Kati Thanda – Lake Eyre
"At Lake Eyre, the silence isn't absence. It's the loudest thing in the landscape."
I flew to Lake Eyre from William Creek on a six-seater Cessna with a pilot who had done the flight three hundred times and still kept glancing out the window. Below us, the landscape emptied over the course of the forty-minute flight from sparse grey-green scrub to nothing at all — no trees, no roads, no variation in tone. Then the white appeared on the horizon, at first a stripe and then a full expanse, and the plane banked and dropped and we were over it. The pilot said nothing. I understood why.
Kati Thanda — the Arabana name for what is also called Lake Eyre — is Australia’s largest lake and one of the world’s largest salt lakes. It occupies a vast depression in the South Australian interior, sits eight metres below sea level, and fills with water approximately three times per century. The rest of the time it is a salt crust: white, flat, and so reflective under a midday sun it makes the sky above seem dull by comparison. I had come in a dry year. The crust was intact and pristine.
The pilot landed on the salt — it’s smooth and firm enough in dry conditions for small aircraft, and the surface holds a surprising amount of weight — and we got out. I walked about 200 metres from the plane and stopped. The silence was extraordinary not because it was quiet in any ordinary sense but because it was complete. No wind. No birds. No insect sound. The surface beneath my boots made a faint crystalline crunch with each step and then nothing. Standing at the centre of the largest terminal drainage basin on the continent, with the horizon a perfect flat line in every direction and the sky an inverted bowl, something in the spatial part of the brain stops being able to help.
The salt itself is beautiful in ways I hadn’t anticipated. It forms polygonal crystals — hexagons and irregular plates — across the surface, and in the afternoon when the sun comes from a low angle, the crystal edges catch light and the whole plain momentarily sparks. In the distance, the heat haze turned the far shore into a floating horizontal mirage, the line between salt and sky dissolving and reforming.
When the lake does flood — as it did significantly in 2010, 2011, and 2019 following exceptional Queensland rains — it transforms into a vast shallow sea that turns pink with salt-loving algae, attracts hundreds of thousands of birds, and can be seen from orbit. But the dry lake has its own authority. There is something about its scale and its emptiness that is not desolate so much as clarifying — a place where the usual texture of the world has been stripped away and you’re left with the basic elements: ground, air, light, distance.
William Creek, the nearest settlement — a pub, a few buildings, four permanent residents, and an airstrip — serves cold beer and a meat pie I ate sitting on the tailgate of a ute belonging to a man named Gary who had been driving cattle in this country for thirty years and had opinions about the lake that were specific and interesting and not available anywhere on the internet.
When to go: Year-round for the dry-lake experience, though May through September offers the most comfortable temperatures — the heat from October onward can be extreme. Flying is essential: the scale cannot be grasped from the shore. If the lake is in flood, fly at any cost — this is a once-in-a-decade event that transforms the entire character of the place.