I first encountered the Mallee like many suburbanites - first on the Silo Art tour in 2018, and then on a trip to Lake Tyrrell in 2020. The Mallee is unlike any area of Victoria I had photographed before. It's a vast, wide, open landscape stretching across the top third of the state, where we border New South Wales and South Australia, and beyond into those states. The southern half is known as the Wimmera Mallee, the northern half simply the Mallee.

There is something about this vast open space that has drawn me in. Straight roads run for hundreds of kilometres, farms stretch as far as the eye can see, tiny towns in various states of repair dot the landscape, and larger vibrant towns serve as linchpins for the wider region. It's quite a meditative experience choosing a route between towns on the map, putting on an audio book, and setting off to see what comes. I find myself drifting into a zone of seeing, and scanning the passing landscape. An abandoned church hall, a particular fence or electricity pole, a copse of trees in desert sand, or a expanse of salinity affected vegetation might catch my eye. Glorious sunrises or sunsets over a field that stretches forever, or a solar farm to an old rail line, decaying concrete grain silos, or newly painted ones in vivid colours. Stunning mirrored lakes, expanses of dead trees. Wonderful historic architecture, nostalgic motels, counter meals in grand hotels and friendly locals ready with a tale and directions to a local spot of interest.

The Mallee may not have mountain ranges, waterfalls, rugged coastlines and sweeping vistas, but it has a wonderful charm and a unique landscape. For a photographer there is so much waiting to be captured in your own unique way.

The Mallee is VAST, so I'm only going to touch on a few specific places, or 'Big Drawcards' then talk more about what I've personally loved photographing on my trips, 'Mallee Scenes'.

If you have any recommendations that I haven't covered off, please let me know below!

Big Mallee Drawcards

Mallee Scenes

The Mallee is so vast I'm not going to list all the spots I've visited, however on this map, B is Lake Tyrrell, C is Lulla, D is Ouyen, E is Lake Hindmarsh. After Lake Hindmarsh you could thred your way back to Melbourne through towns like Warracknabeal, St Arnaud, Ararat, Bendigo or Ballarat. You could also spend a few days in the Grampians, I have a separate guide for the Grampians hereor in the Best Victorian Photo Spots menu above.

The drive from Melbourne to Sea Lake is 4 hours with no stops. Sea Lake/Lulla/Ouyen is 1.5 hours with no breaks, Ouyen to Lake Hindmarsh 2 hours, and then Lake Hindmarsh back to Melbourne 4.5 hours.

Rupanyup - Sheep Hills - Brim - Rosebery - Lascelles - Patchewollock + More

The Silo Art Trail has become a fantastic draw card for tourists out to the regions. The landscape is dotted with concrete grain silos, most of which are now no longer in use

My image of the Brim Silo below was featured on Victorian Premiere Daniel Andrew's 2020 Christmas Card. I tend to be to the left of centrist, so for me this was really quite exciting.

Since the 'original' Silo Art Trail was completed more silos are being completed in the region. Some of the newer ones:

These are some of the more dramatic spots where I've taken photographed around the Mallee. There are many others I still want to visit, so I'll most likely add to the list as I go!

I would love any recommendations!!

Where to Stay?

Ouyen

Ouyen is a good sized town that is a great spot to base yourself for a few days if you are planning on exploring north of Sea Lake. I've slept here a couple of times when I've driven up to photograph at Lulla. There are heaps of tiny little towns and spots around to drive to. It's also one of the last bigger towns until you get up to Mildura, so it's a good halfway point to sleep. There's slim pickings between here and Mildura. I've stayed at the Hilltop Motel a few times while I've been exploring the area. There's also great bistro meals at the Victoria Hotel only a couple of minutes drive from the motel. The hotel also has some accommodation available.

Some of the points of interest around these towns, apart from Lulla and Lake Tyrrell, are the little towns like Tempy and Speed, the end of the old railway at Kulwin, the Murray-Sunset (pink lakes) and Big Desert national parks to the west. There's also a huge stretch of solar farms to the north, running along the west side of the railway to the west side of the highway.

Sea Lake

Sea Lake is the town just to the south of Lake Tyrrell, and has a number of motel options. There's a good representation of stores including cafes, supermarket, chemist and a wonderful photography gallery/cafe Skymirror. Skymirror also has some accommodation available, and a fabulous array of photography on rotation in their gallery space. It's well worth a visit to grab a coffee (best for miles) and appreciate some fantastic work on display (and maybe buy a print to take home!).

Culgoa

If all the accommodation in Sea Lake is taken, Culgoa is only a 30 minute drive away where you can stay at the Kaneira Hotel. This is a good value country hotel, that serves good meals, cold beer and a comfy bed. I've stayed here twice and would happily stay again! It's a very small little town, but I had a great time walking the main street at sunrise and capturing some of the rural scenes.

This is the home of Lake Tyrrell, a shallow salt lake that in the right conditions forms a perfect mirror.

From Visit Victoria: The 120,000 year old lake is regarded as one of the best places in Australia for star navigation, with the dark and endless skies providing the perfect environment to view the dazzling spectacles of the southern hemispheres constellations. The unique salty formation on the lake bed has also become a mecca for international visitors looking to capture that once in a lifetime photo opportunity, over the shallow lake's refective surface.

