Lake Hillier

LakesWestern Australia,Australia

Fragile nature — stay on the trail, leave no trace.

A pink lake off Western Australia that keeps its colour in a jar, because the pink is microbes in the brine that rain dilutes away.

September·Edge of season

May–Oct

Autumn and winter rains dilute the brine, so the pink softens and can fade toward grey-blue.

Year-round The salt pan and its white crust sit on an uninhabited island all year, reached only by flight or cruise from Esperance. The pink is not guaranteed: it is deep in dry summers and grey-blue in wet years.

Scoop Lake Hillier's water into a jar and it keeps its bubblegum colour, which is how you know the hue is not a reflection of the sky but something alive in the brine. A 2022 survey found no single culprit — instead a crowd of salt-lovers, among them the alga Dunaliella salina and the red bacterium Salinibacter ruber. The lake itself is modest, roughly 600 metres long and 250 wide, a shallow pan on Middle Island in the Recherche Archipelago off Australia's southern coast. There is no airstrip and no road, and the island sits about 130 kilometres east of Esperance, so almost everyone meets the lake through the window of a light aircraft. The reveal comes all at once: pink water, a white crust of salt, a dark collar of paperbark and eucalyptus, then white sand and the navy Southern Ocean, stacked in bands a few hundred metres wide. The pink is not fixed, though. Heavy rain in 2022 diluted the brine and the colour drained to a pale grey-blue. The microbes are still there, but they stop making pigment once the water is no longer punishing enough. Salinity is the switch: the colour ebbs in wet years and strengthens as evaporation concentrates the brine, and a full recovery is expected to take years rather than months. Matthew Flinders logged 'a small lake of a rose colour' here in 1802, then came back for casks of its salt. Edward Andrews moved his sons out in 1889 to mine that salt commercially and quit inside a year, the crop too tainted to sell. Neither of them saw it like this. Soil washed off the island has since run the water brown, boat landings at the lake are paused, and the operators put the return of the pink one to two years out.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Check what colour the lake is actually running before you go — it is well short of the old electric pink, and recent passenger photos from the flight operators are the only honest guide.
No road, no airstrip, no way to get yourself there — Middle Island is reached only by scenic flight or cruise from Esperance, and the boat landings are paused while the lake is off-colour.
Skip the polarising filter behind the aircraft window — polarised glass fights the perspex and can blotch the shot; ask for a seat on the lake side of the cabin instead.
From June to October the same flight crosses whale water — southern right and humpback whales move through the archipelago below, so scan the sea as well as the lake.

Things to do

1
Time the flight for midday, when the pink runs deepest
Light aircraft out of Esperance run east over the archipelago, and the hour you fly decides what you get. With the sun overhead the colour reads at its deepest and the seam against the navy ocean is sharpest. Middle Island then arrives in a single pass, low enough to pick out the salt crust at the lake's edge. Behind it stands Flinders Peak, the hill Matthew Flinders climbed in 1802 to log the coloured water below, though he never got the overhead view that now defines the place.
2
Cross to Middle Island and stand at the lake itself
A licensed boat runs east from Esperance, tenders passengers onto Middle Island's beach and walks them up to the lake — the only way to meet the colour at ground level rather than from the air. The same walk passes the ruins the island's early settlers left and the campsite of Black Jack Anderson. It sails only when the lake is worth the crossing, and it is on hold while the water runs brown.