The Blackett Lighthouse was originally on the Terrace, No. 7. It was later relocated to the corner of Te Weka Street and Benvenue Ave, and then again to the Benvenue Cliffs. It is a Category II structure and the Historic Places Trust. LEFT: The Lighthouse at its current site in 2021. Courtesy of Roselyn Fauth. RIGHT: Timaru's lighthouse being relocated 1980. Courtesy of South Canterbury Museum 2014/107.73
By Roselyn Fauth
My family home stood opposite Blackett’s Lighthouse in Timaru. For me, it was never just a landmark—it was part of my landscape, part of my childhood. When we walked past as kids, we’d sometimes knock on the door, full of hope that someone might answer. We’d wait and wait, pressing our ears to the wood, imagining footsteps. But no one ever came. Because the lighthouse was never a home.
It was a structure with one job: to give instructions to those at sea. But like many built heritage symbols, the Blacket Lighthouse's role has shifted over time. Today, it no longer performs a functional duty, it stands on its third relocation overlooking the bay above the Benvenue shipwreck burried below in the sand. At times, it has been a political icon, even a source of protest, once stirring such fury that effigies were burned in its name.
It is well documented now. A Google search will pull up technical reports, heritage listings, and newspaper articles. But like some of my recent blog posts, I am interested in what has been recorded, and curious about the people in the margins, those whose stories were moved aside to make space for infrastructure, for progress, for “official” history. People who also shaped the place all the same.
So here we go..
A story about light and darkness, Politics and protest, Architecture and argument, And the stories we find in the shadows cast by the lighthouse itself...
By the time Blackett’s Lighthouse was lit on 1 July 1878, Timaru was already a port with a past. The first “beacon” had been a tar barrel set ablaze when a ship was expected. Cliff-top lights followed in the 1860s, but they were unreliable, underwhelming, and widely condemned. The Canterbury Provincial Council finally responded to pressure and approved funds for a proper lighthouse.
Interestingly, the first plan was to build the lighthouse out at Patiti Point, where its beam could sweep across the southern approaches. But there was a complication. Only a wooden lighthouse was on offer from the government, and Patiti Point was already home to the town’s ammunition store. The idea of putting a flaming kerosene lamp in a timber tower beside the town’s entire gunpowder supply made even the boldest harbour men uneasy. Despite the location being ideal, common sense prevailed.
The plan shifted to the cliffs above the harbour, on Le Cren’s Terrace. It was elevated, central, and practical site, where the new tower would become the town’s principal navigational light and a symbol of Timaru’s growing maritime confidence. A watch tower had been erected here, and I tell you the stories of the men sitting up there, exposed on the look out in storms is brutal, so I bet the new lighthouse was well looked forward to.
Enter John Blackett, Marine Engineer to the New Zealand Government. His job was technical. He gave New Zealand a national system of lighthouses, and he gave Timaru a vertical symbol that would later become an icon of identity and civic pride. But not everyone felt great about his influsence on the area or his views.
Blackett criticised the erosion and claimed it was caused by the port’s ambitious breakwaters. He had just planned and installed the new railway line under his boss Mr Vogel. But not long after it went in, the sea was trying to take it out. In response Blackett pushed the blame to the port, writing a letter of reccomendation to the government that the breakwater was a fiasco and should be blown them up. In response, 1000s of furious public made an effigy of Blackett, protested, hissed and dragged him down the Stafford Street, then Strathallan Street, down to the end of the breakwater and then blew the effigy up. They were defending the port they built, a key piece of infrustructure that was to make Timaru's port of entry viable for national and global exchange. Blackets lighthouse had become a lightning rod.
So when we talk about a simple wooden lighthouse, we are already in murky waters. It was never just about safety. It was about power, pride, and place. It was about who got to decide what stayed, and what got swept away. Sand, stories, or protest.
Today the lighthouse stands at the end of Benvenue Avenue, where the sea wind lifts off Caroline Bay and gulls loop against the sky. But this is not where it began, nor where it has always been.
