Lesley Dickman

My work is always informed by landscape. Over the past three years I have explored the salt ponds in Geelong, the Pink Lake in Central Victoria, the Salt lakes around Mildura, and Lake Eyre. While sketching and photographing around the coastline near Geelong, I discovered and became fascinated with the salt ponds at Lara. The vast space and glistening texture of the ponds and the surrounding areas of cracked earth, rubble, sea-grass, small ground plants and natural textures were visually rich. The word “salt” threw up associations, such as corrosion, healing and preserving, and the necessity to have a small amount of salt for good health, and there were other associations that have become part of our everyday language such as salinity, desalination, and rising seas, they are all associations that are tangible and immediate. Michael Sexton the author of “Silent Flood” describes how salty our flat dry continent is. Unlike other countries we have a drainage problem, our river systems are not large enough to drain salty water into the oceans, and as much as that one-sixth of our ground water drains internally into Lake Eyre.