Lighthouses at the end of the world

 

 

After a morning in town, during which Padma visited her GP and I was talked into enduring a bone-cracking Chinese massage, I came home with an armful of books which had been waiting to be rehomed from my favourite op-shop.

I had picked up the usual crop of non-fiction books: "How Australian Democracy Works - And Why We Need It More Than Ever", "The Dog Fence" by James Woodford, "Noise - A Flaw in Human Judgment" (clearly an American book judging by its missing 'e'), and a DVD of a French movie with the title "Indochine", still wrapped and displaying its original price sticker of $12 (was there really a time when we paid $12 for a DVD?), but what really quickened my pulse and made me gladly hand over another two dollars was a handsome hardcover book titled "A Brief Atlas of the Lighthouses at the End of The World".

 

 

After an excerpt from Jules Verne's book "The Lighthouse at the End of the World", which had also been made into a movie with Yul Brynner, neither of which I had ever heard of, and a short prologue by the author, José Luis González Macías, it describes thirty-four lighthouses around the world, from the Adziogol Lighthouse on the Black Sea to the Wenwei Zhou Lighthouse in the South China Sea.

 

Made by the National Film Board 1949. Directed by Lionel Trainor. "The life of the lighthouse keeper is a lonely one, but his work is vital to the safeguard of shipping. His first duty is to care for the light which must be kept working accurately at all times. A six months supply of food must be kept in store. His children are taught by correspondence. The transmission of messages and warnings to ships in storms and back to the authorities on the mainland is a vital part of his work. The arrival of the supply ship brings a welcome break to the loneliness and monotony of his life. This film illustrates the life of the keeper on remote and barren Maatsuyker Island off the coast of Tasmania."

 

I will explore all of them in good time, but I began with the lighthouse on Maatsuyker Island at the most southern point of Tasmania, the only Australian entry in the book. One of its lighthousekeepers, John Cook, who served at Maatsuyker for eight years, also wrote a book about his experience there and on several other lighthouses.

 

 

His book "The Last Lighthouse Keeper" is already on my list of books to read; however, in the meantime, this audiobook preview will do me.

 

 

That is to say, I shall read it after I have read about and researched all the other thirty-three lighthouses mentioned in this beautifully presented "Brief Atlas of the Lighthouses at the End of the World".

 

 

Not that they would ever accept an eighty-year-old lighthousekeeper - although there once was a blind lighthousekeeper at the Svyatonossky Lighthouse in the Barents Sea - so to me my many books will remain my lighthouses erected in the sea of time.

 

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