Dry Creek Salt Fields
Dry Creek Salt Fields, 2012
In 2012 Adam Jan Dutkiewicz., myself and Fichte walked around and photographed a section of the Cheetham salt fields at Dry Creek. The salt field has produced salt from the evaporation of seawater since the 1930s and they are an area of evaporation ponds stretching more than 30 km along the coast from Dry Creek to Middle Beach. It would be more accurate to speak of these salt fields as crystallisation pans that are a part of the Dry Creek wetlands. At the time there was a plan to sell and redevelop the site for housing.
I had photographed it from the air and I’d occasionally walked around parts of the wetlands but I quickly realized it would have been better to explore them by kayak. Dry Creek itself, which flows into Swan Alley a tidal distributory of the Barker Inlet, runs north of the crystallisation pans near the Globe Derby Park. The banks of the degraded creek were littered with dumped rubbish. This creek is part of a large storm water management system within an industrial area with the wetlands acting as the outflow point for the storm water drains.
Dry Creek, 2012
Adam used the series of images he’d made to publish a photographic essay of the salt fields entitled The Path to Salt. Unlike Adam I didn’t have the capacity to think in terms of a photographic essay. Given the limited public access to the wetlands my appoach that morning was to walk around the edge of the salt fields near the Port Wakefield Road, take some photos and leave it at that. I wasn’t thinking of photobooks as part of my photography at the time.
salt pans +Torrens Island Power Station, 2012
I have been back since then. Salt production ceased in 2014. The crystallisation pans and the piles of salt have gone. I understand that a small pond was isolated from the rest of the salt field and reconnected to the sea via a tidal creek. The creek now delivers water flows to the degraded site and the process of restoration has begun. The proposed housing development has been shelved. I have yet to walk the walking trails within the wetlands. There is still only limited public access.