Salt Harvesting, near Point Cook, C.1924
Salt has long been a precious commodity which shaped ancient civilisations and forged foreign trade routes.
The word salary comes from the Latin - salarium, as the payment made to Roman Centurions to buy salt, and your place in the social pecking order was described as "being above or below the salt."
In the first years of the Colony of Victoria, salt was imported and very expensive, but salt was essential for preserving meat, making ice and tanning leather. Only a small proportion of the salt used was added to food for cooking.
Cheaper and more reliable local sources were clearly needed.
Salt could be produced by boiling down sea water, but at around 2% concentration, 49 tons of sea water were required to produce one ton of salt – it was an expensive and labour intensive method.
However, salt could be harvested more economically from the many natural salt pans along the Murray River and across western Victoria.
Some of these lakes occurred on crown land and extraction was licensed and royalty collected by the Forests Commission under the category of “minor forest produce”.
Before roads and rail, camels were used to transport salt from the Sunset Country to the Murray River.
Led by Afghan team masters, the camel trains could endure in the sandy and hot terrain.
The valuable salt was then loaded onto paddle steamers and the camels returned with precious fresh water and supplies.
Then in 1924 the Cheetham Saltworks near Point Cook was established to harvest salt in man-made evaporative lakes.
While there is still harvesting of "boutique" table salts along the Murray and places like Pink Lake near Dimboola, most commercial salt is now produced in the Pilbara Region of Western Australia.