Wadjemup Lighthouse

Completed in 1849, the original 20m Wadjemup Lighthouse was Western Australia's first stone lighthouse and was built to provide a safer sailing passage for ships to Fremantle Port and the Swan River Colony.A second and larger replacement tower was built on the same site in 1896. It is the fourth oldest extant lighthouse in Western Australia and was Australia's first rotating beam lighthouse. A shipwreck which was partly caused by poor communications and misunderstood signals from the lighthouse prompted the construction of another lighthouse on the island in 1900.Location selection and obeliskRottnest Island is the largest and northernmost of several islands near the Port of Fremantle. It is from the mouth of the Swan River and is generally the first land sighted by ships arriving from the west. The island is long, and at its widest point with a total land area of. The lighthouse site is at the highest point of the island at Wadjemup Hill, with the tower base above sea level. It is west of the Thomson Bay settlement and about south-west of the Geordie Bay settlement.Between 1837 and 1843, Commander John Clements Wickham led an expedition in with Lieutenant John Lort Stokes to chart sections of the Australian coastline. During the voyage Fremantle was visited seven times and in the course of one of these visits on 25 March 1840, Stokes wrote in his journal"We moved the ship to Rottnest Island, to collect a little material for the chart and select a hill for the site of a lighthouse. The one we chose lies towards the South east end of the island bearing N76°W (true) twelve miles and a quarter from the."