Lonely Art Club

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To get to main street menzies these days, drive past the graceful Western Australian gold-rush town's lone pub and petrol station, and travel 50 km west along a gravel road to Lake Ballard. It's here, on a 70 sq. km lake dried to a shimmering salt plain, that Menzies shire president Kath Finlayson likes to meet and greet her townsfolk. To an outsider, the 49 metal sculptures appear almost extraterrestrial, with their pointy heads and pixie feet. But to a Menziesite, each is uniquely human. "This is one of the tribal elders," says Finlayson, 56, by way of introduction to Paddy Walker - or rather his sculpture, as the shire president and trained nurse greets many of them by name. In mid-afternoon light, the figures seem to materialize and dissolve from the mirage that looms on the lake's horizon. Further around, Finlayson says g'day to the town policeman and the owners of the Caltex roadhouse. But her biggest, bounciest bush greeting is reserved for herself: "That's me," she says. "See the boobs?"

It doesn't take long to get to the point in remote Australia (Lake Ballard is about 800 km east of Perth and about the same distance again to the South Australian border). And paring back to the essence of things was the whole aim of Antony Gormley's $A500,000 Inside Australia sculpture project. For the 2003 Perth International Arts Festival, the Englishman digitally scanned each able-bodied citizen of Menzies (about 130 of them at the time), tweaked their dimensions on a computer screen, and cast their skeletal cores in a mix of stainless steel and trace elements found at the lake. What we get is a town reduced to its bare bones - "boobs" and all. (By drastically slenderizing his subjects, Gormley makes these and other intimate appendages protrude like sausages on sticks.) But if outsiders care to linger with these Insiders - and the roadhouse guest book indicates that they do, coming all the way from New York or Dublin for the privilege - they can also glimpse the town's soul. Think of Inside Australia as a microcosm of small-town Australia: wilting under the weight of centralization and globalization, for sure, but miraculously still standing. "I loved Menzies the moment I saw it," says Gormley, 54, who spotted the town and its lake from the air after a week's search for a suitable site. "What's amazing is that, yes, it may be a place that's lost its grip on being a destination. That in a way the trucks just pile through without slowing down. But at the same time, you can go to the graveyard or you can go to the pub, and you can talk to the people and they will tell you why they're there and what their story of getting there was."

Often they were in the process of getting somewhere else. Such was the case with Gormley himself, who had pretty much settled on Lake Deborah to the west before, at the last minute, Lake Ballard's unique conical-shaped hill caught his eye. Chance intervened, too, with Baltimore-born prospector Leslie Robert Menzie. While surveying a potential mine site near Ninety Mile in 1894 - two years after Bayley and Ford struck gold in Coolgardie, 150 km to the south - he and his party ran out of water. "We followed the line of the reef to the top of the rise, nuggets and quartz lay everywhere," he reportedly said. "The place was literally saturated with the metal." But the town that briefly prospered in his wake (mining had all but ceased by 1910), today seems like another mirage on Lake Ballard. Surveying an otherwise featureless horizon of red earth and mulga scrub from the town's water board, Kath Finlayson says, "There used to be 10,000 people, 13 pubs, two breweries, and houses as far as the eye can see." But until the sculptures came, the biggest thing on the horizon in the past hundred years was Cyclone Bobby, in 1995. The deluge it brought transformed Lake Ballard into a magical breeding ground for 10,000 banded stilts. "It was like a thousand cotton-wool balls out there," Finlayson recalls. Then the birds left.

It's a pattern. these people left town without paying there account is the sign that greets those entering the Menzies roadhouse. Even its ebullient owners, Robert and Christine Earnshaw, didn't mean to stick around for quite so long. He was an upholsterer from Perth whose first wife came to work at the service station; 18 years his junior, Yorkshire-born Christine, 45, stopped in Menzies while touring Australia. But after 12 years together at the roadhouse, they're ready to sell up. "It's an experience I wouldn't have missed, living here," says Earnshaw, who also runs the town's power house and water board. "It's just that Chris and I are getting old and tired, and seven days a week is starting to kill us." Shire president Finlayson, whose family sheep station was recently sold after 30 years, admits that since the decline of the local pastoral industry, it's been a problem getting people to stay. "People start drifting away," she says. "And you don't want to drag them back unless they've got employment. That's the biggest issue with the centralization of all these small towns." Apart from a pub, police station and school that service a largely Aboriginal population, there are few jobs. "I've lived here all my life, so it's not so good," says beanie-wearing Ronald Hogarth, 50. "Well, the pub's good." Elder Lorraine Williams, 48, calls it "a sleepy little town" whose main store recently closed down because there were "not enough customers." So sleepy, in fact, that written across a soccer ball found abandoned by the road is the instruction: kick da f---king thing.