brettm8
Entrance Island Lighthouse 1
More from 1993. The Entrance Island lighthouse, at the entrance to Macquarie Harbour on Tasmania's West Coast. This is an awesome place. Robert Hughes wrote about it in The Fatal Shore, his well known history of the convict era:
"All is sandbank and shallow; the beach that stretches to the northern horizon is dotted with wreckage, the impartial boneyard of ships and whales. No one has ever lived there or ever will.
To starboard, there is a sharp jumble of rocks. To enter the harbor, you must steer between this headland and another rock, Entrance Island, that marks the southern tip of the sandbars. There is no more than fifty yards between them, and at full tidal flow, the neck of the water has a glossy, swollen look, ominous to seamen.
Macquarie Harbor is one of the few large bodies of tidal water in the world (covering some 150 square miles), with a bottleneck entrance that faces west. Moreover, it looks directly into the Roaring Forties; the prevailing winds are northwesterly, and the waves of the Southern Ocean have the entire circumference of the world in which to build their energy before they crash on this pitiless coast. And so, when tide sets against wind and millions of tons of water a minute come boiling through the entrance, frightful seas rise.
Worse, there is a sandbar dead across the entrance, with only eleven feet of water over it at spring tide. For these and other reasons, the place is called Hell's Gates. It was the first thing that Irish and English convicts saw when their transport ship sailed in, a hundred and [eighty] years ago."
This shot was taken from inside Macquarie Harbour, looking west towards the ocean. The sandbar that Hughes describes is out of shot to the right. There is another shot here that I took a few minutes earlier from outside, looking east back towards the harbour.
These two photos inspired a lot of my interest in photography. I was fascinated by the difference in mood between this photo, shot facing into the sun, compared to the other photo that was shot with the sun at my back.
Entrance Island Lighthouse 1
More from 1993. The Entrance Island lighthouse, at the entrance to Macquarie Harbour on Tasmania's West Coast. This is an awesome place. Robert Hughes wrote about it in The Fatal Shore, his well known history of the convict era:
"All is sandbank and shallow; the beach that stretches to the northern horizon is dotted with wreckage, the impartial boneyard of ships and whales. No one has ever lived there or ever will.
To starboard, there is a sharp jumble of rocks. To enter the harbor, you must steer between this headland and another rock, Entrance Island, that marks the southern tip of the sandbars. There is no more than fifty yards between them, and at full tidal flow, the neck of the water has a glossy, swollen look, ominous to seamen.
Macquarie Harbor is one of the few large bodies of tidal water in the world (covering some 150 square miles), with a bottleneck entrance that faces west. Moreover, it looks directly into the Roaring Forties; the prevailing winds are northwesterly, and the waves of the Southern Ocean have the entire circumference of the world in which to build their energy before they crash on this pitiless coast. And so, when tide sets against wind and millions of tons of water a minute come boiling through the entrance, frightful seas rise.
Worse, there is a sandbar dead across the entrance, with only eleven feet of water over it at spring tide. For these and other reasons, the place is called Hell's Gates. It was the first thing that Irish and English convicts saw when their transport ship sailed in, a hundred and [eighty] years ago."
This shot was taken from inside Macquarie Harbour, looking west towards the ocean. The sandbar that Hughes describes is out of shot to the right. There is another shot here that I took a few minutes earlier from outside, looking east back towards the harbour.
These two photos inspired a lot of my interest in photography. I was fascinated by the difference in mood between this photo, shot facing into the sun, compared to the other photo that was shot with the sun at my back.