Function and purpose
This series contains drawings and plans created by
architects and engineers responsible for the design of lighthouses and for
associated infrastructure including the lights themselves, the residences of
the light keepers, their store rooms and watch houses.
A number of the designs contained within this series never
made it beyond the drawing board.
Related legislation
Section 51 (vii) of the Constitution empowered the
Commonwealth Parliament to legislate in respect to ‘beacons, buoys, and
lighthouses’.
The Lighthouse Act 1911 took effect from 1 July 1915.
The Act provided for the transfer of control of coastal lighthouses from the
various state and territory governments to the Commonwealth.
Harbour and river lights remained under the control of the
states and territories.
Physical characteristics
Some of these plans and drawings are originals while others
are copies of earlier works. In some cases the plans in this series have been
amended. Most amendments have been recorded in red ink on the plan. However, in
some cases only black and white copies of original works are available,
particularly in the case of plans of WA lighthouses. In such cases it is not
always possible to tell if the original plan had been amended before being
copied.
The plans vary in size and have either been drawn, traced,
etched, painted or copied onto paper or canvas. The plans also vary in aspect;
some display a lighthouse and its grounds in coastal profile while others show
parts of the machinery and buildings of a light station at certain elevations
and sections.
System of arrangement and control
The control system imposed upon the records of this series
by the Archives in September 2001, makes use of multiple number. eg 7/14/5.
The first number in each control symbol represents a
particular state except where 8 is the first number. In the few cases where 8
is the first number in an item’s control the National Archives of Australia has
been unable to link the relevant plan to a particular lighthouse or even state.
1 = NSW and ACT (Jervis Bay)
2 = NT
3 = Qld
4 = SA
5 = Tas
6 = Vic
7 = WA
8 = Unknown identity
A combination of the first two numbers in a control symbol
links the item to a particular lightstation. Using the above example, the '7'
and the '14' together link item 7/14/5 to the lighthouse on Rottnest
Island.
Finally, a combination of all three of the numbers that make
up a control symbol identify a particular plan or drawing. No two items within
this series share the same control symbol.
Most of the creating and controlling agencies established
their own system of arrangement and control over the plans and drawings of
lighthouses that they held in their custody. There are at least 14 identifiable
systems of arrangement and control that have been applied to the records that
now make up series A9568 not including the one imposed upon these records by
the Archives. However, none of these systems have ever been applied universally
to all of the records in this series.
The control symbols that were used under these old systems
are variable in format and may consist of a single number, multiple number or
they may be alphanumeric; eg 1179, 78/1044, HS135 and ‘Drawing No 2’. Some of
these old controls tell us something about the records.
For instance:
- A
single number such as 44 and 1125 was applied to many of the records
created by the NSW Colonial Architect’s Office between 1854 and 1878. Such
numbers were not unique to a particular plan but rather to a particular
building or object. There are, for example, four plans in this series that
were once marked with the number 1125. All four of these plans relate to
the lighthouse built on South Solitary Island in the late 1870s.
- Single
numbers were also applied to some records from Victoria and Tasmania but
their meaning and significance is not apparent except where indicated in
the relevant items’ descriptive notes.
- Between
1878 and 1885 records created or controlled by the NSW Colonial
Architect’s Office were often assigned a running number with a year
prefix, eg 78/1044 and 80/398. Such controls tell us when records were
created or brought into the agency’s recordkeeping system. For instance,
the plan once controlled as item 78/1044 was created or brought into the
recordkeeping system of the NSW Colonial Architect’s Office in 1878.
This system was briefly revived in NSW between 1898 and 1900 when controls
such as 00-64 and 99-61 where imposed upon a few records created at that
time.
- Some
records created in Victoria carry alphanumeric control symbols such as
VL45, VM27, and V28 while some others created in Tasmania were marked with
controls such as TL13, TM32 and T36. These controls were probably imposed
upon the records between 1977 and 1990 when the Victorian and Tasmanian
lighthouses were managed from one office.
- Between
1913 and 1927 the Commonwealth Lighthouse Service (CA 2294) imposed
controls such as ‘Drawing No 779’ and ‘Drawing No 289’ upon the plans of
lighthouses that it created and upon some of the others that it
gained custody of from other sources.
- At
some point between 1927 and 1968 the Commonwealth imposed one, but never
two, of the following three types
of control symbols upon many of the records that now make up CRS A9568:
xx-xxx eg: 16-3
or xx-xxH
eg: 22-34H or HSxx eg: HS52 where xx = a number.
- The
first two of the above Commonwealth imposed controls, ie xx-xxx and
xx-xxxH, appear to be variations of a system of arrangement and
control which was to have been universally applied to all plans and
drawings of lighthouses and other navigational aids controlled by the
Commonwealth Department of Transport in 1975. Under such a system the
controls for items held in Canberra would follow the following format CN-xx-xxx
where ‘C’ represented ‘Central Office’ and the ‘N’ the ‘Navigational Aids
Branch’.
Finding aids
Half of the known items in this series have been
entered onto RecordSearch.
Provenance
While most of the records within this series were created
during the colonial period by such agencies as the NSW Colonial Architect’s
Office, other items from this series were created as late as 1968.
It is assumed that the various state and territory governments
transferred their plans and drawings into the care of the Commonwealth around 1
July 1915 when the federal government formally took over control of coastal
lighthouses.
Immediate source of acquisition
CA 7235, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA),
transferred 325 lighthouse plans belonging to A9568 into the custody of the
National Archives of Australia in 1996. A further 325 lighthouse plans and
drawings belonging to the same series were found in the offices of the
Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DoCITA) in
2002. AMSA agreed to have these transferred directly into the National
Archives’ custody that year.
Sources
Lighthouses in Australia: A Guide to Records held by the
Australian Archives, Australian Archives in assoc. with AGPS Press,
Canberra, 1991
From Dusk Till Dawn: A History of Australian Lighthouses,
The Macmillan Company of Australia Pty Ltd in association with the Department
of Transport and Communications, Melbourne, 1988
Phillips, V. Romance of Australian Lighthouses. Rigby
Ltd., Adelaide, 1977
Lighthouse Computer Training and Development, Lighthouses
of Australia, December 1997, published online at: www.lighthouse.net.au/lights/