It began with a flicker of light inside a wall cavity.
Specialist painter Brian Burford was working high in the lantern room of Cape Bruny Lighthouse, an 1838 structure perched on a windswept headland off Tasmania’s southeast coast, when something caught his eye — “glinting” in the shadows. Chipping away at rust, he reached into the wall and drew out a sealed glass bottle.
Inside was an envelope, two pages folded tightly. The letter was dated January 29, 1903.
A Preserved Moment in Time
The author of the document was JR Meech, the inspector of lighthouses for the Hobart Marine Board at the turn of the 20th century. His letter recorded upgrades made to Cape Bruny Lighthouse that year — a new staircase, floor, lantern room, and lens.
He noted the project’s cost, described the new flash sequence of the light, and listed the names of those involved in the work. His writings preserve the details of a moment when the lighthouse was transformed nearly 70 years after it was first lit.
Meech’s duties extended far beyond Bruny Island. He supervised the construction and maintenance of some of Tasmania’s most remote and treacherous lighthouses. These included those on Cape Sorell, Maatsuyker Island, Tasman Island, Table Cape, and Mersey Bluff.
A Delicate Unbottling
Annita Waghorn, historic heritage manager for Tasmania’s Parks and Wildlife Service, remembers her surprise when she got the call.
“We had some specialist access painters in the lighthouse painting, and I got a call from them saying, ‘we’ve found such an exciting thing, we’ve found a bottle in the wall of the lighthouse’,” she told ABC News.
The location of the find was inaccessible for over a century. “As far as we knew no one had even been able to access this space since the lantern room was put on the lighthouse in 1903,” Waghorn said.
But retrieving the letter was its own challenge.
At a lab at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, conservators set to work. The bottle was sealed with a cork dipped in bitumen. Removing it meant carefully scraping away the hardened tar-like coating without shattering the glass.
“We had to remove the bitumen from the top of the cork, then carefully work our way around the cork to detach it from the glass,” said senior paper conservator Cobus van Breda.
Even then, the letter resisted extraction. It had been folded in such a way that coaxing it through the narrow neck without tearing the fragile paper took time and precision. It took several days to fully decipher the words.
The letter will go on public display, though museum staff have yet to decide where. For Waghorn, the find is a bridge across time — a physical link between the keepers of the past and those who now care for Tasmania’s maritime heritage.