If it's your first time, you can get in touch with Julie at Sea Lake Tyrrell Tours to have a chat about your plans for your visit. A tour with Julie is an excellent way to introduce yourself to the lake. See the section above about some great places to stay, and the must visit Skymirror gallery/cafe & accommodation.

Let your imagination run wild, this is a photographer's playground. Be careful with your gear here. Incredibly salty water and electronics do not play well together. I was alternating between running around with excitement and being paranoid about getting salt water in my gear. Also, if you are going to be spending a lot of time here, gumboots would be a really good idea, and be prepared for your hands to get a bit chapped from all the salt.

In terms of gear, the landscape here is VAST, so well suited to wider angle lenses, think 35mm and wider. These will capture the expanse of space and a good portion of the sky. If you are positioning your camera at eye level, anything in the foreground will become minimised and lose any sense of importance in your image. It can be fun to position your camera right down close to the ground to emphasise a feature in the foreground, this will make it seem incredibly large in your composition with the background minimised.

Focusing on details or features, a 'normal focal length of 50mm will allow you to capture your subject without excessive distortion. An 85-100mm will separate features from the background at lower apertures, or compress and emphasise features from front to back of your scene.

Sunrise

Sunset

The sun sets somewhere to the left and behind the viewing platform, so for sunsets you are best to walk our into the lake and shoot back towards the platform to capture the colours of the sky. I was rather lucky on my visit! There had been a dust storm that day, and storms brewing, but the clouds were high with a gap on the horizon. All the sediment and moisture in the air set the sky on fire - perfect! In the images below, you can see the water is quite choppy, and not the mirrored image you can see in the image above. It was quite a windy day, so I lost the mirror effect (and I left my filters at home so couldn't simulate it). Nevertheless, work with what you have!

Astro

Abandoned Industrial Objects

Be Creative!

This is a spot that will give you new opportunities every time you go there with the change of conditions. No water? Make use of the vast expanse of dry salt plain. Water? Create some amazing mirrored images. Try abstracts, try close ups, try wide shots, try long exposures. This is a perfect place to play.

Lulla FFR is between Manangatang and Ouyen (maybe 15 mins from Manangatang and 30 mins from Ouyen). Lulla is a large 200 hectare reserve incorporating a salt lake, and an expanse of trees that have succumbed to high levels of salinity.

I first learnt about Lulla when I visited Manangatang, a small country town that runs the incredibly popular Manangatang Races. I stopped in to the Manangatang Hotel for a steak sanga lunch and had a great chat with the publican Aub. Aub recommended the Lulla where he had taken some great shots at sunset. An expanse of dead trees almost as far as you could see?? CHECK! I was off to check it out straight after lunch, and have gone back a number of times since.

You need an all wheel drive or 4 wheel drive to access the best part of the reserve, otherwise you can always park and walk in. If you're not an experienced 4WDer be careful not to drive too far out into the trees as the ground can turn soft very quickly and you'll risk getting bogged.

At sunrise and sunset this can be rather spectacular - with flat white sand, gnarled trees stretching off into the distance, and incredible skies. I just loved getting my camera down low so that the gnarled trunks of the dead trees stick out in silhouette over the horizon line. For the image above I found the composition that I really wanted and left my A7RIV on a tripod with a 16-35GM lens and took a number of shots as the sky changed. I composited the sunstar back in to the main shot from a shot taken maybe 5 minutes earlier as the sun was just dipping past the horizon.

I used the continuous self timer to take a number of shots over time, leaving me free to look around for other images. The shots below I took on my A7C with my 24-105 G lens, hand held whilst my main camera was on timer. I took a number of images from alternate perspectives looking for different angles and compositions.

The images below were taken during the day time. The first was taken in mid afternoon after first learning about Lulla, as you can tell by the hardness and direction of the shadows. I used the fence line and fallen tree to add interest into the shot. The second image was taken in the early morning, as you can see from the long shadows. I took a number of shots with the sun behind me shooting into the trees, but although the colour was amazing they felt quite flat. This image is taken with the trees side-lit and it gives them so much more dimension, texture and form.

This shot was taken near the edge of the 'dead' part of the reserve, where the bare sand gives way to scrubby vegetation. The old fence post and transition from gnarled trees to scrubby ground cover felt like to me like a story of failed endeavours. This was also taken earlyish in the morning, but with a little more cloud. We still have side light but it's quite soft and muted. This version is cropped in a little more than the original framing of the shot. I have the original crop printed and on my wall, I find it quite beautiful.

Lake Hindmarsh is a huge lake between Jeparit and Rainbow. It's very popular, I've been there a couple of times both when the lake has been completely dry.

From Visit Victoria : Lake Hindmarsh is Victoria's largest freshwater lake an extremely popular spot for holiday makers, teeming with wildlife. Fringed by ancient River Red Gums and fed by the Wimmera River, this huge lake is shared by parrots, pelicans, sea eagles, anglers and water sports enthusiasts alike. The Wimmera River originates on the Great Dividing Range near Beaufort and ends in a series of 'terminal lakes', including Lake Hindmarsh, Lake Albacutya and finally, the Wyperfeld flood plains.

