At night their beams would sweep over the boat like a searchlight, austere and unforgiving. They were the transition points between my life at sea and the land. In 1935, Pencarrow was decommissioned and Baring Head lighthouse, further along the coast, took over as the guiding light for Wellington Harbour and Cook Strait.Īs a child who grew up up on a boat, I loved lighthouses. She held the role for another five years, the first and last woman lighthouse keeper in New Zealand.
In 1859 the first permanent lighthouse was built on the same location, and Mary became the country’s first official “Keeper of the Light”. When he drowned in 1855, his widow Mary took over the role, while looking after their five children. In 1852, New Zealand’s first “lighthouse” was a lamp in the seaside window of a cottage at Pencarrow Head, maintained by George Bennett. Wellington’s South Coast is littered with shipwrecks, as navigators mistook Owhiro Bay and Lyall Bay for the Wellington Harbour entrance at night. To live in isolation on desolate, windswept shores, you had to be stoical, handy, and dedicated to keeping the light on – sailors lives depended on it.īefore lighthouses, our dark coast was treacherous. Lighthouses are an interesting part of New Zealand’s colonial history. So fires, and later lamps, were lit along the coast to guide sailors safely by. Lighthouses come from a time when the world was darker, when sailors had to navigate at night by the stars and the shadowy shapes of hills in moonlight. Our region’s lighthouses at Pencarrow, Cape Palliser, Somes Island, Castlepoint, and Baring Head are situated at exposed and remote points of our coastline.
A guiding light, a beacon of hope, or a weather-beaten warning sign? Whatever a lighthouse represents to you, there’s something intriguing about them.