Of Salt and Sky

Words & Photography: Jessica Howard

Into the Heart of Our Great Land

To see Lake Eyre in flood is a rare thing. Decades can pass with little more than salt and shallow water across the basin. Then, distant rain arrives and, for a brief time, an inland sea appears in the desert. 2025 was one of those years, and we'd come to see it for ourselves.

I was sitting in the back of a small single-prop aircraft, the engine loud enough to smother any second thoughts. For a moment, I wondered if I'd be sick or something worse. But I dared not voice this because I was travelling with some of the toughest men I knew: my father and
his oldest friends.

Over the course of the trip, we covered more than 5,000 kilometres, much of it country they'd worked for most of their lives. They'd run cattle here and mustered below; now we were seeing that familiar country from high above.

We lifted out of Rockhampton and headed west, trading the coast for cattle country, then that for something flatter, drier and much less populated. By the time we reached Queensland's Channel Country, the scale of the flood was beginning to reveal itself.

The Lake Eyre Basin covers around 1.2 million square kilometres, almost one-sixth of Australia. Rain falling hundreds of kilometres away can take weeks or months to work its way through the Diamantina, Georgina and Cooper systems before eventually reaching Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre, the lowest point on the continent.

From the air, that system began to make sense. Thin channels appeared across otherwise dry country, dividing and re-forming, feeding broad floodplains where water lay in shallow sheets. Country that could look empty from the ground was suddenly full of movement. By Birdsville, there was water everywhere.

We followed it south towards Lake Eyre, where floodwater was spreading across a basin that sits around 15 metres below sea level. When we visited, the lake was still growing, the water slowly creeping across the cracked salt.

At its fullest, Lake Eyre covers around 9,500 square kilometres. From several thousand feet up, it stretched towards the horizon, deep and dark, looking like a sea dropped into the middle of a continent.

After a night at William Creek, we flew south over Anna Creek Station, where the Painted Hills rose like geology laid bare, a reminder of just how old this country is.

For my father and his mates, almost everything below seemed to have a reference point: a property, a road, a stock route, a yarn about a bloke they knew forty years ago. The commentary from the front seats rarely stopped.

I'd thought seeing the country from the air might make its scale easier to comprehend, but it did the opposite. Distances that looked manageable on a map stretched beneath us for hours. Rivers became systems, properties disappeared into the landscape and the sweeping country seemed to go
on forever.

For a few hours, with the water shining below us and the country running out every which way, it was hard not to feel very small.

Explore the full photographic essay in Issue 01 of The Burton, available in RB Sellars stores and with every purchase online.