Light came to Pilot Hill the hard way. The first marker, around 1866, was little more than a wooden hut with a large kerosene lamp set on a bench - a flame tended by hand to warn vessels off the bar at the river mouth. It was enough to matter but far from grand. As traffic on the Clarence grew, so did the need for something permanent, and in 1878 tenders went out for a proper tower. The mast from that first crude light survives today, preserved in the Story House Museum in Yamba - a humble relic of the years when a single lamp and a watchful keeper stood between the ships and the reefs.

The 1880 lighthouse was the work of James Barnet, the prolific Colonial Architect whose buildings still define much of New South Wales. It was one of a matched set of five he designed between 1878 and 1880 - the others marking Fingal Head, Crowdy Head, Tacking Point, and the Richmond River - all variations on the same neat theme: a short tower, barely 7 metres tall, joined by a roofed porch to a small annexe, with a keeper's cottage close by. Built by W. Kinnear for the modest sum of 1,097 pounds, the Clarence light shone for six nautical miles and was automated in 1920. Then progress crowded it out: a hotel rose in 1934 and blocked the beam, a reservoir was planned for the hill, and in 1956 - a year after its replacement was built - the Barnet tower was pulled down.

Some places let their landmarks vanish. Yamba would not. After the reservoir was demolished in 1980, residents pushed to recreate the lost lighthouse on its original ground. When government funding fell through, local volunteers simply funded and built the replica themselves - at first without even a lantern, the building pressed into service as home to the community radio station 2TLC. The dream did not stop there. In 2009 a fresh restoration effort began, backed by local people and businesses, and in November 2011 it was crowned with a lantern and a genuine 19th-century Fresnel lens, donated by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority. Barnet's tower was gone, but its likeness stands again - proof of how fiercely a small town can love a lighthouse.

The lighthouse that actually guides ships is the unassuming one. Built in 1955 from concrete in a stripped-back modern style, it inherited the old light's apparatus and now runs on a compact electric beacon - a 75-watt quartz halogen lamp throwing 22,000 candela, visible 16 nautical miles offshore. It serves as the rear range light for two separate ranges, lining vessels up safely through the shifting channels of the Clarence entrance. The tower itself is closed, but the grounds on Pilot Hill are open to anyone, with sweeping views over the river mouth, the breakwaters, and the Pacific beyond. Together the two towers tell the whole arc of the place: the working beacon that keeps the ships safe, and the cherished replica that keeps the memory alive.