In 1828, French optician Augustin Fresnel developed apparatus for using the refractive properties of glass in a central lens with concentric prismatic glass rings arranged on vertical panels – the dioptric system. This meant light passing through the central lens could be directed in a beam, but light outside the scope of the central lens …
Constructing the Cape Schanck lighthouse began in 1857 and finished in 1859. Named by Lieutenant James Grant after the man who invented the sliding keel on Grant’s survey ship, the Lady Nelson, Cape Schanck is the most southerly point of the Mornington Peninsula, Victoria. Advice to mariners issued in the Victorian Government Gazette in May …
Ninety metres below the Cape Otway lighthouse, breakers sweep over the Cape Otway reef and crash onto the granite cliffs lining the shore. Staring out beyond the breakers, I think of the people who might have looked back from out there, back towards this lighthouse site. The people who sailed past this Cape before each …
The elegant Cape du Couedic lighthouse brings Robert Louis Stevenson’s idea that lighthouses are living art to mind. Located on the south-west tip of Kangaroo Island, South Australia, in the Flinders Chase National Park, Cape du Couedic is not to be missed when on the Island.
Cape Borda is on the north-west tip of Kangaroo Island, Australia’s third biggest island. Cape Borda was the second lighthouse built on the Island and is one of only six square lighthouses in Australia.
The allure of lighthouses is part isolated setting, part design, part engineering feat. In the nineteenth century, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote that engineering ‘was not a science…It was a living art, and it visibly grew under the eyes and between the hands of its practitioners’. He should know. Between 1790 and 1940, eight members of …
Cape Borda, on the north-western end of Kangaroo Island, was the Island’s second lighthouse (after Cape Willoughby), and the third in South Australia. Built in 1858 to guide ships battling the ‘roaring forties’ trade winds, it’s the only square lighthouse in South Australia and stands at the top of the tallest coastal cliffs – over …
It’s a coal-black night on the north coast of Kangaroo Island. Gale-force winds whack our cyclone-proof house and it sounds like there’s a percussion ensemble on the roof. Lightning flares across the sky, and below us, Kangaroo Beach is a roaring squall. It’s wild. It’s thrilling in a dark, elemental way. But it wouldn’t have …
The first Australian lighthouse – the Macquarie Light – threw a beam out from South Head in Sydney in 1818. Prior to that, the only white-settler beacon on the mainland was a fire lit in an iron basket in the same location from 1794. It’s hard to imagine the Australian coastline without lighthouses. It’s hard … Continue reading
Cape Schanck is the most southern tip of the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, Australia. The lighthouse is beautifully maintained and the South-American Mahogany-lined lantern room with an intact Chance Brothers first-order lens makes this a special lighthouse destination. Continue reading
If you’re really lucky you’ll find Pat Howell in the lantern room at the Cape Otway lighthouse and he’ll be able to give you a terrific run-down on this lighthouse, and the many others where he has kept the lights burning over many years. Continue reading
Sometimes known as the ‘White Lady’ the Split Point Lighthouse is an elegant 34-metre high landmark at Airey’s Inlet, Victoria. Built in 1891, many will recognise this lighthouse from the television series Round the Twist. Continue reading
Settlers Under Sail
by Don Charlwood
Published by Burgewood Books, 1978
Many Australians will have read Don Charlwood’s All the Green Year while at high school, but may not know that Charlwood also wrote about Australia’s early maritime history in Wrecks and Reputations and Settlers Under Sail – an account of the 1878 wreck of the Loch Ard, west of Cape Otway in Victoria. Charlwood’s connection with sailing ships dates back to the 1860’s when his uncle, Edward Charlwood, kept a shipboard diary of his journey to Australia with his new bride. Continue reading
The Forgotten Islands by Michael Veitch
Published by Viking, 2011
Michael Veitch’s ‘adventure through the islands of Bass Strait starts with the tale of a young assistant lightkeeper, who, at the turn of the twentieth century, disappeared from Deal Island. Deal, like the other islands Veitch sets out to explore, is a windswept remote island off the coast of Tasmania. In The Forgotten Islands, Veitch’s quest is primarily to explore an Australia he hardly knows, but uncovering the reason for the young man’s disappearance figures as a lesser, but just as interesting, quest. Continue reading
Beacons of Hope by Donald Walker
Published by Neptune Press, 1981
Donald Walker appears to leave no historical stone unturned is his history of the Cape Otway and King Island lighthouses. Part lighthouse, part maritime, part social, and part political history, Beacons of Hope provides a detailed analysis of why and how these two significant lighthouses were planned, built and lit in 1848 (Cape Otway) and 1861 (Cape Wickham, King Island). Continue reading
From Dusk to Dawn – A History of Australian Lighthouses
Published by Macmillan Australia in association with the Department of Transport and Communications, 1988
Written by historian Gordon Reid to coincide with Australia’s Bicentenary, From Dusk to Dawn is an authoritative history of how Australia and its system of coastal lights developed. It entwines early exploration of Australia’s coastline with British rule and explains the challenges faced by the home rulers trying to balance domestic needs with those of a new colony shaping up as a rich trade and immigration destination. Continue reading
Lighthouses of Australia – Images from the End of an Era
by John Ibbotson, Published by Australian Lighthouse Traders, 2001
Lighthouses of Australia is the ultimate large-format pictorial guide to lighthouses around the Australian coastline. It’s a reference book with a difference: it gives historical and technical information about the lights as well as beautiful photographs capturing the lighthouses and their locations. This is book at home on your reference shelf or coffee table. Continue reading
Shipwreck! was written by Kathleen A. Foster and published by Philadelphia Museum of Art to coincide with an exhibition at the Museum in 2012. Winslow Homer’s painting, The Life Line – even on a book cover – captures the emotional drama and peril of a shipwreck rescue in the 1880s. The Life Line was acclaimed … Continue reading
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