Point Danger Lighthouse
- ️Tue Jul 04 2023
Point Danger is home to the Captain Cook Memorial Lighthouse. Opened on 16 April 1971, it is one of seven concrete towers built for the bicentenary of James Cook’s first voyage. Built as a joint venture between Gold Coast City Council and Tweed Shire Council, it marks the border between Queensland and New South Wales. Each of the four columns are aligned to the cardinal points of the compass.
The Commonwealth Department of Shipping and Transport joined in to make the tower a navigational aid also. It lays claim to being the first in the world to experiment with laser technology which was first developed just 11 years earlier. The benefit over a conventional light was the ability to penetrate fog, something that is not common in the Sunshine State.
The experiment was unsuccessful in that it was unsatisfactory for shipping. The beam emitted was quite powerful but was too narrow to be easily seen by ships. It was replaced by a conventional light, an AGA PRB12 in mid 1972. The Laser apparatus can be viewed at the Queensland Maritime Museum.
91.7 Gold Coast ABC has a podcast talk about the lighthouse