NSW Ocean Baths - Heritage Themes

The economic significance of ocean baths lies less in the pools' roles as money-making businesses, but in their roles as attractions that helped promote tourism and land sales.

Adapting British seabathing & seaside practices
Coastal tourism was important from the 1830s. The British models of seaside tourism, exemplified by the flourishing resort of Brighton, influenced not only the seabathing facilities sought on the Empire's distant coasts, but also the types of formal and informal segregation practised at seabathing facilities. In nineteenth-century Britain and in the colony of NSW, 'respectable' seabathing for men and women remained gender-segregated, either in time or in space.

In major and minor centres of population and tourism along the NSW coast, environmental and cultural factors prompted and nurtured divergences from both the British models of seaside tourism. While any improvements to enhance community enjoyment of the coast's beaches and rocky shores were regarded as public works deserving public support, it was not practicable to replicate the pleasure piers that characterised British seaside resorts on an exposed shark-ridden coast, subject to strong seas. Aspiring colonial watering places focused on attracting affluent Sydneysiders or country visitors by offering healthy sea air and safe respectable seabathing facilities along with fishing, walks and other amusements.

The British climate had provided a considerable incentive to heat the seawater for bathing or pipe it to an indoor baths, where both the air and the water could be heated. These practices seemed less compelling on the coast of NSW, where summer seabathing was popular with people seeking relief from the heat and humidity, as well as those who believed in the health-promoting power of seawater. On the open shark-infested surfcoast of NSW, ocean baths offered the most economical means of providing safe and respectable bathing for bathers, who lacked swimming and surf skills, but wanted to stay in the water for extended periods with minimal risk.

Early tourism in Wollongong

Sited the same distance from Sydney as Brighton was from London, Wollongong aspired to become a major watering place, when tuberculosis was regarded as an indicator of a sensitive temperament rather than a contagious disease, and tourist areas sought to attract affluent invalids. Seabathing, especially when combined with sea air and a break from the pollution and stress of city life or simply from a more humdrum routine, was no doubt of some pleasure and therapeutic value for some invalids and other sufficiently affluent and leisured people. When few homes had baths, bathrooms or piped water, simply feeling clean all over or being immersed in buoyant seawater was a luxurious experience.

As overland travel from Sydney to Newcastle or Wollongong was far more difficult than travel by sea, most early colonial tourists travelled by privately owned coastal shipping lines to those seaports aspiring to be 'the Brighton of NSW'. By 1838, Wollongong was 'the usual resort of invalids', but those invalids took to the water from the open shore or natural pools if they were men, and from the security of the baths if they were women or children. The bathing machines that were such a fixture at British seaside resorts did not become established at Wollongong, despite the best efforts by the proprietor of Wollongong's Brighton Beach Hotel.

Nineteenth-century customs and regulations on bathing sought to minimise social risks by keeping naked or near-naked bathers out of public view in daylight hours. When a woman who appeared dishevelled was unlikely to be thought respectable, female bathers needed the privacy of a secluded bathing area with suitable changing rooms. Ladies went to the baths with their attendants, usually a maid who could help them undress and dress, assist with any required childminding and be sent to remind any man in the vicinity that a lady using the baths was entitled to privacy.

Wollongong's original ladies bathing place was considered an additional reason for 'the smoke dried citizens of Sydney' to take ship to Wollongong in the interest of health and pleasure. When Wollongong became a municipality in 1859, its women and children even had a choice of two bathing pools, namely 'the Children's Pool' on the south side of Flagstaff Hill and the older Chain Baths on the east side. This apparent high priority for women's recreation and hygiene is perhaps better interpreted as testifying to the increasing importance 'respectable' people were placing on segregated bathing. Yet despite assertions that 'men with the least sense of decency will not venture on the sacred precinct of the females bathing ground', the Illawarra Mercury reported instances where that the 'privacy which the ladies expect when bathing has been intruded upon'.

