Man of many lights

GYMPIE retiree Reg Hatch is a living legend of a bygone era.

KEEPER: Reg Hatch tells the tales of light keeping in his self-published book My Seven Year Itch. . Picture: Renee Albrecht

GYMPIE retiree Reg Hatch is a living legend of a bygone era.

The man, who left school as an apprentice painter at 14, turned his career to manning lighthouses across the Queensland coast.

In Reg's recently self-published book, My Seven Year Itch, he describes his years in the job.

It's a job that technology has now pushed to the side, but Reg was lucky enough to experience some of the best days of his life tending the lights with his young family.

His love of the lights was ignited after he was contracted to paint the light keeper residents on Dent Island.

"I got a hankering for something different," he said.

"The isolation was what I was probably looking for."

He soon applied for a job at Sandy Cape, and not telling the department his wife Marj was pregnant, he moved with his wife and two-year-old son to begin a very different life on the tip of Fraser Island, where the only noise heard was that of the light house motor turning.

It was a huge learning curve, Reg wrote in his book; where light was the number one priority.

Two keepers on the island would take shifts between sundown and sun-up, winding up the weights every hour and a quarter, which turned the big glass prism around the mantle that turned the light.

Reg remembers the days fondly; days that were as close to holidays as you get while working. He said there was no commute, no rush and the young family would fill their days off with swimming and fishing. They would spot dingoes and spanner crabs, and watch the life cycle of turtles as hatchlings made their way to the sea.

Reg manned five light houses in seven years, but as the kids grew older, schooling became a priority and the family moved to Brisbane where Reg took up painting again.

But he will never forget his life with the lights. Lightkeepers are like circus people he said - it becomes your life.

 

- FRANCES KLEIN