Wednesday10:00
Tower and lantern room
Straight up the stair to the optic’s pedestal, out onto the gallery, and back down through the store. 45 minutes.
$12 adult
$8 concession
The Cape Solander light was switched off in 1973. Thirty-eight volunteers keep the tower, the lens and the logbooks.
We are a volunteer society on the sandstone headland at Kurnell, on the southern side of the entrance to Botany Bay. Our lighthouse was first exhibited in 1873 and switched off a century later. We run tours up the stair, keep a museum in the old store, and log the weather twice a day.
Book a tower tour Read the tower’s record
Tours run Wednesdays and Sundays. Bookings close 4 pm the day before.
The tower’s record
Compiled from the keeper’s logbooks, the 1973 decommissioning survey and our own 2024 condition report. Where the record is thin, we say so rather than guess.
- Station
- Cape Solander, Kurnell, New South Wales
- Position
- 34°00′59″ S 151°13′54″ E
- First exhibited
- 4 March 1873
- Discontinued
- 30 June 1973
- Tower
- Tapered Hawkesbury sandstone, 11.4 m from the ground to the gallery rail
- Focal height
- 41 m above high water
- Light character
- OC WR 10s — occulting, white and red, in a ten-second period
- Range
- 14 nautical miles in white, 9 in red. The red was shown over the shoal water south of the tower.
- Optic
- Fourth-order fixed lens, eclipsed by a clockwork screen that passed between the lamp and the glass twice every ten seconds. The screen is in the museum; the lens is on its original pedestal.
- Condition
- Sound. One cracked balustrade casting is booked for recasting in 2026.
What we cannot prove
The optic’s maker’s plate is missing. The attribution to Chance Brothers rests on the pattern of the glazing bars and on a store invoice dated 1872, not on anything fixed to the lens itself. The museum label says “probably Chance Brothers, Smethwick”, and we would rather you knew why than read a confident sentence here.
0 s2.55 s7.510 s
The light that is still on
People ask whether we are the light they can see working at the entrance to Botany Bay. We are not. That is Cape Baily Light, built in 1950 with a lantern enclosure salvaged from a late-nineteenth-century lighthouse, now solar-powered and unmanned, and operated by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority. It stands at the end of the Cape Baily walking track, about two and a half hours on foot from where Solander Road stops, and its tower is closed. We are a different building on a different headland, and ours is off.
What the society does
- Restoration
- Re-pointing, stone replacement and rust treatment on the iron stair, done by volunteers under a conservation architect’s schedule. First Sunday of the month, 8 am to noon, and we stop for smoko whether or not the job is finished.
- Tours
- Up the tower twice on Wednesdays and twice on Sundays, capped at twelve because that is how many the stair takes at once. Guides are members who have shadowed three tours and walked the route through with the head guide.
- The museum
- One room in the former store: the optic, the occulting screen, the logbooks, the fog-signal timer and the painted notice board from the keep. Open whenever a tour is running, and on Saturday mornings from 9 until noon.
- Watching the water
- Weather logged on site at 9 am and 3 pm, the same hours the keepers logged them, and the cliff edge walked after every southerly gale. In whale season we count from the headland and send the tally to the park.
Tours
Four a week, twelve people each. The stair to the lantern room is 38 open-tread cast-iron steps in three flights, steep and not for everyone; the museum and the store are on the level and step-free.
Wednesday14:00
Museum and headland walk
The museum first, then north along the cliff line to the whale platform and back, reading the geology on the way. 90 minutes, mostly gravel and boardwalk.
$18 adult
$12 concession
Sunday10:00
Slow tower
The same climb with a seated stop on each landing and no rush at the top. 60 minutes. For anyone who wants the view without the pace.
$15 adult
$10 concession
Sunday14:00
Family tour
Shorter climb, louder questions. Under-twelves free, and within arm’s reach of an adult on the stair. 60 minutes.
$30 family
2 adults, 3 children
Booking. Email the bookings officer at bookings@capesolanderlighthouse.org.au. Bookings close 4 pm the day before. We take cash and card at the door, but booked places come first, and Sunday afternoons in whale season do fill.
Cancellations. We do not run on a day of total fire ban, or when wind is forecast above 40 km/h on the headland. If we cancel you get an email and either your money back or a place on the next tour, whichever you would rather have.
Weather. The forecast we use ourselves is the Bureau of Meteorology forecast for Sydney, and for swell the marine forecast. Check it before you drive out. The headland has its own weather and it is usually worse than Cronulla’s.
The museum
One room in the 1873 store, entered through the same door the keepers carried the oil through. Nothing in it is a re-creation.
