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.

Lighthouses of Australia starts with the history of lighthouses and outlines how lens types and lamps developed. Ibbotson highlights the achievements of the ‘leading lights’ in this field in the nineteenth century – Augustin Fresnel and the Chance Brothers for example – and also touches on more recent navigational and global positioning technologies. He also covers the progress of Australian lighthouses as the colony develops, and lighthouse automation and de-manning.

But it’s the comprehensive state-by-state profiling of each lighthouse that is the heart of this book, as Ibbotson – clearly a talented photographer – manages to show the individual beauty of each of the 228 lighthouses and the land and seascapes they occupy. Lighthouse maps for each state, a list of lighthouse museums, a chronological list of lights, a very informative glossary, bibliography, index and ‘quick facts’ complete this invaluable text.

If you love lighthouses, you’ll love this book.