We keep the 1877 lighthouse at Cape Solander standing, and count every whale that swims past it.
The tower went dark in 1950, when the light was moved four kilometres south to Cape Baily. Sixty-three volunteers have held it since: patching the stone, keeping the lantern room dry, running tours to the top, and logging humpbacks from the platform below.
Tours Wed, Sat and Sun at 10am and 2pm. The museum is free. The platform is free, and always the best place to be in August.
- Position
- 34°01′S 151°14′E
- First lit
- 1 March 1877
- Dark since
- 1950, when the light moved to Cape Baily
- Tower
- 14.6 m of stone, 34 steps to the lantern floor
- Last survey
- 6 September 2026 — standing, dry, open
The tower, and what is holding it up
Three things tell you what happened here: the service records in Sydney, the log we keep in the tower, and the building itself. Everything below comes out of one of those.
- 1876 — the lens
- Chance Brothers of Birmingham shipped a second-order dioptric lens out in crates. It arrived with one prism cracked, and it stayed cracked for seventy-three years.
- 1 March 1877 — first lit
- Local stone with a rendered brick lining, 14.6 m to the lantern floor, and a keeper's cottage that the Department took away in 1911 and nobody has found since.
- 1950 — the light leaves
- Cape Baily's concrete tower went up four kilometres south, and our lantern was dismantled, crated and re-hung on it. It still flashes down there today, off solar panels, which we have decided not to be sore about.
- 1961 — the society forms
- Nine residents, after the Department of Shipping called the tower a demolition liability. We have held the maintenance licence for the tower, the store and the platform ever since.
- 2019–2023 — the lantern room
- Restored: 340 kg of rusted ironwork taken out and replaced by hand, 46 panes re-puttied, the dome and vent stripped and painted. Getting the scaffold up the track took a fortnight on its own.
- Today
- Standing and dry. Open to the public three days a week, and open to the weather the other four.
Four standing duties, and who has them
There is no paid staff here. Everything in this table is done by members, in pairs, on a roster that gets rewritten every February.
| Duty | Standing since | On the roster | What it involves |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stone watch | 1961 | 14 people, first Saturday from 8am | Repointing, salt scrubbing, clearing the gutters and downpipes, testing the gallery railing for rust. Gloves, scrapers and lime mortar live in the store. |
| Gate and guides | 1974 | 18 trained guides, Wednesday to Sunday | 45-minute tours up 34 steps to the lantern floor, the story of the light's seventy-three years of service, and unlocking the store for anyone who asks. |
| The whale count | 1998 | 9 counters, through both runs | Two-hour watches from the platform, every whale logged to the minute against sea state and swell. Binoculars and a tide table provided. |
| Store and records | 1989 | 7 people, Tuesdays | Accessioning, conservation, answering research enquiries, and keeping the 1876–1950 service file legible for the next hundred years. |
We are not the park. Kamay Botany Bay National Park manages the headland and the walking track; we hold a licence for the tower, the keeper's store and the whale-watching platform, and we report to the park's area manager each quarter.
Season 2026 · southbound run · 10 August to 4 October
The count, in fives, as we tallied it
Humpbacks run north past the cape from June, and south again from August, close in. That is why this headland is one of the few places in Sydney where you can count them from a railing. Somebody is on the platform for most of both runs.
The tally is a ledger, not a chart — on a narrow screen it runs off the edge, so scroll it sideways.
Counters work in two-hour watches, scan from the platform railing with 10× binoculars, and add a stroke for every whale they can hold. Sea state, swell and visibility go in the margin, because a flat calm morning and a two-metre swell are not the same count, and whoever reads the series in ten years deserves to know the difference.
The daily figures go to the park and to ORRCA, the whale rescue people, who have used them to time their patrols along this stretch of coast.
This season: 397 southbound whales across 56 watches. The northbound run came to 612. Best morning we have recorded: 9 September 2023, when one counter logged 74 between 6.40am and 10am, then went home and slept for a very long time.
