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NLA News - home September 2005 Volume XV Number 12

‘ONCE A DANGER, NOW SAFE’

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Jean-Baptiste Arnout (b.1788)
Vue du Phare du Port Jackson, Nouvelle Galles du Sud 1830
hand col. lithograph;
23.5 x 38.0 cm
Pictures Collection
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Russell Doust goes on a voyage of discovery in the National Library, investigating Australia’s lighthouses

‘Olim periculum—nunc salus. Once a danger—now safe’. These are the words etched into the glass doors of the Norah Head lighthouse in New South Wales. In the course of my research into the Select Committees of the New South Wales Legislative Council, I came across the first of several inquiries, in 1841, into the need for and provision of lighthouses in what was then called Bass’s Strait. We now know it simply as Bass Strait. The troubled and dangerous stretch of water between mainland Australia and the island of Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) had proved to be a much shorter route (by about 600 nautical miles) to Eastern Australia from the English and Indian ports than the voyage round the south of Tasmania; but it was inconveniently studded with islands, shoals, reefs and uncharted rocks, and the relatively high number of shipwrecks made it obvious that some navigational aids were essential.

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John Flynn (1880–1951)
Old & New Macquarie Light House, Sydney N.S.W. 1884?
b&w photograph; 28.7 x 22.6 cm
Part of ‘Old Sydney Collection 1870’
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn3513278

Lighthouses in Bass Strait were eventually built (the first in 1848), but not until complicated jurisdictional matters were ironed out. There were two key questions. Were the lighthouses to be paid for by the Colony of New South Wales, whose southern territories lay to the north of the Strait, or by the Colony of Van Diemen’s Land to the south? And where should they be built?—a question which required expert knowledge. Agreement between the two colonies was finally reached, but not before the Admiralty in London had forbidden transports carrying convicts or troops to use the Strait until lighthouses had been built.

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Cover of Lighthouses: Do We Keep the Keepers? Report from the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Expenditure, December 1983 (Canberra: Australian Govt Pub. Service, 1984)

Researching in the National Library, I quickly became aware of how little I really knew about Australian lighthouses. From boyhood reading, I knew more about the famous Eddystone Light in England than I did about any Australian lighthouse—even the first of them, the Macquarie Lighthouse on Sydney Harbour’s southern headland, whose foundation stone had been laid in 1816. I therefore set out to find out what I could.

A search of the National Library catalogue soon produced a wealth of information, including references to Australia’s own Eddystone Light, a pink granite tower on the north-east corner of Tasmania. A good starting point for my inquiry turned out to be From Dusk to Dawn: A History of Australian Lighthouses, published in 1988 in association with the Commonwealth Department of Transport and Communications. It is a handsome book with an informative and highly readable text by Gordon Reid and stunning colour photographs by Murray Foote. The Library held many other sources, however: images, some digitised for ready electronic access; cartographic records; books for juveniles; and photographic calendars. Clearly I did not need to see them all (nor did I have time), so I decided to look at a representative sample of what was available. So, what did I find?

Well, there are a number of books which seem to be mainly intended for lighthouse enthusiasts, who are obviously akin to trainspotters. One example is Lighthouses of Australia, a Visitor’s Guide (Surrey Hills, Vic.: Australian Lighthouse Traders, 2003). The author, John Ibbotson, dedicated the book ‘to all the people who are fascinated by lighthouses, who visit them and who are committed to their preservation’, and helpfully sketches out a four-month (or longer) journey from Brisbane to Sydney, to Melbourne, Tasmania and back to Melbourne, to Adelaide, across the Nullarbor Plain (‘a very long drive’, he remarks) to Perth, then on to Broome, Darwin, then Cairns and home to Brisbane. A marathon trip indeed, but one calculated to show 150 or so of what he considers to be Australia’s best lighthouses. That’s a lot of lighthouses, but after all, the Australian coastline does measure nearly 20 000 kilometres.

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John McKinnon, Australian Information Service
Mr John Cook checks the electric bulb inside the Maatsuyker Island lighthouse’s prism, 1977
b&w photograph; 20.5 x 15.4 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn3513220

Then there are the stories of the lighthouse keepers, and their families. Among these, I liked Nan Chauncy’s The Lighthouse Keeper’s Son (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). The boy Chester, about to turn 10, is devastated when his father decides to leave his lighthouse keeper’s job on Maatsuyker Island at the very bottom of Tasmania, to farm pineapples in Queensland. Of course, the farming venture fails, and father seeks, and gets, another lighthouse-keeping job, this time in North Queensland—and we hope that everyone lived happily ever after.

Another book, Keepers and Lighthouses, by Max Fatchen (number 5 in the series Australian People. London: Longmans Green, 1963) is intended for much younger children:

We are lighthouse children
On an island home;
Sea is all about us
Rocks and waves and foam.

Father’s in the lighthouse,
Keeping watch tonight,
Writing in his log book,
Looking to the light.

