefit to the nearby areas. Particularly small towns like Sea Lake, where we stayed, which is a central location for the Silo Art, with good facilities and also very close to Lake Tyrell.

For information on the Australian Silo Art trail: https://www.australiansiloarttrail.com/

And for the area we visited: http://siloarttrail.com/home/

Roughly there is about a half an hour’s drive between each one but you it all depends on the route you take. Take snacks and water as some of them are really in the middle of nowhere and very few have a cafe or similar nearby.

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Please feel free to leave a comment or ask me questions on our experiences of the Silo Art Trail and Lake Tyrell.

And perhaps pay me a visit on Instagram and follow me if you like what you see.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this Travel Inspiration from an Empty Nester!