Hutt Lagoon
Interesting facts
- Explorer George Grey named the lagoon after William Hutt, a British politician closely involved in colonising Western Australia and brother of the colony's governor John Hutt.
- In summer around 95 per cent of the lagoon's surface becomes a dry salt flat, leaving only scattered pools of pink brine.
- Water evaporates here at roughly 2,445 mm a year, more than five times the average rainfall of about 449 mm.
- The whole lagoon covers about 70 square kilometres, an elongated basin trapped between the beach barrier and older coastal dunes.
- Salt from Hutt Lagoon was highly commended at the 1873 Sydney Intercolonial Exhibition, where gypsum from its western shore won a bronze medal.
- Explorer Augustus Charles Gregory promoted its salt and gypsum deposits as early as 1854, pointing to their closeness to the harbour at Port Gregory.
- At its peak the Port Gregory saltworks produced around 4,000 tons a year and employed up to 50 people.
- The lagoon's brine shrimp, Artemia parthenogenetica, are harvested commercially as specialist feed for prawn and fish farms and the aquarium trade.
Why it is worth it
Hutt Lagoon is a long, shallow salt lake behind the dunes of Western Australia's Mid West coast, and for much of the year it is pink. The colour comes from Dunaliella salina, a microscopic alga that thrives in very salty water and protects itself with beta-carotene, the same pigment that colours carrots. Depending on the season, the cloud and the angle of the sun, the lagoon can look bubblegum pink, deep red or pale lilac, and on a clear day the contrast with the blue Indian Ocean a few hundred metres away, across a strip of dune and the little town of Gregory, is startling. Midday light, when the sun is high, tends to bring out the strongest colour.
The lagoon is about 14 km long and just over 2 km wide, lying along the coast in a hollow between old dunes, and most of it sits a few metres below sea level. Seawater seeps into it continuously through the beach barrier, and in the wet winter months fresh groundwater rises from springs as well; in the long, hot summers evaporation takes over and much of the surface dries to a crust of salt. That balance of inflow and evaporation is what makes the water so saline and gives the algae their conditions. The lagoon and several smaller lakes around it are listed as a wetland of national importance.
The pink is also put to work. Along the lagoon runs what is described as the world's largest microalgae production plant, some 250 hectares of artificial ponds where Dunaliella is farmed for beta-carotene, used as a food colouring and a source of vitamin A. The lagoon also supplies brine shrimp as feed for aquaculture. Salt was harvested here earlier: shipped through nearby Port Gregory from 1908 until the saltworks closed in 1924. The lake was named by the explorer George Grey, who camped on its eastern shore in April 1839 and, seeing it full after the rains, took it for the estuary of a great river; a ship sent to find that estuary the following summer found a dry river mouth instead.
Getting there
Hutt Lagoon lies beside the coast road between Northampton and Kalbarri, about 80 km north of Geraldton, a drive of just over an hour, and some 45 minutes south of Kalbarri. The nearest airport is Geraldton Airport (GET), about 88 km away. George Grey Drive runs along the eastern edge of the lagoon, and there is an unsealed pull-off, the Pink Lake Lookout, on Port Gregory Road, where you can park and walk to the shore.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Hutt Lagoon is a marine salt lake located near the Indian Ocean coast 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) north of the mouth of the Hutt River, in the Mid West region of Western Australia.
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