History of lighthouses with demands, and to the loss of a number of ships, most notably the Dutch merchant ship Vreede in 1800 with the loss of 380 lives. After the reforms of the Lighthouse Act 1836, owners still managed to collect large dues, of which the largest were for the Smalls Lighthouse which collected £23,000 in 1852 and Trinity House was forced to spend over £1m in buying back leases, including £444,000 for the Skerries Lighthouse. The modern era of lighthouses began at the turn of the 18th century, as lighthouse construction boomed in lockstep with burgeoning levels of transatlantic commerce. Advances
Woody Island Lighthouses the lanterns and finally adjusting them, took around ten days. A call for tenders for the construction of lighthouses and a lightkeeper's cottage on Woody Island was advertised in the Maryborough Chronicle on 26 May 1866. Plans and specifications for the buildings were available in the Harbor Office in Maryborough. It is likely that the design for the lighthouses and the original lightkeeper's cottage at North Bluff was prepared by the Office of the Colonial Architect, Charles Tiffin. The Office prepared the specifications for the cottage at Middle Bluff two years later (1868). The plans were likely to have been