Light romance

Night time and the vast oceans have had an ancient tradition for mankind where right from the beginning, seafarers relied on their primitive lighting to highlight their presence to others afloat.

The night sea is a canvas on which is painted myriads of lights from moving and moored vessels. Particularly soulful are the solitary riding lights of moored vessels, creating a yellowish white warning to other ships daring to draw close in the dark.

To an increasing extent, shore placed lighthouses provided a location reference for the careful navigator who was often using the vast sky full of stars to steer the ship to its destination. Sailing with lights was an embedded custom where he water may be calm and mirror-like, allowing a single light from a ship to dance and glisten, or be more turbulent to give a multitude of reflective glimmers.

Gone is the practical navigation safety need for these lights in this modern age of radar and GPS; they hark back to the true origins of man's night time, maritime, endeavour not only to see but be to be seen.

A more recent moving piece of night romantic conjecture is the sight of many passenger aircraft setting up for their final straight-ins to Kingsford Smith.

My home lies right on the approach path and I am often touched emotionally by the glow of landing lamps busting through what famed poet James Cuthbertson described as 'the lustrous purple blackness of the soft Australian night.'

Then comes the throttled back whine of relaxing jet engines taking their last gulps of the cool high night air before they are commanded to push hard again after touchdown.

Man-made light 'midst starry or moonlit backgrounds; lamps carried from whom knows where to light the path down to the runway as thousands of used kilometres over darkened as well as brilliantly lit night landscapes draw to a close over my roof.

There is vast contemplative magic in noting all these light romances, if you're bright enough.