Seabathing was never a pleasure solely reserved for tourists. The men's baths at Wollongong had a set of regular bathers who made 'make their morning plunge an institution' and faced only a week of inconvenience when blasting work was undertaken to further enlarge their baths in the late 1890s. Their improved Wollongong men's baths was 4-7 feet deep with a 'concrete wall across the mouth', so the baths remained full even at low tide and 'as the waves are rolling over the wall, the bathers secure all the enjoyment without the danger of swimming in the open sea'.

Early tourism in Newcastle

Newcastle, which aspired to be the 'Brighton of the Northern District' also offered respectable means of sea-bathing' for invalids and other visitors. As the Great Northern Railway line linked Newcastle, Maitland and Brisbane long before a rail bridge over the Hawkesbury provided a direct rail connection to Sydney, Newcastle was an attractive and accessible summer destination. Its Bogey Hole was popular with male residents and visitors, while women's seabathing focused on the rock pool-rich section of the beach set aside for use by ladies in the afternoons and equipped with a ladies bathing house.

Seabathing was also an occupational health issue in Newcastle as the district's miners used seabathing to relax and rinse themselves free of coal dust on their days off. By the 1860s, when control of the Bogey Hole passed to the Newcastle Borough Council for public use as a pool, communities were beginning to expect their local council to manage ocean baths as public facilities. During the 1880s, the Newcastle Council enlarged the colony's oldest ocean baths, the Newcastle Bogey Hole and created a new public baths. Known as the Soldiers Baths, the new public baths were a ring-of-rocks sited beneath Newcastle's Signal Hill close to Fort Scratchley.

Newcastle Council had contracted out enlarging the Bogey Hole Baths to their present size, about seven times the pool's original capacity. The improvements produced what was proudly proclaimed 'one of the finest swimming baths in NSW or Australia ... over 50 feet long nearly as broad' with a depth varying from 5 feet 6 inches to 3 feet 6 inches and a bottom 'almost as smooth as a billiard table'. Newcastle Council added to the pool's attractions by installing dressing-sheds and showers to use water piped 150 yards from a natural spring. The improved Bogey Hole was 'largely patronised' even in considerable seas. The caretaker paid by Newcastle Council provided bathers with towels at a moderate charge. Later improvements at the Bogey Hole reduced the risk of bathers being violently dashed into the caves by waves. People lined the paths to the Newcastle Bogey Hole from early morn to dewy eve to 'lave their limbs in the fresh and cooling wave'. During school vacations, it was a 'favourite place of resort with the youthful as well as the adult portion of the sterner sex'.

Unlike Wollongong, Newcastle also had indoor baths, but these did not threaten the viability of the ocean baths, which were less expensive to construct. Besides, while Newcastle's off-beach Corporation Baths offered safer, more predictable bathing conditions, they did so in seawater that was changed less frequently than the water in the tidal baths. The bylaws defined for indoor Corporation Baths including gender-segregated bathing hours also applied at the more exposed and sometimes dangerous Newcastle Bogey Hole.

More 'would-be Brightons'

By the 1870s, several ambitious NSW seaside municipalities aspired to rival the established holiday resorts at Manly and the Blue Mountains as a holiday destinations and vie with Wollongong and Newcastle for the title of the 'Brighton of New South Wales'. All such aspiring watering places required 'respectable means of sea bathing', but few could match the Brighton-like attractions of Manly, only a short, generally pleasant ferry trip away from the centre of Sydney.

In Sydney, privately operated women's baths developed at Coogee in the Randwick municipality. The Coogee Ladies Baths had become a more formalised baths complex complete with women's changing-rooms after a crown reserve was created on the southern headland and lease for the area of the baths below the high water mark granted to Randwick Council. The men's rock pool at Coogee's northern headland remained a popular, though less formalised bathing place. A large rock pool further south in the more isolated setting of Sydney's Long Bay also attracted regular patrons.

A little further north, Waverley Council borrowed an engineer from the Harbours and Rivers Branch of the NSW Public Works Department to create public baths at Bronte and Bondi during the 1880s. Promoted as places of fresh air and beauty close to the centre of Sydney, these baths catered to daytrippers as well as holiday-makers and local residents. Apart from their up-to-date baths, both Bronte and Bondi also had natural bogey holes offering safer bathing than the surf beach.