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Maatsuyker Island Lighthouse, c.1940: the landfall of vessels proceeding from Capetown and other South African ports to Hobart
b&w negative; 10.0 x 12.3 cm
Pictures Collection,
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When we’re in our bedroom
Long before we dream,
Like a mighty finger
Sweeps the lighthouse beam.

On our lonely island
here the wind sings loud,
We are lighthouse children
And we’re very proud.

For older readers, Stuart Buchanan tells the story of how he and his wife Shirley, disgruntled and tired of working as juniors in an architect’s office, went lighthouse keeping, relieving when permanent keepers were away—not quite the idyllic life that 10-year-old Chester enjoyed at Maatsuyker Island, but still a source of pleasure, mixed with hard work and tough conditions. After some years, for personal and business reasons, Stuart and Shirley decided that they had had enough. They were, in fact, just in time, for in 1983 the Federal Minister for Transport set up a Committee of Inquiry to examine the continuing need for lighthouse keepers. By then, great advances had been made in automating light stations, and the operators of large ships believed that with radar and other navigational aids they were no longer dependent on the lights. This attitude was no doubt influenced by the fact that it was the shipping owners who paid for the lighthouses and their keepers. The Report of the Committee, Lighthouses: Do We Keep the Keepers? records the evidence, much of it contradictory, and noted that the Minister had implicitly asked why commercial shipping should pay for a service it did not require. It appeared that the light stations and other navigational aids (there were 376 of them) were mostly used by the captains of small vessels without sophisticated navigational aid equipment. Aside from this, there was the question of the heritage value of the lighthouses; caretaking and maintenance staff were obviously still necessary for this, even if the lights themselves operated without human intervention. In addition there was concern that unmanned, or at least unsupervised, lighthouses would be open to vandalism.

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Charles Cousen (c.1819–1889)
Sydney Heads [1874?]
engraving; 19.5 x 26.5 cm
Pictures Collection
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What did a lighthouse keeper actually do? It was a lonely life but a busy one. The first lights were oil lamps (if one excepts the early reports of bonfires lit on the South Head of Port Jackson in 1793). The oil was fish oil, or more commonly whale oil, but in 1859 colza oil (also known as rapeseed oil) came into use, to be superseded in 1875 by kerosene, and then by acetylene gas in cylinders. The last kerosene light in Australia was not replaced until 1985. Acetylene could be automatically controlled, and some lights were automatic, but keepers were still needed for a variety of other purposes. Lenses had to be kept clean, gas cylinders regularly changed, the clockwork mechanisms which enabled the lamps to rotate (and therefore to appear to flash) had to be wound up regularly. Electricity was tried quite early, and is now common, but there was always the problem of where did the electricity supply come from. Early experiments in on-site generating equipment were not satisfactory, and in any event the keeper was needed to maintain the generators.

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Looking Along the South Heads Cliffs at the Lighthouse
© Courtesy Sydney Harbour Federation Trust

A secondary duty of the lighthouse keeper was to keep watch for suspicious vessels; and the etiquette of the sea was of importance. The Instructions to Lightkeepers, Commonwealth Lighthouse Service of 1917 provided that

The ensign is to be hoisted at the signal staff, between the hours of 8 a.m. and sunset (weather permitting), on Sundays and on the following occasions:—

The Birthday of the reigning Sovereign;

The passing of British men-of-war, of Government vessels, or of vessels flying the flag of the Governor-General or of State Governors.

The customary compliments are to be paid to such vessels by ‘dipping’.

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William and Augusta Chalk Baudinet
Reproduced from Gordon Reid’s From Dusk to Dawn: A History of Australian Lighthouses (South Melbourne: Macmillan, in association with the Dept of Transport and Communications, 1988)
© Commonwealth of Australia. Reproduced with permission

Australia’s first lighthouse keeper had been Robert Watson, of the Macquarie Lighthouse in Sydney, appointed in 1818. Many followed across Australia. Among these were the 10 men who built the light on Gabo Island (off southern Victoria) in 1853, and whose rations ran out: ‘Many a day we had nothing to eat but shark, which we caught in the Bay and in many cases nothing but a little rice.’ Even so, three of them stayed on as keepers. There were also the Baudinets, on Tasmania’s Deal Island, who raised 12 children. Long service was commonplace: William John Hawkins was superintendent of Bruny Island Lighthouse (Tasmania) for 37 years; no-one in Australia served longer. John and Lyn Cook lived on isolated Maatsuyker Island in 1977. Lyn is quoted in Gordon Reid’s From Dusk to Dawn as saying:

It’s not the same at being as being in town, of course. You can't go shopping when you feel like it, but I like it here, I like the life. I make my own fun—I spin and knit and read quite a lot, so I don't really miss out on anything I'd be getting if I lived in town.

By this time my curiosity had been assuaged, my knowledge had been increased, and my fascination had been aroused by the progress which had been made since my first encounter with lighthouses in the official records of the colonial period—and all of this without leaving the National Library reading rooms.

RUSSELL DOUST is a former State Librarian of New South Wales, and a historian of the nineteenth century in New South Wales

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