The Lamp on Lassiter Point

The lighthouse at Lassiter Point has been decommissioned since 1986. The Heritage Council believes the shire owns it. The shire believes the Heritage Council does. No one has paid for maintenance since 2003, and the Fresnel lens has been sitting in the dark ever since. Until it wasn't. At two in the morning, the lamp comes on. Forty minutes exactly. Old Mossy, who has sat on the Rockingham seawall long enough to remember how the coast used to sound, has seen it before — three years ago, before the Meridian barge grounded; in 2009, before the Carnac diver who was never found. Each time, the light, and then disaster. He calls in the only people he trusts with a pattern he can't explain. The Safety Bay Six — Barry, Annie, Kath, Vic, and Rose — are meant to be on holidays. They take the case anyway. Pip Fenwick, aged nine, opens her purple exercise book to a fresh page and begins: 'The Lamp on Lassiter Point: A Complete Account, with Pelican.' What they find is not one mystery but three, threaded through sixty years and three centuries of coast: a marine archaeologist diving before dawn with yellow watertight cases; an eighty-one-year-old woman whose great-grandfather resigned from the lighthouse in 1948 and never explained why; and a 1663 Dutch East India Company vessel — the Haringvliet, lost on the outer reef with its navigational instruments sealed in bronze tubes — that someone found, hid, and has been signalling the location of ever since. Against them: a bureaucratic obstruction running through the fishing cooperative, the Heritage Council's forms division, and one Phil Cosgrove, who has more titles than authority and has been filing the wrong objection on the right schedule for four years. The sixth book in Patrick Maher's Safety Bay Six series, The Lamp on Lassiter Point is a story about what the coast remembers — and about the patience required to leave things in the right place so the right people will eventually come. Rich with maritime history, procedural wit, and the particular warmth of a community that looks after its own, it is one of Maher's finest. Gerald, the pelican, has opinions about all of this. Mostly about chips.