A little to the south of Wollongong, the Shellharbour Progress Association co-ordinated the development of time-segregated ocean baths to attract tourists, once the operation of the new South Coast railway had caused the local shipping trade to decline. Opening of its ocean baths in 1894 meant Shellharbour became 'like a new town' with strangers visiting, staying at the local hotel and the baths 'taxed to their capacity in the summer months'. Even with its 'baths for adults' and a harbour beach offering 'admirable recreation for children', Shellharbour's tourism remained small-scale.

Further to the south of Wollongong, Kiama (a small seaport with an improved harbour and a famed tourist drawcard in the form of the famous Kiama Blow Hole), had created ocean baths with separate hours for men and women in the 1870s. Abolishing charges for those ocean baths made them at least theoretically available even to people,who had lacked funds to subscribe as members of the town's earliest baths. Kiama followed Wollongong's lead by creating separate bathing places for men and women and allocating the most secluded and formalised bathing place for the women and children. By 1899, the much improved men's baths at Kiama's Blowhole Point swimming baths had incorporated a far smaller bathing pool that local men had previously used and were 'second to none for purity of water ... perfectly safe to swim in any weather excepting when the sea is unusually rough'. With the coming of the South Coast railway, Kiama confidently expected to become' one of the most popular tourist resorts in the colony', as 'of the numerous sea coast towns of New South Wales none are more picturesquely situated or more readily accessible from Sydney than is Kiama'.

Daylight bathing at surf beaches and ocean baths

The lifting of bans on daylight surfbathing at Sydney beaches in the early 1900s ushered in an era when beaches, surf bathing and surf clubs became part of a new Australian national identity. The separate life of suburban households merged into a community of shared pleasure at the surf beaches and at the public baths. But though surf and sun became unifying forces, sunbathing or 'loitering on a beach clad only in bathing costume' was initially forbidden on NSW beaches and in the public areas of ocean baths.

While gender segregation at surf beaches was an established practice at Newcastle and Merewether, more widespread daylight surf bathing at gender-segregated beaches along the coast resulted in far too many people drowning. After 1912, the NSW government supported mixed surfbathing in respectable costumes as a safety measure.

The enthusiasm for surf beaches meant NSW ocean baths were revalued as facilities complementing the surf beaches. Even at beaches patrolled by volunteer surf lifesavers, good crowds still patronised ocean baths. Ocean baths offered safe bathing at times when lifesavers were not on patrol and arguably offered more effective protection against shark attacks. Travel guides and the NSW railways promoted the surf beaches and the ocean baths, though tourist literature gave increasing prominence to surf beaches.

Pools for segregated and mixed bathing

In the 'safe' environment of the ocean baths, there was little basis for introducing mixed bathing as a safety measure. Mixed bathing could, however, be promoted there as a matter of fashion, a sign of modernity or a recognition of 'family values'. By 1910, when all the other seawater baths in the thriving weekend seaside resort of Coogee Beach offered only gender-segregated bathing, the new private enterprise ocean baths created by Henry Alexander Wylie enthusiastically promoted mixed or 'family' bathing to attract people away from the surf beaches.

The availability of mixed bathing at Wylie's Baths then served to reduce the pressure to desegregate Coogee's set of gender-segregated ocean baths, consisting of men's baths and women's baths on opposite sides of Coogee Bay and a time-segregated baths at the off-beach seawater pool in the Coogee Aquarium. While during the second wave of pool construction, men's pools and women's pool were well separated, the mixed bathing at Wylies Baths took place in premises sited next to the much older Coogee women's baths.

Other 'would–be Brightons' also retained their traditions of gender-segregation ocean baths. In the Illawarra district to Sydney's south, Wollongong had men's baths and two ocean baths for women (including one designed for lap and competitive swimming), Gender-segregated bathing remained so popular in the Illawarra that men's ocean baths were constructed at Gerringong in 1911, leaving Gerringong's earlier ocean baths solely for use by women and children.

