The Lure of the Lighthouse

In our travels around the Sapphire Coast yesterday, Nicole and I skimmed past a turn off to 'Green Cape'. This point is situated several kilometres south of Eden at the tip of the next bay and, as it's been the site of several shipwrecks over the past 150 years (leading to the aptly-named 'Disaster Bay' to the south), it bears some significant connection to the local history we had already explored. Amongst theses wrecks was the tragic destruction of the Ly-ee-moon, the second worst maritime disaster known to Australia.

The view from Disaster Bay Lookout is deceptively picturesque but these inky blue waters hold the wrecks of at least 9 ships from the mid-to-late 19th and early 20th centuries. At least one of these wrecks is of an unidentified vessel from the 1850s, the remains of which may be attributed to either of two ships lost at sea in this area around this time.

Getting to Green Cape lighthouse was a mission and a half. The road was unsealed and so it took nearly an hour for Nicole and I to drive across just 20 kilometres. The journey was definitely worth it though as I have long held a deep and unexplained fascination with lighthouses. Maybe it's attached to my fear of heights, or maybe it's attached to a beloved Doctor Who serial from the 1970s in which the Doctor travels to a 1900s lighthouse and faces off against an alien jellyfish (pictured below):

You should check it out. It's great.

The Green Cape lighthouse was built in the late 19th century and is supported by several Victorian-era houses. Despite the isolation of the lighthouse keeper and his two assistants, the houses were kept separated by fences so that a class system of sorts could be kept intact. You can now stay in these houses as they have been kept on as accommodation. Note the huge solar panel at the end of the path in the picture above, which demonstrates the changing face of lighthouse-technology.

It's quite easy to imagine the damage that these rocks could do to a ship if it ran aground near here. The Ly-ee-moon was found smashed to pieces in 1886, and 71 bodies were recovered from the water nearby. The second photograph above is taken by Nicole.

While walking back inland along the headland I stopped to take a photograph of something random. Nicole quickly grabbed me and whispered urgently, "Stop! Don't move. You scare everything off". I slowly turned around to see that she had spotted an echidna snuffling around in the dirt just a few metres from us. Its only defense its spines, the echidna tucked its little legs in and wedged itself up against some nearby sticks so that all we could see was a black ball of fur and yellow spikes. Once it thought we had gone it started moving again.

As you can see from Nicole's photograph above, the echidna lifted itself up out of its little hollow once we stopped moving. Random echidna fact: the Short-Beaked Echidna (the Australian species of echidna pictured here) has one of the shortest spinal chords of any mammal, and its entire body is covered by a large muscle just beneath the skin known as the 'panniculus carnosus'. This muscle allows the echidna to change the shape of its body to minimise vulnerability when it perceives danger to be nearby.

Our travel inland on the cape was to find the Ly-ee-moon Cemetery, which is only about half a kilometre or more from the lighthouse. The bodies that were pulled from the wreck were all buried on the cape as it wasn't possible in the late 19th century to transport them back to their families from such a remote location.

The graves of the 71 recovered travellers are unmarked but a plaque of their names was erected about 30 years ago by local historians who had pulled together available records. Sadly, some names have been lost in time, with at least three of the bodies listed as being of unknown identity (one is just described on the plaque as 'a Greek man, invited onto the ship by the cook'). Equally sad is the sign back at the lighthouse that implores visitors to pay their respects to this cemetery as "the families of the victims of this tragedy would never have been able to come visit their loved ones back in the late 19th century".