Filling in the gaps, because there's more to the trip than I was able to complete while I was still in Australia...
Calperum Station is located on the Bookmark Biosphere Reserve north of Renmark in South Australia. The Station promotes awareness of the unique environment of the Biosphere through educational and community outreach programs. From 6/18-24, we stayed on site along with eight ANU art students (aside from two nights when the Land Arts folks went camping not far from there...more on this later). The people who work at Calperum were truly generous and great in every way. Grant, who runs the place, was very keen to the idea of working with artists as a means of communicating issues of the Biosphere to the broader public. In the U.S., such openness to artists by people in scientific fields seems rarer. Possible residency for the future??
The station and its surroundings were quite varied and strange, as I saw on a couple of my long walks. Some of the nearby lakes look utterly bleak, like they belong in a haunted forest. Others are completely dried out, with a top layer of encrusted salt (and more salt beneath the surface, as found by Joseph in his hole-digging). The mallee, which is the unique environment around which the biosphere was formed, are quite lovely and strange. These eucalypts produce several trunks from a single underground root, called a lignotuber. Something like 80% of these trees were removed from Australia to create grazing lands. On the two nights away from Calperum, we stayed deeper into the mallee woodland to experience this type of environment more closely.
Here's some pics of Calperum and my walk to the salt lake.
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| Calperum Station and the Murray River Basin |
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| My Path from Calperum Station to the Salt Lake |
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| Out of the Mallee onto the Crusty Rocks |
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| Salt Lake |
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