The Young and The Restless | Where the desert meets ‘the sea’

We’d stumbled across the rally while looking for something to entertain us, from a limited selection of weekend activities out that way, when a friend had come to visit me where I lived in Nyah (north of Swan Hill).

After a quick web search, I learned that the ‘dune buggies’ we’d watched race around a lake’s perimeter had been doing so for 48 years, until 2019, when the Victorian Government did not issue a permit for the event, due to concerns that it was damaging cultural heritage at the site.

And then I learned that the lake they’d skirted was Lake Tyrrell: Victoria’s largest salt lake, which also happens to be 120,000 years old.

But before my quick research unearthed any of this, I had recently placed Lake Tyrrell on a to-go-to list, not even registering that I had, in fact, visited before.

We traipsed back up to the Mallee a few weeks ago for a little look-see at the phenomenon.

The pink lake, with a bed of salt, covers around 20,860ha of land.

Often dry, but usually covered in shallow water about 5cm deep throughout winter, our July visit found it shimmering and primed for artful photography where a would-be mirror-like surface should have reflected the expanse of cloud-laden sky, had fierce arctic winds not been whipping the saltwater into a state of choppiness.

The blustery gale, however, provided another aesthetic for quality footage.

Little puffs of salted ‘clouds’ rolled off the water’s edge, looking just like sea foam, even though we were about 400km from the nearest ocean.

Some of the photos could fool our social media friends into thinking we spent our weekend at the beach, not the desert.

Wikipedia says the ancient lake was probably formed by sand blocking the passage of Tyrrell Creek, a distributary of the Avoca River, which feeds the lake.

When the water evaporates in the warmer months, a crust of salt remains, which is harvested by Cheetham Salt in nearby Sea Lake.

The summer months are supposedly when the lake throws its pinkest hues, so I wasn’t expecting to see a blush tint on the middle weekend of winter, yet we were still treated to a hint of rosiness.

The relentlessly rolling froth had found places to settle outside the water and formed salt hills that challenged the kids — and us adults — to scale them for higher vantage points at the site.

Probably too cold for much activity from them during our visit, there’s said to be a fair bit of reptile habitation at Tyrrell, along with mobs of kangaroos and emus making the area their home with the flourishing birdlife.

Besides the lake and salt itself, there are other features that lend themselves nicely to Insta-worthy shots, including the circular, almost keyhole shaped boardwalk, the Sky Lounge (a circular space with several fixed sun lounges to relax on) and large rusted iron letters on the lake’s foreshore that spell Tyrrell.

While anyone could be forgiven for thinking the name was derived from man’s moniker, perhaps an early explorer, it actually translates from the local Boorong Aboriginal people’s language to “sky” or “space” in English.

It describes the vastness of the lake, where many visit purely to stargaze.

To continue our theme of rebellion (not visiting during the most favourable season), we also bucked the recommended time-of-day trend of visiting at sunrise or sunset — or at night for aforementioned stargazing — and arrived smack-bang in the middle of the day en route to elsewhere.

But none of that really mattered.

While extraordinary stars, sunrises and sunsets are inviting, I reckon this remote Mallee lake is worth a visit any time of day or year for its natural history, uniqueness and a fix of salty air when you’re closer to the desert than the sea.