At those beaches that became popular after the introduction of mixed day surf bathing or that had been remote enough to ignore the gender-segregation practices, there was no tradition of gender-segregated bathing in ocean baths. As mixed bathing had long been common practice at surf beaches at Sutherland Shire's Cronulla and in Warringah Shire, it is hardly surprising that ocean pools created in these areas always offered mixed bathing, rather than gender-segregated bathing.

Impact of World War I

Beachgoing continued throughout WWI. Rather than ending the popularity of beach holidays, the absence of many surf lifesavers and other men of military age may have enhanced the charms of the ocean baths and the entertainments they offered. After their 'temporary' opening in 1913, the Newcastle Ocean Baths stayed open to free public use, even though there was almost no dressing accommodation at the baths. Even so, Newcastle residents believed they had not only the best beaches in the Commonwealth of Australia, but also its finest ocean baths.

From 1914 to 1918, coastal communities worked to create new ocean baths, deepen existing baths or extend them to standard competition lengths. Enthusiasm for ocean baths in the Illawarra led to creation of several pools at Austinmer between 1914 and 1919. Real estate advertisements featuring ocean baths helped convert some tourists into landowners.

Baths development in the Interwar years

The interwar period was a boom era for beachgoing and for the development of ocean baths. Especially in sparsely populated coastal areas like Warringah Shire on Sydney's Northern Beaches, which lacked the infrastructure of the older municipalities, the ocean baths and the surf clubs were important community centres. (See Multipurpose social spaces).

Mixed bathing was seen as an essential part of global moves to a modern outdoor lifestyle. In Britain, the art-deco style outdoor pool with a sunbaking area were known as Lidos and promoted mixed bathing and a phenomenon, that Britons still accustomed to gender-segregated baths and beaches referred to as 'Lido libido'. As I have argued elsewhere, misunderstandings and conflicts were inevitable in the NSW coastal communities, when people accustomed to mixed bathing in pools from the most recent wave of ocean baths creation visited older coastal communities, long accustomed to gender-segregated ocean baths. At Kiama in the 1920s, police were called in to help the Council inspector prevent women from using the Blow Hole Point Baths during hours set aside for men. These conflicts are better interpreted as conflicts between locals and outsiders, than as simple conflicts between local men and local women. That these conflicts took place at the ocean baths demonstrates the importance of these baths for tourism and the tourists' expectations that mixed bathing should be available at ocean baths as well as at the surf beaches.

When Newcastle Ocean Baths conveniently located 'at the tram terminus' officially opened in 1922 under their official name of the Griffith Ocean Baths, those lido-style outdoor baths boasted showers, change-rooms, private dressing-boxes and lockers, a kiosk/shop, refreshment rooms offering light lunches and afternoon teas 'at city prices', an office and a three-bedroom residence. The Newcastle Ocean Baths had a 300 foot by 150 foot (100 metres by 50 metres) pool 'certainly larger than that of any other enclosed ocean baths in Australia'. The swimming basin had a sandy bottom and a depth that varied enough to cater for 'the youngest child'. Water was renewed every two days, which still made them far more sanitary than Newcastle's nineteenth-century indoor Corporation Baths. An entry fee of a penny for children and tuppence for adults was charged and a turnstile system used. By 1929, the 'powerful electric pumps' changed the seawater daily, the ocean baths were brilliantly illuminated at night and thousands of children attended weekly classes at the baths during the summer month.

A hot summer Sunday would attract around thousands of people to the Newcastle Ocean Baths. When few air-conditioned public or private spaces existed, hot summer days and nights drew large crowds of residents and visitors to all the ocean baths lit for night bathing. Lighting the ocean baths brilliantly at night not only made them extremely popular social and recreational centres, but also allowed swimmers and surf club members to train after work, and the staging of night carnivals.