Blackett’s Lighthouse was originally built in 1877 and completed in early 1878. It stood on Le Cren’s Terrace, overlooking the port and the first breakwaters. Its light was first fuelled by kerosene, then upgraded to gas in 1890 and to electricity in 1920. In 1948 it was fitted with a flashing mechanism. It remained in use until March 1970, when new harbour lights were erected above Dashing Rocks.
After ten years in limbo, the lighthouse was moved in 1980 to Māori Park. There it was given a second role as the rear lead beacon in a navigational system that had been installed above the Benvenue Cliffs in 1907. When plans were announced for a new aquatic centre on that site, the lighthouse was moved again in 2010, this time several hundred metres down the street, across the railway line and closer to the edge of the sea.
It now rests on a concrete pad in a coastal reserve surrounded by macrocarpa trees, twenty metres above sea level, a short walk from the cliff’s edge. But the land it stands on is no blank slate. It was once part of Reserve 884, known as Opukuorakaitauheke, a Māori reserve established under Kemp’s Deed in the 1840s. That land was gradually reduced, redefined, and in some cases reclaimed for public purposes. Part was taken for the railway. Later, the council bought the rest. The park was renamed Ataahua, meaning beautiful place.
This matters. Because while the lighthouse moved, other things moved with it. Stories. Boundaries. Meanings. And people. Ngāi Tahu families who had seasonal or permanent connections to the coast were slowly displaced, their place names overwritten and their access to traditional food gathering grounds eroded.
To some, the lighthouse is simply a maritime object. To others, it is also a marker of cultural change and colonisation. It stands on layered ground.
A Sculptural Survivor with a Still Presence
Even without its light, the structure remains striking. It is built of timber, with narrow kauri weatherboards and a wide board dividing the lower sections. An X-braced timber balcony encircles the top level, and the octagonal copper lantern is edged with a simple iron handrail. Pedimented sash windows add a decorative touch, giving it the appearance of a small civic building or monument rather than a working light tower.
Despite being relocated twice, the lighthouse retains its integrity. It is one of only a few surviving timber lighthouses in Aotearoa, and one of the very few Blackett-designed structures still standing. Its simplicity and texture are part of its power. It doesn’t shout. It stays.
When I look at it now, I do not see just a navigational device. I see a sculptural survivor, something between a sentinel and a relic. Something we thought we needed to move forward, and yet we keep circling back to it, trying to listen for something it might still have to say.
Blackett Lighthouse inside - pigeon holes - photo Roselyn Fauth 2025
People in the Margins of the Beam
Let’s widen the circle of light. Who else stood near the lighthouse, but rarely made it into the records?
The men who carried barrels of kerosene up the stairs. The harbour board labourers who maintained the lens. The women who stood on the cliffs waiting for their husbands’ ships to come home. The Ngāi Tahu whānau whose kāinga once overlooked Caroline Bay, and who watched their landscape get reshaped by stone, sand and steam.
And the lighthouse keepers. We know the name of the first one, Captain Meredith, who earned fifty guineas per annum, but not much else. What did he think about on cold nights? Who replaced him? Who climbed those stairs the last time the lamp was lit?
Even the children who knocked, like I did, waiting for a response that never came. We were all part of the lighthouse story too, even if we were never named.
The lighthouse made things visible. But it also cast shadows. That is what this blog is about. Bringing some of those stories out of the dark, into the soft, questioning light.
Mary Blackett
While John Blackett’s name is attached to the lighthouse... his wife, Mary Blackett (née Chrisp), is barely named in the record. But she would have been there for it all. I wonder what conversations the couple had. How she felt about her engineering husband now being tangled in town politics.
Mary was born in England and married John in February 1851 in Kirk Leavington, Yorkshire. They departed for New Zealand shortly after, sailing on the Simlah — a newlywed couple bound for a land neither of them had seen before. Like many colonial wives, Mary left behind her homeland, her family, and the only life she had known. She gave birth to four children, and two sons, John George and James William, went on to become engineers themselves.
