Lake Hillier
Interesting facts
- The colour does not wash out when the water is scooped into a glass: a sample taken from the lake stays pink.
- Its salinity is often compared to that of the Dead Sea, yet the water has no known harmful effects on people who swim in it.
- The first written record of the lake comes from Matthew Flinders, who spotted it on 15 January 1802 after climbing Middle Island's highest summit, now Flinders Peak.
- A member of Flinders's party reported salt crystallised so thickly along the shore that it could have filled a ship's hold.
- The lake is reportedly named after William Hillier, a crewman of HMS Investigator who died of dysentery in May 1803 before the ship left the island.
- In 1889 Edward Andrews moved onto the island with his two sons to mine the salt, but the venture lasted only about a year.
- The lake measures roughly 600 metres by 250 metres and is separated from the Southern Ocean only by a thin belt of dunes and paperbark and eucalyptus woodland.
- Seen from the air it reads as solid bubble-gum pink, while from the shoreline the water looks clearer, ringed by a crust of white salt.
- Unusually heavy rain can dilute the brine and dull the pink for a while; scientists expect the colour to return as the water level falls.
Why it is worth it
Lake Hillier's pink is not a bloom that comes and goes — it's a stable, resident ecosystem. The core color-maker is the microalga Dunaliella salina, which produces high concentrations of beta-carotene as protection against intense sunlight and extreme salt stress, but a 2022 genetic survey found it shares the lake with multiple other pigment-producing extremophiles, including halophilic archaea that add their own reds and purples. In water this hostile, almost nothing else can survive — and the handful of organisms that can happen to be nature's own pigment factories.
You likely won't walk up to it. Lake Hillier sits on Middle Island, part of the uninhabited Recherche Archipelago nature reserve off Western Australia's south coast, accessible only by permitted boat landing or, far more commonly, by air — which is precisely why almost every photo of it is an aerial shot rather than a beach snapshot. That restriction isn't red tape for its own sake; it's what keeps the fragile microbial community undisturbed.
What sets Hillier apart from other famous 'pink lakes' — Senegal's Lake Retba, or the mainland Pink Lake near Esperance — is consistency. Many pink lakes fade in and out with seasonal algae bloom cycles, so timing a visit matters. Hillier's salinity and microbial population usually stay steady enough that the colour holds through most of the year, which is part of why it became the reference image for 'pink lake' in the first place.
Good to know
Unlike some pink lakes whose color is partly a trick of light on the water's surface, Hillier's water reportedly keeps its pink tone even when scooped into a clear container — a sign the color is genuinely in the water's pigmented biology, not just an in-situ optical effect.
Getting there
406 km from Kalgoorlie. Esperance Airport (EPR) is about 136 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Lake Hillier is a saline lake on the edge of Middle Island, the largest of the islands and islets that make up the Recherche Archipelago in the Goldfields-Esperance region, off the south coast of Western Australia. It is particularly notable for its pink colour. A long and thin shore divides the Southern Ocean from the lake.
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