In 1930s NSW as in Britain, many new outdoor pools were developed as part of public works programs designed to create work for the unemployed and provide public facilities where the unemployed could enjoy some of their enforced leisure. While councils submitted pool designs to the NSW Department of Local Government and the NSW Department of Public Works, siting and financing considerations inhibited any standardisation of the 1930s ocean pools. Of the many unheated open-air ocean baths in NSW constructed in the interwar years, only ocean baths at Newcastle and Forster and the saltwater Port Kembla Olympic pool embody variants of the lido style then so dominant in the UK. The others addressed more utilitarian concerns for a swimming and bathing space.

Working bees, public donations and other community support for ocean baths were still both required and forthcoming. The Depression-era public work programs made it possible for many coastal communities to realise their dreams of bigger, better ocean baths, that would attract tourists. At Merewether and Kiama, new 110-yard pools were constructed near earlier smaller ocean baths. New baths at Forster, Shellharbour, Gerringong's Werri Beach and Bermagui aimed to attract and retain campers. Ocean baths flowered on Sydney's Northern Beaches. Like earlier ocean baths, most of these new baths were in great demand and put to use while still under construction.

Ocean baths in World War II

Work on some ocean baths begun during the Depression years was completed during the years of World War II. It was not an environment favourable to development of new ocean baths. After the fall of Singapore, access to the surf beaches and ocean baths on the NSW coast was restricted by barbed wire on the beaches and other anti-invasion measures. Men and women had left for war service overseas and in other parts of Australia. Petrol rationing and travel restrictions curtailed tourism. Coupons were needed to purchase swimwear and the manufacture of swimming costumes ceased, so more resources could be channelled into the war effort. In the war-time planned economy, Newcastle Council had to seek a Department of War Organisation permit to make improvements to the Bogey Hole Baths and provide accommodation for a caretaker.

Coastal tourism and new post-war ocean baths

The post-war housing shortage increased the demands on public recreational spaces such as beaches and ocean baths. From the 1950s, improvements to roads and increased car ownership made it easier for people to travel to more remote beaches and ocean baths. Camping grounds developed into caravan parks. 1950s 'Sydney and Environs' roadmaps distributed via the NRMA and the NSW Government Tourist Bureau not only showed all the 'ocean surf beaches' from Palm Beach to Cronulla but proclaimed that 'practically all beaches provide dressing pavilions, rock swimming pools, refreshments etc.' While the rock pools were seen as essential features of a Sydney Beach, ocean baths were being downplayed as visitor attractions in Newcastle. A Tourist map of Greater Newcastle issued by the N.S.W. Government Tourist Bureau and Newcastle Council in the same era omitted the ocean baths from its listed places of interests, but drew the Newcastle Ocean Baths and Canoe Pool and Merewether Ocean baths on its map while labelling, but not drawing the Bogey Hole.

New land releases for housing created demand for ocean baths in new sites on the central coast and in the Illawarra. From the 1960s, Canberra's growing population also brought additional beachgoers to the Shoalhaven and South Coast to enjoy facilities such as the Mollymook Bogey Hole, the sea pools at Ulladulla and Huskisson, and Bermagui's Blue Pool. As the NSW coast became even more settled and suburban in the late twentieth-century, the ocean baths' significance as local facilities and community centres became more marked. The Central Coast's rock pool at Norah Head sited close to a caravan park may be one of the last of the NSW ocean baths to be created.

Social tourism programs and ocean baths

Since holidays at the beach remained unaffordable for disadvantaged groups, several social tourism programs developed to bring disadvantaged individuals, especially children, to the 'health-giving' beaches. Since the 1930s, social tourism programs such as Manly's Royal Far West Children's Scheme and the Stewart House program for schoolchildren in NSW public schools had brought disadvantaged children from rural areas to a Sydney beach for a holiday experience that integrated beachgoing and city visits with health examinations and medical, optical and dental treatment and learn-to-swim classes that the children lacked access to at home. In the 1950s, the NSW Aboriginal Welfare Board began organising summer camps along these lines for Aboriginal children from western NSW (see the thematic history for Aboriginal culture & interactions with other cultures).

