The lighthouse first threw its beam out to sea on 15 April 1891. What makes it remarkable is not the tower itself, a modest 17.4 metres, but the ground it stands on: a granite bluff 111 metres above the waves, lifting the light higher than any other in the state. From here the beam reaches far out over the shipping lanes, guiding vessels toward the entrance of the Macleay River just to the north. The tower's shape is unusual too, octagonal rather than round, an eight-sided column of mass concrete. The choice was pure pragmatism. It was simply easier to build the angular formwork than to bend timber around a circle.

Smoky Cape was among the final great lighthouse complexes designed by James Barnet, the colonial architect whose towers are reckoned the most architecturally refined in Australia. He brought to this remote outpost the same care he lavished on grand public buildings: a bracketed granite gallery, a gunmetal balustrade stamped with Queen Victoria's mark, an ornamental cast-iron stair winding up inside the walls. Barnet selected the site himself and prepared the plans. The contractor, a man named Oakes, died during construction, and the work was finished by his heirs, within budget, on the windswept headland he never saw completed.

The tower is a study in early engineering experiment. Its walls, 920 millimetres thick at the base and tapering to 620 at the top, were poured as mass concrete using granite quarried on the spot as aggregate. Only three nineteenth-century concrete lighthouses were ever built in New South Wales, and Smoky Cape is the finest. At its summit sits a treasure: the original revolving optic from Chance Brothers of England, its triple-panel array throwing a distinctive triple-flash signal. It is one of only four such lanterns known to combine a trapezoidal glazing pattern with a Trinity-type vent, a genuine relic of Victorian industrial craft, still turning after more than a century.

A lightstation was a small isolated village. Below and behind the tower, sheltered from the worst weather, sit the head keeper's cottage and two semi-detached assistant keepers' quarters, all of the same rendered concrete, arranged on terraces cut into the steep slope and held by high retaining walls. The path up from the car park is so punishing that locals call it Heart Attack Hill. In the Second World War the precinct took on a harder purpose, with a searchlight battery and gun emplacement watching the coast; their concrete stumps still sit among the grass. Today the keepers are gone, the light is automated, and the cottages welcome holidaymakers, while the headland draws watchers of a different kind, scanning the swell for the spouts of passing whales.