Pink Lakes Of Australia

Only three kilometres from the town of Esperance, Pink Lake used to be a great Instagram opportunity drawing thousands of tourists but sadly the lake has lost its pink eye. It’s now mostly white. Locals running the Pink Lake Butcher, the Pink Lake Laundromat, and Pink Lake Caravan Park are considering changing the name of their businesses. The lake needs a rebrand to Used-To-Be-Shocking-Pink-But-Now-It’s-Startling-White Lake or the locals need to find a way to get more salt into the lake, to return to its former magnificent hue. It's unfortunate for Pink Lake residents but fortunate for you, there are other pink lake options to explore.

Port Gregory’s Pink Lake is exactly that. Pink. And quite beautiful. Even the sands around the lake take on the pink hue in different shades, giving you a unique pink/red beach rainbow that makes you rub your eyes to make sure it’s real. The lake stretches for 5km along the roadside so it’s not hard to miss the pinktastic scene but it is only accessible from a few points around it, be patient trying to find them by car as it’s not well sign posted. And if there is cloud cover the colour won’t be anywhere near as impressive as when the sun hits the water.

You reach Hutt Lagoon on George Grey Drive, between Geraldton and Kalbarri.

Lake Hillier is permanently pink; even if you took the water out of the lake and put it in a pan it wouldn’t change (sadly you can’t as the lake is not accessible on foot or car, it's a trip in a plane or boat to see this mighty one). Sitting on Middle Island, in the Recherche Archipelago 130 km from Esperance, it’s pretty spectacular from the air. The view from a plane shows up the contrast of the blue of the nearby Pacific Ocean to the unreal unicorn pink of Lake Hillier that makes you think of an artist's easel.

Another pink lake high in salt concentration, Lake McDonnell, looks like it’s got a split personality disorder some days. First off, it’s split by a causeway that you can drive down, but on a clear day, one side can be salmon pink and the other side baby blue. If you’re in this part of the Eyre peninsula, do a drive-by of nearby Penong town, where they have 26 windmills including ‘Bruce’, the biggest in Australia.

We’re not sure this one actually qualifies as a lake, more of a large pond, but you can drive over the top of it, so that makes it a pretty impressive pond. Quairading’s pink pond-lake reminds us of a hangover, where one side of your brain is pounding red some mornings and the other side wants to just feel normal again. The different colours are due to the road passing through and come from salt build up. Sometimes one side is almost brown and the other is orange. The road east of Quairading (Bruce Rock Road) drives right over the lake, you can’t miss it.