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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →