Robe Lighthouse

For decades, retired mariner Andrew Munro walked to Robe’s original lighthouse each evening to light a kerosene lamp, returning at dawn to extinguish it. By 1972, that ritual ended with this gravity-defying concrete star, narrower at the bottom than the top, fitted with a fourth-order Chance Brothers lens that had already served decades at Gabo Island. The optic outlasted its first lighthouse, got a second life, and now flashes three times every ten seconds from its inverted tower.

The lens had already lived a full career by the time it got to Robe. It had spent decades on Gabo Island’s granite tower, one of the tallest lighthouses in Australia, doing the unglamorous work of warning ships off a genuinely dangerous stretch of Victorian coast, before someone decided a fourth-order lens with that much service left in it was too good to retire. So it made the journey west and took up residence in a concrete star shape that looks like it shouldn’t be able to stand up, let alone hold a light steady. Munro, who spent his own years walking out to a much humbler wooden shed to light a wick by hand, would probably have found the whole arrangement a little absurd: his job replaced by a machine wearing a secondhand eye.