The headland had been marked for a lighthouse as early as 1864, when committees in the young colony of Queensland first studied where the coast most needed warning. Then nothing happened for twenty years. The recommendation sat unbuilt while ships kept rounding the point unaided. Only in the early 1880s did the portmaster, Commander George Poynter Heath, press Parliament hard enough to move it. The contract went to W. P. Clark, a builder who knew the work; he had already raised Bustard Head, the first lighthouse the colony built after its formation, and others up and down the coast. When Double Island Point finally lit, it was the eighteenth lighthouse the Queensland Government had completed, a small white sentinel finishing a job begun two decades earlier.

The technology inside the tower kept changing as the years passed. The first lamp was an oil wick burner, faint by later standards. In 1923 it became a kerosene gas mantle, and in 1925 the lens was upgraded to an apparatus floating in a bath of mercury, the standard precision bearing of its day. The leap came in 1933, when the light was wired to electricity and its intensity jumped to three-quarters of a million candela. By 1980 it reached a full million candela, visible 26 nautical miles out to sea. Then, in October 1991, came the modern reversal: a compact solar beacon replaced the grand optic, and the light's reach actually shrank, to 17 nautical miles. The trade was reliability for raw power. The following year the keepers left for good, and the station ran itself.

For more than a century, people lived on this remote point. Keepers and their families occupied a cluster of cottages below the tower, and from 1884 a small schoolhouse taught their children until it closed in 1922. The isolation was total; supplies and company arrived by sea. One grave remains to mark what that life cost. South of the cottages, behind a picket fence and beneath a marble headstone, lies Fanny Byrne, wife of head keeper George Byrne, who tended the light from 1886 until 1900. She is a reminder that the romance of a lighthouse was, for the families who kept it, simply home, with all the ordinary grief and endurance that any home contains, set down on a headland at the edge of a continent.

The light still turns, automated now and watched over by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, flashing white every 7.5 seconds. The land around it belongs to the Great Sandy National Park, looked after by Queensland's parks service. There is no public access to the tower itself, but the headland is one of the great drives of the Cooloola coast. Visitors reach it by four-wheel drive along the beach from Rainbow Beach, the town famous for its mineral-stained sand cliffs that glow in bands of ochre and rust. The walk up to the lighthouse opens onto enormous views of the wild surf coast, the same water that, in 1973, drove the cargo ship Cherry Venture aground on the beach below, where its rusting hull became a landmark for the next 34 years.