Scot gets dream job as lighthouse keeper on Australian island

A Scottish man has landed his “dream job” as a lighthouse keeper on a remote Australian island.

Sandy Duthie, 42, jumped at the chance when the previous lighthouse keeper decided to retire after 25 years on Gabo Island, off the coast of Victoria.

Sandy, from Aberdeenshire, visited Australia five years ago with his partner, and never left. When he went to the small lighthouse island he realised he would love to one day become part of its history.

Landing the lighthouse keeper and island caretaker job means he is now spending six months of the year there – one month on and one month off – with a colony of penguins for company.

Sandy hails from Kirkton of Durris, near Banchory.

He studied ecology at the University of Aberdeen before becoming an arborist.

He visited Mallacoota in 2019 with his partner Brodie Gaudion on an initial three-month holiday visa to meet her family for the first time, and ended up staying.

He first went to Gabo Island two years ago, and dreamed of eventually being its caretaker.

Gabo lighthouse itself was built more than 160 years ago.

Previous keeper Leo op den Brouw, 70, had spent every second month alone on the island for the past 25 years.

When he decided to return to family life on the mainland earlier this year that left the post open, and Sandy landed the job with government organisation Parks Victoria.

He and another keeper – who has now been working there for 16 years – share the month-on and month-off rotation.

Sandy and his enormous beard – which he has been cultivating for many years, and which he thinks may have helped in the job interview – started his new job back in March.

He gets to and from the island via a small boat charter.

It takes about 30 minutes if the weather allows it – the conditions are often choppy – and there tend to be whales nearby.

Sandy’s first experience of Gabo Island came when he visited for two weeks to do weed control work.

“It felt like home immediately, it felt very much like the north east of Scotland,” he explained.

“The foliage – it’s pretty scrubby – and the granite is unlike any other part of Australia that I’ve seen. I fell immediately in love with the place.

“I asked the caretaker then how he got he job and he told me it was just luck at the right place and the right time. And since then he retired and I applied for the job – right place, right time.

“The job does not come up very often.”

He described Gabo island as small but with “amazing” wildlife.

“We have little penguins – a large colony of them,” he said.

“We have whales, sea eagles and seals. We have whales go past constantly at the moment.

“I saw around 15 or 16 today. Sometimes there are 30 or 40 a day.”

Sandy said the job itself is more like a way of living.

“You have to really get with the rhythm of what you have to do and not put too much expectation or planning because Gabo Island has a way of flipping round whatever plans you have.

“You have to be able to problem-solve. Our range of tasks run from weather observations every six hours to cleaning the public toilets, painting everything – we have 80% humidity with salt air so everything rusts and corrodes and it all needs looked after.

“There’s a lot of ongoing maintenance that needs to be done to the house.

“You just have to expect the unexpected.”

He said the job was ideal for him, but that it came with challenges.

“There’s enough difference to keep your mind busy all the time,” Sandy said.

“I quite enjoy my own company. I do also enjoy the company of others. My partner comes to visit.

“Don’t get me wrong, there are some days where it seems like a prison sometimes.

“The previous caretaker described it as Alcatraz the rock. You can’t leave, go to family events if you’re here. Sometimes we get stuck on here for days on end because of the weather.

“But at the same time you can basically write your own script of the day and go about your duties.

“It can be difficult when phone signal drops out but there’s not much that I miss..

He said supplies could run low if a boat did not come.

“But the other side of it is when I get back to the mainland, something I’ve found is having to be super cautious about being in a crowd of people.

“If you’ve been here for weeks by yourself and not seen another face it’s quite intimidating going to the pub or going to an event.”

He has also discovered that there were other Scottish connections to Gabo Island.

“The pink granite on Gabo is very hard compared to other Australian granite,” Sandy explained.

“Documents I’ve found suggest the person in charge of building the lighthouse in 1859 actually sought Scottish stonemasons, in particular ones who had worked on the Aberdeen and Peterhead lighthouses, as they were used to working with such a hard material.

“Unfortunately we don’t know much more about who built the lighthouse though.

“There’s a book about all of the caretakers who have been on the island since 1859, and a lot of them are Scottish – people from the Highlands and Islands, Perth, Edinburgh, Glasgow and from the north east too.

“It’s really incredible the Scottish connection here.

“It is 100% a dream job. For me it’s perfect.”