Light romance

They stand out within the darkness, some bright, some dim.

They highlight their loneliness by contrasting strongly with an amorphous background of nothingness.

They provide a point of romantic fixation to the aware viewer by being so completely different to their surrounds by reason of their solitude.

They rule our night - they are ….. lights.

Lights of all strengths and purposes, some in the skies, some on the seas, and some on the lands.

The stars and the moon are natural tenants of a darkened world, but man- made lights often stand out because of their very reason for existence.

One of my first realisations of the night's lights came around age thirteen during a wearying, long, overnight mail train journey from Brisbane to Bundaberg with my parents to visit distant (no pun) relatives.

During the hours of wakefulness, I glimpsed the occasional solitary light coming from what I presumed to be farm homesteads set back from the rail line. This was during the wee small hours where no active purpose for that light seemed to exist, making them just tiny beacons burning bright over dark fields.

Later, a more memorable experience of purposeful lighting happened during a rail stop at a tiny country village whose name was unknown to me (but would not have surprised me to learn that it was Bringabaggalong) where a couple of utes had gathered to collect travellers alighting (no pun) from the train.

The romance of the setting was that the sole illumination was a bright street light mounted very high on a long power pole in an untarred street gathering area and casting its radiance downwards to its base, around which the gathered utes had parked. Everything else was darkness.

The romance to me was this arranged joining of travellers, with suitcases replete with the obligatory travel rugs strapped to the outsides, and welcoming, yawning transporters at this luminescent oasis of the night without any sounds other than the gasping of the steam locomotive as it commented on the shouts of greeting for the travellers.

Solitariness enhancing assembly, amidst darkened backdrop.

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.