Maritime Museum Lighthouse Exhibition - Beacons by the Sea: in the Adelaide Coast region of South Australia
“Beacons by the Sea” sounds like the title of a poem or a song or oil painting, and we certainly romanticise the lighthouses that stand at the edge of our continent. The National Archives travelling exhibition on show at our South Australian Maritime Museum is all about reality, however. It points out, for instance, how it was the Victorian gold rush of the 1850’s that tripled the sea traffic off our coast, and that led to a dramatic rise in the number of shipwrecks and their human toll. In response, up went the lighthouses until, by the turn of the twentieth century, there were more than a hundred around the coast of the new nation. Lighthouse keepers and their families staffed them all, and so the hordes of students visiting the Maritime Museum see plenty of evidence of what it was like to be a lighthouse kid.
How many of us could own our own goat on our own island? Or take our dog to school, as one lad did when he was photographed forty years ago on South Neptune Island off the bottom of Eyre Peninsula? His father was a keeper for the bright red iron lighthouse that now stands on the wharf at Port Adelaide. It is open every day as part of the Maritime Museum, and it is quite a climb - about five storeys - to the light and surrounding deck. (Marvellous views of the tugs heading up the Port River from here, and so it is worth it).
According to the exhibition, the rules of lighting the lamp brought the keeper up a quarter of an hour before sunset to pull back the canvas curtains that shielded the giant lens. Otherwise it could act as a magnificent glass and start a fire. The keeper on duty would check the gas lamp in the night and then, as soon as the sun was “two figures above the horizon”, he would dowse the light and close the drapes again. One of the keepers noted that, with the hissing of the lamp and whirring of the giant clockwork below, he could “feel its very heartbeat”.
The South Neptune Lighthouse was replaced in the 1980’s with a new automatic beacon, but the tall white light station nearby in Investigator Strait still stands on lofty Althorpe Island. It is fondly remembered by a former young resident who then returned as a keeper. Become a friend of Althorpe, and you too can stay in the keeper’s cottage and briefly experience what John Lawley so fondly remembers.
“It changed my life” he told Postcards on a recent visit that saw our “camo”, Jeff Clayfield, collecting some breathtaking images.
“The vastness and open spaces gave me a lifelong feeling for the outdoors and the environment”, John recalled.
The Sturt Lighthouse became the first in South Australia just over 150 years ago. Now known as the Cape Willoughby Light on Kangaroo Island, it was often the first sign of a new home and a new life for immigrants who had spent months at sea in a crowded sailing ship. If they approached the other end of the island, they would have seen the unusual squat and square lighthouse at Cape Border. With cliffs and impenetrable mallee scrub hemming them in, the families posted there knew all about one of the exhibition themes - isolation.
One panel shows how the keepers talked about going “rock happy”, or getting a bit “lighthousey”. There’s a quotation from one who told his head keeper when he departed, “I can’t stand the shape of the back of your head, and I can’t stand the stupid way you hold your knife and fork!” In another much sadder case, in the absence of a straitjacket, they had to take off one poor soul nailed to a door to restrain him.
There were predictably fatal consequences of isolation, too. Near the Cape Borda Light is a bush cemetery full of simple wooden crosses, all poignant reminders of the dangers of distance from help. Keepers’ wives died in childbirth. A seven year old boy succumbed to Scarlet Fever, and as ranger Tim Grieve told us on a Postcards visit, more tragedy was to befall his father, the keeper, who recorded in the log just two years later, that four children went off walking together.
“Only three returned,” he wrote. “Found remains of my youngest, Arthur Main, at the base of the cliffs below the lighthouse.” His original logbook is open at that awful page in the exhibition.
“Beacons by the Sea” also marks the way lighthouses have changed. With the coming of the Fresnel prism lens, for instance, the beam was concentrated and seen much further away. Later technology like the automatic daylight switch sparked the beginnings of automation and the end of the lighthouse keeper era that spanned thousands of years.
The old lighthouses themselves, in all their guises from a magnificent sixty metre slim sentinel on King Island to a stumpy “galvo” model in Queensland, mostly remain to act as tourist magnets on our coast. Our own Troubridge Island Light off Edithburgh on Yorke Peninsula is the first cast iron prefabricated version to be erected in Australia (in the 1850’s). When Postcards took the half hour charter trip with Chris Johnson, he explained why it ended up on a white sand island surrounded by shallows.
“It was much easier to build it here,” he pointed out, “but the reef out there was the reason it was built. It’s covered by the tide for about seven hours every day, and that is where all the shipwrecks are”.
Keepers’ families shared the island with colonies of Caspian and Crested Terns, who still hatch their young in sandy nests each November. One exhibition panel depicts an 1890’s “Lighthouse” brand that was used to sell everything from coffee to curry powder, and next to it is a giant spectacular photograph of tiny Troubridge Island, dominated by the lighthouse. “Beacons by the Sea” tells us that it was a very special calling, but we can now book its cottages, or several on Kangaroo Island, and try it for ourselves. This beautifully mounted and evocative exhibition may well prompt you to become a lighthouse keeper for a weekend.
Beacons by the Sea
Stories of Australian Lighthouses.
National Archives of Australia Touring Exhibition
South Australian Martime Museum
126 Lipson Street,
Port Adelaide, South Australia10:00 am to 5:00pm every day [Exhibition closes 23 November, 2003]
Admission to Museum
$8.50 Adults
$6.50 Concession
$3.50 Children
$22.00 Family TicketPh: 8207 6255
National Archives of Australia
ph : (02) 6212 3600
