Cape St. George Lighthouse

The romantic image of a Lighthouse is usually of a magnificent structure built on a remote craggy outcrop, its light and foghorn warning sailors off the rocks, its brave keepers out on rowboats rescuing the unwary and the unlucky.

Cape St. George Lighthouse somewhat bucks that trend - constructed on a spot convenient for the builder but near useless for warning ships off the coast and reefs, the feeble light allowed 23 shipwrecks to occur in less than 30 years whereupon it was destroyed by the Australian Navy as a danger to shipping. The tale of the lighthouse keepers is a similar one of woe: a greater collection of grizzly deaths - all out of the line of duty - I have never heard.

Designed by colonial architect Alexander Dawson, the stone ruins of the Cape St. George Lighthouse are located in the Jervis Bay Territory amongst thick low-lying heathland. You drive down the long gravel Stony Creek Road to a car park seemingly in the middle of nowhere, totally surrounded by car-height scrub that hides you and everyone else along the short pathways to the lighthouse. Once upon a time the three storey tower would have been easily visible, but it's been demolished down to the height of the keepers house and from a distance is almost lost in the surrounding greenery.

As you approach the ruins you'll come across sandstone remnants of other buildings - stables, cottages and other ancillary buildings - but the Lighthouse itself is built of magnificent giant grey stones that look as if they could have lasted forever if not for the deliberate demolition.

Being such a young nation, Australia doesn't have many ruins - no castles, no ancient city walls and archways - most of its older buildings are either still in extremely good condition or were purposefully demolished and built over shortly after, so finding a genuine Australian ruin is a bit of a treat. Despite the many complaints against the Lighthouse in its time there can be no doubt that it was a beautiful piece of engineering, and there is a certain beauty in its wave of tumbled stone cubes pointing out to sea.

Although you can't get into the ruined lighthouse itself (well, unless you jump the short fence) the platform and guide rails allow you to walk almost all the way around, peeking through the attached keepers cottage up through to the blue sky beyond where a large window once sat in the stonework of the tower facing across the sea.

While the lighthouse wasn't built in the perfect spot for shipping, it still affords excellent views across the sea and is easily the best place in the Jervis Bay Territory to watch for migrating whales heading past the Australian coast in June-July and September-November.

The Lighthouse

A location was chosen for the lighthouse in 1856, but the map used was so inaccurate and the builder so keen to quietly relocate the site closer to the quarry he was obtaining the stone from - that the lighthouse ended up being built nearly three miles north of the chosen location. On top of this fiasco the original site was chosen without consulting any experts or maritime authorities, so the final result was a lighthouse whose light was barely visible to ships approaching from the south, and totally invisible to ships approaching from the North.