When Queensland separated from New South Wales in 1859, the young colony had a single lighthouse to its name and a coastline that demanded many more. Caloundra Head got its light because of a discovery made in 1879, when the colony's portmaster sounded a new deep-water route -- the North West Channel -- running from Caloundra down the eastern shore of Bribie Island into Moreton Bay. It proved the safest, most reliable entrance to the Port of Brisbane, and in 1896 a lighthouse rose on the headland to mark its mouth. The tower was a distinctly Queensland design: a conical hardwood frame sheathed in corrugated iron, cheap to build with local timber, fitted with a fine optical apparatus imported from Chance Brothers near Birmingham. Fewer than a dozen of its kind were ever built.

The first keeper arrived when the light was lit in September 1896, and his cottage quickly became the hub of a settlement. One room served as the local post and telegraph office; the steady traffic of residents collecting their mail wore a track along the ridge that eventually became Canberra Terrace, the town's main road. Because the keeper had a large family, the first Caloundra school was held for a time in his cottage. By 1910 a new incandescent vapour light -- the first of its kind in Queensland -- shone 22 miles out to sea, and many mariners reckoned it the finest on the coast. Lighthouse Hill became the place visitors were taken to admire the view, and the tower's silhouette spread onto postcards, brochures, and the local school crest, whose motto read simply: Giving Light.

By the 1960s, container ships were growing and the old light was ageing. In 1968 a second lighthouse went up beside the first -- a square reinforced-concrete tower carrying a glassed observation room, looking for all the world like an airport control tower. It combined lighthouse, signal station, and radar in one structure, one of only two of its design ever built in Australia and now the only survivor. For a while the two towers stood together, Victorian timber beside Space-Age concrete, a seventy-year leap in engineering compressed into a few metres of grass. It is a rare thing to see a craft and its successor preserved cheek by jowl, and the contrast is the whole point of the place.

Neither light lasted as long as its builders hoped. The 1968 tower had a short working life: high-rise apartments soon rose along the coast and blocked its beam from the sea, and by 1978 a new light at Point Cartwright had taken over the channel. The signal station was de-staffed in 1992, its functions handed to an automatic unit on a nearby rooftop. The 1896 tower, meanwhile, had been hauled away in 1970 and nearly lost to decades of neglect before its dramatic return in 1999. Today both stand together again in a small hilltop park behind Kings Beach, looking out over Caloundra, Moreton Island, and the blue line of the Glass House Mountains. They no longer guide a single ship -- but the town that grew up around the old light has refused, twice over, to let it go.