Follow the Salt


‘The clump of hair lay curled in the bottom of the bath like a dead animal.’

Jo, GODI ladies bathroom.


‘…the walls have swelled with us, leaching our moisture…’

Donna: GODI, day 2.


‘The ghostly white tree cast a shadow over the picnic table…a bird whistled in the distance, another echoed its call.’

Rachel: GODI beer garden.


‘…small creatures glued to the salt…preserved and shining.’

Theresa: on Lake Dumbleyung.


‘I wonder what might crawl out of that hole. What lives in these walls?’

Amber: on the hole in the wall, room 11.


‘My room. Apple green lumpy paint. White plaster patches half-heartedly covering chips, cracks and holes. A narrow window nailed shut. Single bed with virginal white linen. Tiny and cell-like. A nun’s space perhaps.‘
Annie: Opening the door of Room 3.

 

Between desert and coast, stories dwell in a place called The Belt….

Eleven writers drive into the heart of Western Australia’s wheat and salt country for a retreat. They stay at the once-majestic Grand Olde Dumbleyung Inn and share dawn visits to the graveyard, long-table dinners, a rattly tour bus, quandong coffee, and an intimate run-down bathroom. At the pub one evening, a biodynamic farmer tells them if they want to find the stories, they need to follow the salt.

The town’s vast hyper-saline lake features in this collection of short fiction, as do haunted landscapes, missing people, tourists, a bar manager, and ghosts. Set in the past, present and future, the stories pay homage to a lake and a land that is calling out for love. They find the unreal in the commonplace, beauty in the shadows, and humour in the dark. This collection of new Australian gothic fiction will leach into your psyche and score your heart, leaving traces of a place that refuses to rest in peace.

We are: Amber Black, Aksel Dadswell, Narelle de Boer, TIffany Hastie, Annie Horner, Jodie How, Donna Mazza, Rachel McEleney, Andrew James MacLeod, Jo Porter, Theresa Wilks & Ines Zimmermann.

hypersaline salt encrusted lake dumbleyung under a blue sky
Four people look out onto the hypersaline Lake Dumbleyung from the orange dirt by the salt shore
a person in an orange hat crouches on the solid salt of lake dumbleyung

Photo credit: Sarah Mills

Immersive Writing

The challenge of discomfort was an aspect of immersion that brought a unique rawness to this collection, as though the surface of the world peeled away to allow us to lodge beneath it for a few days.

Immersion as a practice for writers is finding traction with those keen to push back against the AI scourge. An active process, it involves going to and being in; gathering all that a place can give to a writer’s senses and building that immersive research into the creative work. It represents a practice that is real in a world brimming with fake. I wanted to see immersion in action, to experience something visceral and tactile, and to see what writing was generated when we all immersed as a group. And we did immerse – both literally and figuratively. The challenge of discomfort was an aspect of immersion that brought unique rawness to this collection, as though the surface of the world peeled away to allow us to lodge beneath it for a few days.

We were shown sacred places. We got our feet dirty by walking across the white crust of Lake Dumbleyung, breaking into the rancid mud beneath. We scraped the salt-dead insects from its surface and peered across the glare of it to fields of golden wheat. It sucked the moisture from our skin and the wind from our sails.
-From the introduction to Follow the Salt, by Dr Donna Mazza.

Find out more about our project and the collection, Follow the Salt, below.

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