There are few things in the Mallee that are as dominant as the huge expanse of farm land covering the region. The dominant crops are wheat and barley, however alternate crops are developing. The history of farming in the Mallee is fascinating. If you're interested in history, I recommend the book Mallee Country : Land, People, Historyby Richard Broome, Charles Fahey, Andrea Gaynor, Katie Holmes. This book charts the passage of time from pre-white settlement, through colonisation and 'development', waves of settlement driven by failed government policies and poor ecological understanding, the use of fertilisers and chemicals to coax productivity, and into our current era. As you drive north through the region you will notice dark soils give way to red dirt and yellow sand. For the most part you'll see expansive fields of crops, or crop stubble, before you get closer to the border of NSW and vibrant green orchards, vineyards and fields stand in stark contrast to the dry yellow, brown and orange landscape surrounding them. It's incredible to see these little oases nurtured by irrigation and fertilisation in the middle of essentially desert.

This landscape used to be covered by scrub and the ubiquitous Mallee Eucalypt that the early settlers had to clear from their land (along with native fauna and native inhabitants). The Mallee spreads across northern VIC, eastern SA and southern NSW, along with another Mallee region in WA. The area is loosely based on the area in which that these trees used to grow. The trees have multiple trunks stemming from a subterranean lignotuber. The lignotubers are large and prevent effective ploughing of the landscape for farmland. They were incredibly hard and labour intensive to remove until mechanisation took over from manual effort from humans and livestock. Until the ecology was better understood by settlers, the aggressive clearing of the land left light sand and soil 'unbound', and when Mallee winds struck up created severe dust storms that got inside houses and covered everything in a fine layer of dust, making lives miserable. These storms culminated in the enormous dust storm that blanketed the city of Melbourne in 1983. Practices have since improved, and you will now see the stubble of previous crops left in the land to bind the soil whilst fields are left fallow, or covered in clover to improve soil fertility.

I'm fascinated by a few aspects to the buildings and towns on the Mallee. What has really struck me has been the vast change in the landscape as communities move from the small settlements dotting the landscape to the larger towns. This has accelerated as family farms are absorbed into larger and larger farms or agri-business. What has really caught my imagination is either the co-existence of daily lives in the shadow of the omnipresence of the grain silo, and the abandoned places that are left as communities move on. I find a sense of beauty in these places. I love to capture them as if to record a place that was once imbued with the hopes and dreams of a community, but are now left fallow as these hopes and dreams spring anew in other places. This is a really biased and one sided view, but it's the one I feel drawn to capture. There are strong, vibrant and prosperous towns in the Mallee that are full of positivity and promise. There are beautiful and lovingly maintained historic buildings. There is history and hospitality in wide supply. On your journey in the Mallee you may find those are the places that call to you rather than my perspective below.

Like I've been drawn to capture the buildings that have been left to fallow, I've also found myself drawn to recreational spaces for the same reasons. The ubiquitous footy oval, tennis court and bowls clubs are hallmarks of a town that has the population, community and commercial success necessary to support them. I find those that have been left to nature to be strangely beautiful. Now empty and being reclaimed, or still being maintained, but again in the shadow of the grain silo. Again this is the view that appeals to me, in larger towns you'll find shining new bowling greens with modern facilities, bright green ovals, netball courts and tennis courts that are spotless and covered with the latest high tech surfaces. I'm drawn to the older places.

The Murtoa Stick Shed is pretty amazing. From thestickshed.com.au :

The Stick Shed (previously known as the Murtoa No. 1 Grain Store) is the only remaining emergency grain store built during World War Two. This structure is an enduring testament to iconic Australian bush ingenuity and a symbol of the growth and strength of the Australian wheat industry. The Stick Shed is the 101st place included in the National Heritage List. Completed in 1942, the unique and dramatic structure of The Stick Shed has captured the imagination of everyone who has seen its serene and evocative cathedral-like interior. Referred to by some as the ‘Cathedral of the Wimmera’. The Murtoa Stick Shed’s ghostly unmilled tall timber poles and central aisle draw the eye upward towards the roof as light spills into the space through skylights as if through a stained-glass window.

I'm quite taken by by concept of energy generation in the landscape. Whether this is a coal fired power station, a wind farm or a solar farm, I find these places absolutely irresistible. These vast spaces standing out in the landscape, the ingenuity of man and our ability to wrest power from nature. When I see older power plants I see invasive, dominant and massive structures dominating the landscape. When I see wind turbines and solar farms I see our push to use what is freely available to us, an effort to apply technology in concert with nature. In this landscape, rows and rows of solar panels alone in the red dirt, or alternating between vineyards and orchards. I feel like we are starting to live in a brighter future.

What would any trip to the Mallee be without paying homage to these huge grain silos dotting the landscape. These are such a visual symbol for the agricultural nature of the landscape in it's current form. Even when not painted with incredible artworks, they are fantastic to photograph over such a wide, flat landscape.