Pamamaroo Lake Sunrise

Pamamaroo Lake Sunrise

The sun rose over Pamamaroo Lake, part of the Menindee Lakes, as I guess it does every morning.

Still early in the trip and not very well organized, I had a bit of battery trouble with both cameras on this morning. Ah well! I've got it sorted now.

The air was clear and still, the stars having given way to the brilliance of a colourful dawn and the cresent moon, still quite visible, was an integral element of the landscape.

Lake Pamamaroo has been dry for several years, the result of low flows and lack of flooding in the Darling River. Whatever water was held in the basin has been released to flow down the Darling and Murray Rivers to South Australia.

Here and there around the dry lake bed are fresh water mussle shells, the shellfish long since dead. Black, clay silt forming the ground is cracked and covered in native, ground cover herbage.

While the lake bed is decidedly black, the surrounding country is that typical red of the Australian outback, the red clay sand of much of this continent.

Menindee Lakes and the town of Menindee are about 110 km east of Broken Hill on a good bitumin road.

The two dirt roads, one on either side of the Darling River from Wilcannia to Menindee, were closed following rain earlier in the week, so we had to take the long way round through Broken Hill. It doesn’t take much rain to close dirt roads in this clay country.