South Head – The Macquarie Lighthouse

South Head And The Macquarie Lighthouse 

Stand on Old South Head Road at Vaucluse and you are on Australia’s longest continuously used navigational-beacon site. A flagstaff and fire/beacon signalled shipping from the early 1790s; Australia’s first purpose-built lighthouse followed when Governor Lachlan Macquarie laid the foundation stone in 1816. Convict architect Francis Greenway designed the Palladian-inspired tower, lit in 1818. Macquarie famously rewarded Greenway with a conditional pardon after calling the work “noble and magnificent.”

Local sandstone proved soft; within decades the tower needed iron banding, and by the 1870s the lantern room could not take modern optics. Colonial Architect James Barnet designed a replacement that deliberately echoed Greenway’s form. The new electric light (among the earliest electrically powered lighthouses) commenced in 1883 a few metres from the old tower; the Greenway lighthouse was demolished in 1887. Hornby Light, the separate Lower Light at the tip of South Head (1858), had already been added after wrecks including the Dunbar (1857) showed the need for a clearer harbour-entrance mark.

The present Barnet tower, keepers’ quarters and archaeological remains of the Greenway lightstation are managed by the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust, with the working light under AMSA arrangements. Photographs here show the Macquarie Lighthouse and South Head setting.

Governor Macquarie Laid The Foundation Stone Of The Tower In July 1816, & Had Expected The Job To Be Finished  In Nine Months. 

Francis Greenway Didn’t Like Using The Samdstonw Quarried On Site As It Was Too Soft, And He Knew It Wouldn’t Last. 

Within 50 Years The Tower Had To Be Reinforced With Iron. By 1883 The Whole Elegant Structure Had Been Condemned. 

I. December 1817 Governor Macquarie Made Up A Breakfast Party To Drive Out And Inspect The Work. He was So Delighted With The “Noble & Magnificent Ediface” - That He Gave Francis Greenway His Conditional Pardon. 

When The Lamps In The Original Lighthouse Were First Lit They “Astonished A Mariner When He Beheld Them From 38 Miles Out At Sea. 

The Second Light, Can, Officially Be Seen 25 Miles Off shore. 

MY COUNTRY - Dorathea McKeller - Poem

The Love Of Field & Coppice, 

Of Green Shaded Lanes 

Of Ordered Woods And Gardens

Is Running Through Your Veins 

Strong Love Of Blue Grey Distance

Brown Streams & Soft Dim Skies

I Know But Cannot Share It

My Love's Otherwise 

I Love A Sunburnt Country

A Land Of Sweeping Plains

Of Ragged Mountain Ranges 

Of Droughts And Flooding Rains

I Love Her Far Horizons

I Love The Jewel Sea

Her Beauty And Her Terror

St Jude’s Cemetery – Avoca Street – Randwick

Tucked behind St Jude’s Anglican Church on Avoca Street, Randwick, the churchyard is one of those rare Sydney cemeteries that still feels like an English parish close — figs, freesias gone wild from old grave plantings, iron surrounds, and a quiet that the traffic on Avoca never quite ruins. Burials here run from 1858 (the first recorded is infant Edwin David Daintrey, September 1858) — before the present sandstone church was finished — through the late Victorian boom years when Randwicks well-heeled preferred to be buried next to their own church rather than shipped out to the general necropolis.

The roll-call is a who’s who of colonial Sydney if you walk it with a list in hand. Simeon Pearce, “father of Randwick” and first mayor; Archibald Mosman, who gave his name to the north-shore suburb; Sir Alfred Stephen, chief justice and lieutenant-governor; colonial secretary Sir Edward Deas Thomson; retail matriarch Ann Hordern; William Busby of Busbys Bore; Henry Mort and kin; Obed West, the old Sydney chronicler — the church’s own cemetery notes name them, and Randwick Council’s local-history pages agree on the big markers. The precinct (church, cemetery, rectory, verger’s residence) is on the State Heritage Register; the ground is small, about a hectare, and still readable as a Victorian Anglican burial ground rather than a lawn cemetery.

Spell it cemetery in the prose. The URL’s “cemetary” is a live typo we leave in the slug.