"I had this very clear memory of the lake lapping near the road and it being quite windy and cold and it having this quite amazing feeling," he says.

Now, almost 30 years later, Conroy drives past the lake on his almost daily commute to the Australian National University, and it's hard to believe that there was a time when it was filled with water.

It is on these commutes that the photographer started taking images of Lake George, documenting the way it changes depending on the light and weather.

"It's a labour of love in terms of it being my commute, but I've just really noticed how changeable the lake is and I sort of got into I suppose what you would call the psychogeography - the mystery of the lake," he says.

Mr Conroy started trawling through the National Library of Australia's Trove database, discovering articles from The Canberra Times and Goulburn Post which "came up with a huge number of interesting things".

"There's a lot of tragedies surrounding the lake, particularly in the mid-20th century," he says.

"There were a lot of really evocative tragedies that really grabbed me, along with other things like proposals to work on the lake.

"There was a whole raft of things that I started reading about the lake that seemed incongruous and very strange when we look at it now, as it stands with it being largely empty since the late 90s."

It's the lake's vast absence which inspired him to try and capture it in his photography, which will be on display in Driving around Bad Water at the Goulburn Regional Art Gallery. "It's this huge flat pan that's largely without water - it just conjures the mysterious," he says.

"One only has to stand in front of one of these big prints that I've made to really get a sense of that. I've tried to be honest as much as possible in terms of scale and expanse of the lake and I've tried to offer the viewer a window into the experience.

"It's not like standing in front of the lake exactly, because photography is always a bit of translation, but it certainly gives one a sense of the vastness and the varied textures, and how changeable the lake is from light."

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The exhibition's name was inspired by the Indigenous name for the lake, Weereewa.

"The translation for that word varies, but the one that struck me is bad water because the water is quite saline and it's not good for drinking," Mr Conroy says.

"And I thought 'what a difference to the colonial name of Lake George, named after a king that never visited Australia'. He was this sort of prince that lived in London and had no relation [to the lake], whereas the Indigenous word relates directly to the lake itself and the fact that it is very changeable and dangerous, and serious because it is a serious place."