Word: finlayson
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...these days, drive past the graceful Western Australian gold-rush town's lone pub and petrol station, and travel 50 km west along a gravel road to Lake Ballard. It's here, on a 70 sq. km lake dried to a shimmering salt plain, that Menzies shire president Kath Finlayson likes to meet and greet her townsfolk. To an outsider, the 49 metal sculptures appear almost extraterrestrial, with their pointy heads and pixie feet. But to a Menziesite, each is uniquely human. "This is one of the tribal elders," says Finlayson, 56, by way of introduction to Paddy Walker...
...place was literally saturated with the metal." But the town that briefly prospered in his wake (mining had all but ceased by 1910), today seems like another mirage on Lake Ballard. Surveying an otherwise featureless horizon of red earth and mulga scrub from the town's water board, Kath Finlayson says, "There used to be 10,000 people, 13 pubs, two breweries, and houses as far as the eye can see." But until the sculptures came, the biggest thing on the horizon in the past hundred years was Cyclone Bobby, in 1995. The deluge it brought transformed Lake Ballard into...
...experience I wouldn't have missed, living here," says Earnshaw, who also runs the town's power house and water board. "It's just that Chris and I are getting old and tired, and seven days a week is starting to kill us." Shire president Finlayson, whose family sheep station was recently sold after 30 years, admits that since the decline of the local pastoral industry, it's been a problem getting people to stay. "People start drifting away," she says. "And you don't want to drag them back unless they've got employment. That's the biggest issue...