Qualla: Lake Way

Lake Way: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Calistemon, CC BY-SA 3.0. Most years, Lake Way is not a lake at all. It is a blinding white salt pan, flat to the horizon, its crust crunching underfoot in the heat south of Wiluna. Then, rarely, the rains come - in 1900, in 1942, in 1963, again and again through the wet years of the 1990s - and the pan fills, becoming a shallow silver sheet that doubles the sky. Birds arrive from nowhere. The transformation lasts weeks or months before the desert sun takes the water back. This rhythm of absence and brief abundance has shaped the lake for far longer than any map of it has existed, on country that the Martu and Tjupan peoples have known and named across generations.

Read more: Lake Way on Qualla

Image: Calistemon | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lake Way: A Lake on Borrowed Water

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Calistemon, CC BY-SA 3.0. Lake Way is an ephemeral saline lake in the Mid West, running roughly parallel to the Goldfields Highway as it threads between Leinster and Wiluna. 'Ephemeral' is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. For most of recorded history the lakebed has been dry, holding water onl...

Read more: Lake Way on Qualla

Image: Calistemon | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lake Way: Yellow Cake in the Calcrete

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Calistemon, CC BY-SA 3.0. Beneath and around the lake's margins lies something the modern world has argued over for fifty years: uranium. The deposit is unusual - calcrete-hosted carnotite, a bright lemon-yellow mineral, lying in sheet-like layers only two to ten metres below the surface, near or below th...

Read more: Lake Way on Qualla

Image: Calistemon | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lake Way: Toro's Long Wait

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SentinelHub, CC BY 2.0. When Western Australia lifted its six-year ban on uranium mining in 2008, Lake Way returned to the spotlight. Toro Energy took up the Centipede-Lake Way project, planning to extract uranium oxide by heap leaching at around 700 tonnes a year over a decade. The company secured nati...

Read more: Lake Way on Qualla

Image: SentinelHub | CC BY 2.0

Lake Way: Unburied Questions

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Calistemon, CC BY-SA 3.0. The uranium at Lake Way has never been only a technical matter. In 2010, state MP Robin Chapple asked why radioactive uranium oxide and ore were still lying unburied and unfenced at the site - a question he had first raised a decade earlier, in 2000. Laboratory testing confirmed ...

Read more: Lake Way on Qualla

Image: Calistemon | CC BY-SA 3.0