Light artist Bruce Munro is giving travellers another reason to visit Mildura, Wentworth, Kings Canyon and the Red Centre. Discover some of the stories, science and nostalgic nods behind his remarkable installations.
For anyone who grew up with a Hills Hoist in the backyard, the sight of one can bring memories flooding back. Sheets flapping in the breeze. Kids swinging on the arms when Mum wasn’t looking. Barbecues and beers around the base.
Standing among the towering, illuminated versions created by light artist Bruce Munro near Wentworth, those familiar backyard clotheslines take on a different meaning.
Music rises around me as colours travel through their arms. Above them, the outback sky is thick with stars. It’s an extraordinary thing to experience, particularly when you discover that it began with a childhood wish to walk through an orchestra.
Across four installations in Australia, Bruce has turned ideas gathered over a lifetime into artworks that invite people to spend time in the landscape after dark.
I first met him in Darwin in 2019, at the opening of his exhibition Tropical Light. One work, Gathering of the Clans, featured eight Hills Hoists covered in colourful clothes pegs, accompanied by a chorus of cockatoos.
Being a bird lover, I was enchanted. The sounds took me straight back to childhood afternoons in the backyard.
When we met again in Mildura in 2026, a quick coffee became two hours of conversation. I reminded him of those cockatoos, and he explained how an everyday sight had sparked the idea. “I saw this Hills Hoist and what I thought were little birds on the lines. I got closer and realised they were clothes pegs. At the time, living on the Northern Beaches, birds were everywhere, and I loved the sound of magpies and cockatoos.”
That affection for Australia runs through his work, from the Murray River, to the desert around Uluru and far beyond.
At the Perry Sandhills near Wentworth in south-western NSW, Bruce’s Fibre Optic Symphonic Orchestra, or FOSO, brings together 80 illuminated sculptures inspired by the Hills Hoist. The idea had been with him since childhood.
“I’d often think – why can’t I walk through an orchestra? Wouldn’t that be amazing?” he says. “There are practicalities as to why you can’t – such as bumping into musicians and disturbing things – but I wanted to bring that childhood dream to life.”
British composer Nainita Desai created the orchestral score that accompanies the changing light. As you move between the sculptures, different sections of the music surround you.
The strings give me goosebumps. Further along, the brass and wind instruments change the mood, while the percussion puts a spring in my step.
Thousands of fibre-optic strands carry colour along the columns and across their outstretched arms. Looking up, I can understand why Bruce returned to the clothesline as inspiration.
“Every Australian who grew up with a Hills Hoist has memories from time spent around it in the backyard,” says Bruce. “Summer barbecues around it, swinging on the arms of it with your mates. It’s such an iconic Australian invention that means so much to so many people.”
For those of us who remember the Hills Hoist as a central feature of family life, there’s something lovely about seeing it celebrated on this scale.
On Lock Island in Mildura, Trail of Lights offers a quieter experience. Here, 12,550 illuminated sculptures spread through the bushland, their fine fibre-optic strands moving gently in the breeze. Bruce calls them fireflies. To me, they look like upturned flowers, or jellyfish floating in a dark sea.
Walking among them, I’m struck by how quiet everyone is. Other visitors are following the paths, yet there are moments when I feel entirely alone. Apart from the excited whisper of others: “What do you think they are? Jellyfish? Octopus?” asks someone.
“Fairy flowers!” A child shouts.
A breeze passes through and the lights sway together. I stop to watch, then find myself stopping again a few metres further along. The longer I look, the more I notice how the individual strands move and how the lights change the appearance of the surrounding bush. To me they look like the swaying skirts of Hawaiian dancers. Another memory from childhood – to me they look like the swaying skirts of Hawaiian dancers, dancing by fires in the darkness.
Along the river’s edge, another work, Gone Fishing, is a tribute to Bruce’s childhood fishing trips with his brother. Clusters of illuminated rods suggest the stillness of standing beside a stream, waiting for a fish to bite.
After the orchestral energy of FOSO, the peacefulness of Lock Island stays with me.
Long before these installations, Bruce and his wife Serena explored Australia in their trusty little Corolla, carrying what they needed and sleeping under the stars.
“Serena was the real traveller. She was the planner,” Bruce says. “I went along for the ride. We’d mark somewhere off on the map and just go there. Broken Hill, Uluru, Kings Canyon, Port Augusta, Margaret River…. we just kept going.”
At Uluru, watching the light move across the landscape left an impression that would eventually shape his best-known work.
“When we first saw Uluru, we just watched how the light changed. It was magical – like Impressionism in real life, and then there’s an inversion of the sky when the stars come out. It made us feel connected to the world – there’s no other way to describe it. We’d never felt more alive. The land shimmers. The Indigenous people know this. They’ve seen it and felt it for thousands of years. But the question was, how could I create a piece of art to explain it?”
The answer came through thinking about what lay beneath the desert. “Deserts can be barren places, but there are dormant seeds under the ground and then they explode into growth, like super-fast speeded up films I watched as a kid.”
Back in Britain, the couple raised their family, but the idea stayed with him. Bruce created an early version of Field of Light in Wiltshire in 2004. In 2016, he brought it to the place that had inspired it.
At Uluru, 50,000 glowing spheres spread across the desert, gently changing colour as darkness falls. Originally intended as a temporary exhibition, Field of Light marks its tenth anniversary in 2026.
Walking through it beneath a sky full of stars, I’m surrounded by blue, violet and pink light. Fine illuminated threads run across the ground, connecting the stems. At first, the flowers of light seem scattered almost at random. Then I begin to notice the care in their placement and the way the colours work together.
I’d seen photographs before visiting, but they hadn’t prepared me for the feeling of being within it. I walked slowly, reluctant to reach the end of the path.
At Discovery Resorts – Kings Canyon, Bruce’s Light-Towers brings a different shape to the desert.
Opened in 2023, the installation comprises 69 towers, each two metres tall and constructed from 216 glass bottles. Fibre-optic cables illuminate the bottles, with colours changing to a soundscape by British composer Orlando Gough.
Bruce’s inspiration reaches back to a book he read as a young man. “I read a book called Gifts of Unknown Things when I was 21, and it’s a gentle book about myth, soft science and travel. It covers the sixth sense and tapping into synaesthesia. Sounds – they have a colour, a shape, and it’s about Earth having a natural pulse in the upper atmosphere, at a rate of sixty-nine beats per day.”
“They are structurally strong and when filled with loops of illuminated fibre optic cables, they light up,” he says.
Wandering between the towers, I think of Stonehenge. There’s something about their height and arrangement that gives them a presence beyond the everyday objects used to build them. The music adds to that feeling. I find myself pausing between the columns, watching one colour give way to another, and the sky behind shift and change.
Someone beside me will see something entirely different. That’s part of the pleasure of spending time with Bruce’s work. His memories provide the starting point, but there’s always room for your own, and standing in these incredible landscapes with lights all around, you can let your imagination run free.
If you enjoyed this feature on Bruce Munro’s light installations, you might enjoy our feature on the new David Hockney light show at Carriageworks.
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