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
Caloundra Lighthouses who constructed additional lightstatons and made substantial upgrades to existing lights, with many lighthouses converted to unattended acetylene lights. The bulk of the expenditure was concentrated north of Cooktown where seven new lighthouses were constructed to guide ships through the Torres Strait and the Great Barrier Reef. Manned lighthouses were phased out in favour of less expensive, utilitarian-designed, unmanned structures. Caloundra Head Lighthouse continued to signal the entrance to the North West Channel to the Port of Brisbane and by 1929 investment in new navigation marks and dredging to increase the depth of the channel ensured that most of the