While John was meeting with harbour boards, Mary was managing the home. Through years in Taranaki, then Nelson, and later Wellington, I imagine she would have dealt with isolation, illness, uncertainty, and perhaps even resentment when engineering demands pulled her husband away. But her voice remains invisible in the official story. She appears in the margins, or more often, not at all.
The lighthouse was never a home, but the engineering life that built it depended on someone keeping one.
Did Mary ever visit Timaru? Did she hear about the lighthouse built in her husband’s name, or the effigy burnt in protest against him? Did she miss him while he surveyed coastlines, drew designs, and oversaw public works in often harsh and remote places? We don’t know. But absence in the archives is not absence in real life.
Mary’s daughter, Isabel Mary Houston (née Blackett), went on to become an accomplished artist. Born in New Zealand, she was a lifelong friend of painter Dorothy Kate Richmond, whom she met in childhood during the family's years in Taranaki and Nelson. Their bond continued even after the Blacketts moved to Wellington, where Isabel regularly visited 'Dolla' Richmond.
In 1889 Isabel's work was shown in Nelson in an exhibition arranged by Miss Morgan, the art teacher at Nelson Girls’ College. She exhibited with the Fine Arts Association in Wellington (1883–84) and with the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts. By 1953, she was still living in Wellington. Her legacy includes establishing the John Blackett Prize at the University of Canterbury — awarded to top engineering students. Her act of commemoration is one of the few places the family name lives on. But it too overlooks Mary.
Isabel’s father, John Blackett, was not only a pioneering engineer but also a skilled sketcher. Born and educated in Newcastle upon Tyne, he had a successful engineering career in Great Britain before arriving in New Zealand in 1851. He served as an ensign in the New Zealand Militia in 1858. Through his friendship with the painter J. C. Richmond, he was appointed Provincial Engineer for Nelson in 1859 and later served as Commissioner for the West Coast goldfields. He provided vigorous service throughout the region, overseeing infrastructure from roads to bridges to lighthouse placements. Sketches of South Island lighthouse sites — attributed to Blackett — are held in the Turnbull Library, showing an eye for landscape and design beyond technical drafts.
So here, in this story about a lighthouse that gave light to others, let us stop and hold space for a woman who lit no beacon, wrote no reports, but who crossed an ocean, carried a family, and helped steady a legacy that was never entirely hers.
Because behind every mapmaker is someone who stayed back to hold the thread.
Cover and pages that mention the Blackett's: Nineteenth Century New Zealand Artists a Guide Handbook. Author: Una Platts - Victoria University of Wellington and Christchurch City Libraries, 759.993 PLA
Reflections from the Doorstep
I never got an answer when I knocked. But maybe I wasn’t meant to. Maybe the lighthouse’s job was not to speak, but to signal. To point somewhere else. To say, this is the edge. Look beyond it.
Blackett’s Lighthouse was never a home, but it has always been a place of orientation. Not just for ships at sea, but for people on land. A place to wonder, to remember, to begin again.
It is a tangible thing that helps us ask:
Who built this?
Who was it built for?
Who stood under its beam?
Who was left in its shadow?
Today it no longer guides vessels. But it can still guide thought.
If we let it.
The Timaru Lighthouse is icon for the District, learn about the engineer who designed it and the controversy... Download: Colourful Facts Blackett Lighthouse.pdf
Portrait of John Blackett taken circa 1889 by Wrigglesworth and Binns.. PAColl-8810: Blackett, John, 1819-1893 : Photographs. Tiaki IRN: 229554. Tiaki Reference Number: 1/2-080821-F https://ndhadeliver.natlib.govt.nz/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE140906&dps_custom_att_1=emu
Blacklett Lighthouse interior - Photo Roselyn Fauth 2023