Hornby Lighthouse
Red-and-white striped sandstone tower built after a catastrophic wreck, on a windswept harbour headland.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Hornby Lighthouse in Sydney returns to a wild August night in 1857, when the ship Dunbar, eighty-one days out from England, closed in on what should have been the harbour entrance in a howling gale. It follows the public outcry that followed, and the colonial architect commissioned to build a light on this headland the next year. Listen for how the tower got its stripes, and its name, from a family with no connection to the sea at all.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Palm Beach
Sandy beach beneath a sandstone headland lighthouse, flanked by ocean surf and calm estuary waters.
Watsons Bay
Harbourside village and cliff lookout marking the site of a nineteenth-century clipper shipwreck.
Gap Park
Clifftop park on wind-swept sandstone sea cliffs with sweeping ocean views and a somber shipwreck memorial.
Fort Denison
Sandstone Martello tower on a tiny harbour island, once a gibbet site for a hanged convict.
North Head Quarantine Station
Former isolation hospital on a harbour headland, its sandstone cliffs carved with over a thousand six hundred passenger inscriptions.
Georges Head Lookout
Convict-carved coastal gun battery on a sandstone headland, its tunnels and casemates built twice over for invasions that never came.