The Cape Leeuwin Lighthouse is a lighthouse located on the headland of Cape Leeuwin, i/ˈluːwɪn/ the most south-westerly point on the mainland of the Australian Continent, in the state of Western Australia.
Opened with great ceremony by John Forrest in 1895, the lighthouse has since been automated. The lighthouse, besides being a navigational aid, serves as an important automatic weather station. The lighthouse's buildings and grounds are now vested in the local tourism body and the single (1960s) and double (1980s) communications towers that were north-west of the lighthouse, seen in older photographs of Cape Leeuwin, have been removed.
The nearest functioning lighthouse north of Cape Leeuwin is the much smaller Cape Hamelin lighthouse, just south of the Hamelin Bay camping area.
The young Felix von Luckner, later a German WWI war hero noted for his long voyage on the Seeadler during which he captured 14 enemy ships, was briefly assistant lighthouse keeper, a job he abandoned when discovered with his hotel keeper's daughter by her father.
The International Lighthouse Day was celebrated at Cape Leeuwin lighthouse for the first time in 2004.
Read more about Cape Leeuwin Lighthouse: Picture Gallery
Famous quotes containing the words cape and/or lighthouse:
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths; it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)