‘ONCE A DANGER, NOW SAFE’
Russell Doust goes on a voyage of discovery in the National Library, investigating ‘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.
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.
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 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
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 Father’s in the lighthouse,
When we’re in our bedroom On our lonely island 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.
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
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
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 |
| Back to NLA News Index | Back to September Issue | Back to NLA Home Page |
To order a particular issue of
the NLA News e-mail nlasales@nla.gov.au
or join the Friends of the National
Library of Australia and receive a copy each month by mail.