- The fourth-order fixed lens, lifted out of the lantern room on 4 July 1973 and kept in a Kurnell garage until the society collected it in 1998.
- The clockwork occulting screen, in its frame, with the maker’s stamp but no date, and two spare brass pins in a tobacco tin.
- The keep’s logbooks, 1911–1934 and 1948–1973. The 1935–1947 volumes are missing, and the accession register says only that they were “not returned.”
- A brass fog-signal timer, wound and run on the first Sunday of the month at 11 am, when it makes a noise that startles everyone including us.
- The original painted notice board, giving the tower’s position, character and range in white on timber. Repainted once, in 1954, by someone who was not a signwriter.
- Forty-one photographs, mostly of keepers and their families between 1900 and 1960. None of them posed. The catalogue is a shoebox, and indexing it is the longest-running open job we have.
We hold no Aboriginal cultural material and never will. Anything found on the headland is recorded where it lies, photographed, and reported to the Traditional Owners and to Heritage NSW. Nothing leaves the site.
Getting here, and staying off the edge
Finding us
The headland is in Kamay Botany Bay National Park at Kurnell, about 50 minutes’ drive from the Sydney CBD and 20 minutes from Cronulla. Follow Captain Cook Drive to Kurnell, turn left at the T-intersection, then take the next right into Cape Solander Drive. The car park is at 21 Cape Solander Drive, Kurnell NSW 2231.
From there the tower is 180 m south along compacted gravel, firm and free of steps. Parking is free and there are accessible spaces. On weekends in whale season the car park is full and turning cars away by 9 am.
There are no toilets at the headland; the nearest are 2 km back at the Commemoration Flat car park. There is no drinking water and no shop, and mobile reception is patchy.
Access, honestly
The path and the museum are step-free and the museum doorway is 900 mm wide. The lantern room is not accessible. The only way up is 38 open-tread cast-iron steps with a handrail on one side and a shaft below you. If that is not for you, ask the guide to bring the lantern room down to the museum instead — they will, and they do it often.
Cliffs
The sandstone south of the tower drops about 60 m to the water. The rocks overhang and are thinner than they look, and people have died here: falling from the top, and being swept off the rocks below by waves that arrive without warning. Stay behind the fence. Do not step past it for a photograph and do not walk out onto the shelf below.
Offshore, and what you will see
Humpbacks move north past this headland in June and July and come back south with calves from September to November, and the park records them between May and October, sometimes within 200 m of the cliff. Southern right whales are seen most years and a grey whale turns up every so often. The whale-watching platform at the top of the car park, built by the NSW Government in 2022, has the interpretive signage and the best sightline. Bring binoculars and a jacket. The headland is windier and colder than anywhere you drove through to get here.
Cape Solander lookout — NSW National Parks Kamay Botany Bay National Park Coming by public transport — Transport for NSW Report a distressed whale or seal — ORRCA
Parts of the Kurnell area close from time to time for building and road works, and the visitor centre has been shut during the current round. Check the park’s alerts before a long drive.
The country this tower stands on
Kamay, and the headland at Cape Solander, is the traditional land of the Gweagal and Goorawal people, the clans Captain Cook met at Kurnell in 1770. The tower was built on their country without their consent, one hundred and three years later, and we are not going to dress that up.
We seek the guidance of the Traditional Owners before any digging, planting or signage on the headland, and we defer to them on what should be told about this place and by whom. Whales carry a significance here that is older than the light and will outlast it.
Volunteering and money
We have thirty-eight members, no paid staff and no endowment. Membership is $30 a year, which covers public liability insurance and the tea.
What a donation actually buys
- $25 one square metre of sandstone re-pointed
- $140 one pane of lantern-room glazing, cut and fitted
- $900 the annual condition survey by the conservation architect
- $6,000 the cracked balustrade casting, recast and refitted. We are $2,300 short of it.
To give, email the treasurer at treasurer@capesolanderlighthouse.org.au and we will send bank details. We can give you a receipt, but we are not a registered charity, so a donation is not tax-deductible. We would rather tell you that than let you assume otherwise.
What a day buys
- Tour guide — two Sundays of training, then shadow three tours before you take your own group.
- Museum cataloguer — forty-one photographs and about 360 other items, and no index. Work from home if you like.
- Working-bee crew — first Sunday of the month, 8 am to noon. Tools, gloves and a briefing provided. No experience needed.
- Weather logger — ten minutes on site at 9 am or 3 pm, on a roster that asks for two mornings a month.
Nobody here is a professional. Half the crew had never re-pointed a wall before 2019, and the tower is still up.