When I read the history of this island, it's quite amazing. Ships and sailors as early
as the 1600s all passed this way and all sighted this island, and many of them stopped here.
Now Booby Island, is one of Australia’s remotest lighthouses, but its unmanned now.
It was built 1890 and started operation on the 24th of June that same year.
But seafarers were coming here a long time before that.
The Booby Island light marks the entrance to the Endeavour Strait entrance from the west.
It's a hard place to make landfall with the tide dropping, the fringing reef will trap
us here for 12 hours, and we don’t want that. We need to anchor off and keep a careful
eye on the boat.
Here she is, mate.
There it is. Now that thing was manned for over 100 years to protect that shipping channel
out there and stop people from running smack-bang into this big island.
Their families got dragged out here.
Oh yeah. You weren't out here by yourself. Is that why you thought you'd be lonely.
Is that what you were thinking?
Can you imagine being a kid? What are you doing today, dad? I'm gonna go fishing. What
are you doing tomorrow, dad? You'd get sick of fishing.
Going fishing. Well, let's go diving today. You reckon? There's chores to do, mate. You
gotta mow the lawn. You gotta keep the gardens all tidy. You can just let the place run to ruin.
Like it is now?
Paint. You gotta paint the lighthouse, mate. You'd be a bloody good painter by the time
you'd finish, wouldn't you? I reckon you'd be an awesome painter. Especially with white.
We need to go back and check the boat and then we can start looking for this post office.
Tides are unreliable around here, and the lighthouse keeper's second job was radioing
out the tide height. Due to wind, the tide here can be plus or minus 70cms. So the tidal
gauge here now transmits up-to-the-minute information, which is important for the reef
pilots, allowing the largest ships to safely navigate the straits.
This is definitely it.
Yeah, definitely. There look. H.M.S.S. Claim, is it?
So the thing about this cave is the history. Now the lighthouse has been here for 100 years,
but before that, people like the ship the Endeavor, Captain Cook, Fletcher Christian,
Captain Bligh, all those people have been to this point. So we're standing where the
early explorers used to come though. And the reason why this was so significant is because
it became a mail station. Or a post office, so to speak. So ships passing in that direction
would pick up mail, and ships passing in this direction would deliver mail or drop off mail.
So at any stage, ships coming through here would generally come in here, see what's on,
pick it up, oh yeah that's gotta go back to England or somewhere like that. And they'd
pick her up and take it back. And that was the significance of the place.