Menzies: Why Do Its Residents Stand Across a Salt Lake?

Menzies lies in Western Australia’s Eastern Goldfields, about 730 kilometres from Perth. It grew quickly during the gold rush of the 1890s. When mining activity contracted, population and commerce contracted with it, yet the town did not disappear. That history can easily be drawn as a familiar curve: discovery, boom and decline. Lake Ballard, north of the town, introduces a different scale of time.

In 2003, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Perth International Arts Festival, British sculptor Antony Gormley created Inside Australia across the salt lake. Fifty-one slender metal figures are dispersed over its vast bed, each derived from a digital scan of a Menzies resident. They do not turn residents into heroes or reproduce realistic portraits. The bodies are compressed into forms almost like markers, and visitors must walk through salt, heat and distance to approach them one by one.

The work’s significance is not simply that the town gained an attraction. Mining treated the ground as an extractable resource and brought populations that later departed. The figures place local residents within a slower relationship of viewing that requires bodily effort. They neither erase the mining past nor represent the full First Nations history and contemporary life of the district. Instead, they show why a remote town is more than the remains of one boom: it is also made by the people who still live there and by their decision to let their own bodies become part of public memory.

https://www.menzies.wa.gov.au/visit-menzies/visitor-information/about-menzies.aspx
https://www.menzies.wa.gov.au/visit-menzies/explore/lake-ballard.aspx
https://www.antonygormley.com/works/making/inside-australia