Lake Hart and Beyond

If you travel north from Port Augusta on the Stuart Highway, you are kept company by the Flinders Ranges, blue and gold and red, for many kilometres. The ranges, with their folds and shadows, are mesmerising.

But to your west, an equally mysterious landscape begins to expand. It’s treeless, stony, with hard-capped tabletop hills, and huge stretches of sky. It’s Kokatha country. Lake Gardiner National Park, Island Lagoon and Lake Hart.

Those vast expanses cradle enormous shimmering salt lakes, left behind when the inland sea retreated, aeons ago. What seems like an empty landscape is teeming with life: gibber chats among the stones, wildflowers bursting from hard sand, lizards dashing across the road.

This is where the story of Alan Phillips’ new painting exhibition ‘Lake Hart and Beyond’ has its origins.

Exhibition opening Sunday 8 September 2024 by Fran Kilgariff AM