The week-by-week figures, if you would rather read numbers than strokes
| Week beginning | Watches | Whales |
|---|---|---|
| 10 August 2026 | 4 | 6 |
| 17 August 2026 | 7 | 24 |
| 24 August 2026 | 9 | 58 |
| 31 August 2026 | 8 | 91 |
| 7 September 2026 | 8 | 87 |
| 14 September 2026 | 7 | 74 |
| 21 September 2026 | 7 | 39 |
| 28 September 2026 | 6 | 18 |
| Season total | 56 | 397 |
In the keeper's store
The 1898 store stands about forty metres west of the tower and holds what survived the Department's clear-outs: the spare lamp barrel, the logbooks, the charts, and the tools we still use on the stone. Entry is free, and the door is unlocked whenever a guide is on site.
- Lamp barrel, Chance Brothers, 1876 The spare, never fitted. Seized solid by 1954 and written off. Two members freed it over nine weekends in 2021 with kerosene, patience and one broken screwdriver. Accessioned 1963 · conserved 2021
- Keeper's logbook, 1894–1903 Kept by Edmund Tarrant, who wrote up the weather every morning in a small, furious hand. The 1898 entries are the ones with the ink running. Donated by his granddaughter, 1987
- Chart of Botany Bay, 1931, annotated in pencil Someone has drawn the shipping lane the light was meant to hold open, and then, in a different pencil, drawn it eight degrees further east. There is no note explaining why. Found in the store ceiling, 1989
- 23 glass plate negatives, 1876 The tower going up: scaffolding, a bullock dray, eleven men standing in a row, none of them named on the plates. We would very much like to know who they were. Re-housed and digitised, 2016
- The tally slate, 2004–2011 Notched in fives with a sailmaker's needle. Retired the winter a counter spent four hours on the platform in driving rain and watched a whole morning's work wash off. Retired 2011 · on the wall of the store
Research enquiries are welcome and we do answer them: keepers 1877–1950, the tower's construction, the Department's files, or what your great-grandfather was doing on this headland. Write to records@capesolanderlighthouse.org.au with the question in the subject line and allow us a fortnight — Tuesdays are when the records volunteers are in.
Open Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday, 10am–4pm
Getting up the tower
Tours run at 10am and 2pm on open days and take about 45 minutes. Tickets are $12 for adults, $6 for under-16s and $28 for a family, and members go up free. Pay at the store — cash or card. The museum and the whale-watching platform are free, and neither needs a booking.
Groups of ten or more, and school groups: write to tours@capesolanderlighthouse.org.au and we will put two guides on the stairs for you.
- Steps
- 34, with a narrow turn at the top and no lift. Sturdy shoes; we do not send bags up.
- Step-free
- The store, the museum and the platform are all reachable on a sealed, step-free path from the car park, 60 m from the tower gate.
- Getting here
- Cape Solander Drive, Kurnell — about 10 minutes from Kurnell village and 35 from central Sydney. The car park is at the end of the road.
- Without a car
- Buses from Cronulla stop at Kurnell village. From there it is 5.5 km out along Cape Solander Drive, and the last kilometre has no footpath.
- Before you drive
- The park closes the track and the lookout at short notice for weather and for maintenance work. Check the park's alerts page first.
Standing on the roster
We are sixty-three members, and the work in that table is what holds the place together. Nobody here needs a trade or a boat: the stone watch will teach you to repoint a wall, and the count will teach you to hold binoculars steady for two hours.
Open days are the second Saturday of the month, from 8am. Come in boots; we hand out gloves, a scraper and a job, and we stop for tea at ten. Nobody goes up the tower as a guide until they have shadowed three tours and read the maintenance file, which is short and worth reading.
What we need most, in order: guides for Wednesday mornings, counters who can stand still in a southerly, and one more person who is good with a spreadsheet and does not hate it.
Join, or just come out
Membership is $30 a year, $45 for a household. It includes the newsletter, a vote at the annual general meeting, free tower tours, and a standing invitation to the working bees.
Write to volunteers@capesolanderlighthouse.org.au, or turn up on the second Saturday with a hat on. Both work.
General enquiries: hello@capesolanderlighthouse.org.au