- by Jim Low

The Story of Boyd's Tower

Ben Boyd's Tower - Henry Lawson

Boyd's Tower - Read the Lyrics

The song -



Boyd's Tower is situated on the southern headland of Twofold Bay, above the Seahorse Shoals. It was built under the instruction of Benjamin Boyd, a London stockbroker with ambitious commercial plans for this area of the south coast of New South Wales.

The tower was built between 1846 and 1848 and was intended to be a lighthouse. It rises some 23 metres above the headland and is made of sandstone. Each block of stone was pre-cut, numbered and sent by sea from Sydney to be assembled on site.

The tower failed to satisfy an official inspection and was never completed. It was only ever lit three times. Instead, it came to be used as a convenient lookout for whales.


From 1860, Alexander Davidson and his family began shore-based whaling from Kiah Inlet in Twofold Bay. Here he built a boatshed and tryworks. He placed a lookout at the tower. A gunshot was fired to warn the boat crews in the bay when a whale was sighted.
Photography: Lynne Shandley © June 2000



Inside the tower looking up
Photography: Lynne Shandley © June 2000
 The ever present dangers involved in whaling are highlighted by an inscription in the stone ledge at the bottom of the ground floor northern window of the tower. It is a memorial to a young Norwegian oarsman from a Davidson whaling boat:

“In memory of Peter Lia,
who was killed by a whale,
September 28, 1881.
Aged 2 _”

Over the years, it has become difficult to read Peter Lia's age. It is probably 22 or 24.

The incident resulting in Lia's death occurred at night. The whale, on being harpooned, apparently towed the boat eight miles out to sea. Lia's body was never retrieved. He is the only employee known to have lost his life while whaling for the Davidsons.

In his 1988 Boyer Lecture, the late Professor Manning Clark confessed that in his volumes on Australian history, his “scenes with ordinary people were niggardly in number” when compared to those written about “the mighty men of renown”. I was reminded of these comments when visiting the tower in early 1997. The name BOYD, in bold capital letters, can be seen at the top of each of the tower's four sides, whereas the name of Peter Lia is not so clearly visible. It looks as though it was hand chiselled into the window ledge by one of his workmates. This observation led to the writing of the song, Boyd's Tower, which tells the story of Peter Lia's death.
-Jim Low