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a journey through the Whitsunday Passage mentioned that …a young woman and her baby had to be landed at Dent Island, where a new lighthouse has lately been built, of which her husband is the keeper (Anonymous 1879).

There were two separate cottages at the lightstation; one was for the principal lightkeeper with his family; and the other for the assistant lightkeeper and his family. No drawings of these cottages are known to survive, but they were probably similar to those for Cape Cleveland shown in Figure 5.  A photograph published in 1915 shows that they were similar to those built at some other Queensland lightstations (Figure 7).[1]

The keepers took turns keeping watch through the night in the tower, where their principal duty was to tend the kerosene wick burner and to wind up the weight that drove a clockwork to rotate the lenses. Dent Island Lighthouse was originally fitted with a fourth order revolving dioptric light.  This is an assembly of Fresnel lenses and refracting prisms with a focal radius of 250 mm that rotated on a vertical axis around the kerosene lamp, projecting several narrow beams of light out towards the horizon. Because of the regular rotation of the lenses, ships' officers saw distinct flashes of light as each beam passed over their ship. Each lighthouse had its own character or pattern of flashes which was shown on navigation charts, and which allowed the ships' crew to recognise which lighthouse it was.

The keepers' daytime duties included maintaining all the equipment and facilities of the station, monitoring vessels traversing the passage, signalling to and from the vessels, and dealing with quantities of kerosene (brought by the government steamer) and household supplies (brought by contractors). To support these functions, the station was equipped with a workshop, a flagpole, and a boat shed.

Figure 5 — Keepers' cottages at Cape Cleveland
Lightkeepers Cottage and Assistant Lightkeepers Cottage for Cape Cleveland, a contract drawing prepared in the office of the Colonial Architect, and signed by the contractor William Clark. No corresponding drawing of the original Dent Island cottages is known to survive, but it is likely that they were similar to these. (Source: National Archives of Australia, series J2775, item 1717460).

3.3.1 The lighthouse
As was typical for this series of lighthouses, the Dent Island tower was round in plan and tapered in profile, forming a truncated cone. The outer walls were framed with sawn hardwood posts and rails, bolted together with joints reinforced with wrought iron straps and brackets. The walls were lightly braced by timber braces, which would have served to stabilise the timber structure before the iron shell was fitted. At Dent Island there was just one