Children staying at Manly may have visited some of the nearby ocean baths, while children at Stewart House continue to visit the South Curl Curl pool, where many of their predecessors learnt to swim. Learn-to-swim classes even provided some 1930s children at Stewart House with an opportunity to meet Harold Hardwick, the Olympic swimmer who wrote the NSW Education Department manual on teaching children to swim.

One consequence of these programs, and the other social tourism programs run by organisations such as the Country Women's Association, is that particular ocean pools can be highly significant places to people who lived far from the coast and perhaps visited an ocean baths only once as part of a special holiday experience. While the numbers of people involved in these programs are small compared with other forms of coastal tourism, the personal impact of participation in such a program could be profound.

Cultural tourism and ocean baths

By the bicentenary of European settlement in NSW, the NSW ocean baths were becoming 'a type of facility no longer constructed'' heritage icons rather than the icons of modernity that they had remained until the 1970s. From the 1980s onward, there was growing recognition of the heritage value of ocean baths, whether as part of the harbour precincts as at Wollongong, Kiama and Ulladulla or as a part of the beach culture so significant for the development of areas such as Warringah Shire. Since the mid-1990s, the National Trust considered Sydney's harbour and ocean baths as having heritage significance.

The Newcastle Bogey Hole, Wylies Baths and The Entrance Ocean Baths were placed on the NSW State Heritage Register in 2003. Formal state heritage recognition of ocean baths developed more slowly than recognition of inground pools or tidal pools on Sydney Harbour. This is perhaps not only because few ocean baths had buildings that were considered architecturally interesting, but also because most ocean baths were seen as less threatened places than inground or indoor public baths, which can be converted to serve as residential housing sites or shopping centres.

That attitude changed as the rising costs of maintenance and public liability insurance have led coastal councils to consider reducing work to maintain and upgrade ocean baths and to consider imposing charges to use ocean baths, restricting access to ocean baths or closing ocean baths. Those actions triggered greater recognition of the heritage, aesthetic and social significance of ocean baths (see the thematic histories for Creating ocean baths and for Creating images and other creative works relating to ocean baths) as well as their value as functional space for recreation and sport.

The NSW ocean baths are not yet generally recognised as a class of pools as distinctive as the lidos of Britain, nor have the threats to the ocean baths or other NSW public pools produced groups equivalent to the London Pools Campaign or the UK's Right to Swim Campaign. Visits to the ocean baths are not yet equivalent to visiting a representative of an endangered species at a zoo, though there is an increasing sense that the ocean baths that currently exist may be the last of their kind to be created. After the MacMasters Beach pool began to leak badly around 1991, the community began a successful campaign to have the pool upgraded. Even then Barbara Willis, president of the MacMasters Beach Progress Association argued the pool was 'a community asset, built by the community and funded by council. We can't let it go because we will never get it back again'.

Concern for ocean baths is still usually a localised concern. People are concerned about the continued functioning and existence of the baths they already know and care about, but have little curiosity about baths outside their home territory and are often surprised to find that similar baths exist elsewhere. This contrasts with the photographers and other artists who see specific ocean baths as part of a set of bathing places.

Still, the increased recognition of the ocean baths as heritage sites and as aesthetic landscapes has meant that ocean baths have become increasingly valued as places for people to gaze upon, as well as places to visit and use. This has altered the significance of ocean baths for coastal tourism. While in Sydney, the ocean baths remain much-loved feature of the Eastern Beaches walking track and other coastal walking tracks, Newcastle has more strongly promoted its ocean baths as key heritage sites along its Bathers Way walking track.

The notion of an emerging sensibility, which assigns more novelty value to ocean baths than to Australia's surf beaches or any of its other public pools, helps explain the appearance of the Bronte Baths in Tourism Australia's 2006 Where the bloody hell are you? advertising campaign. The ocean baths may turn out to be far more effective and long-lasting visitor attractions than their creators could ever have imagined in the days of the 'would-be Brightons'.

Further Information

Relevant Regions
Newcastle
Sydney - Northern Beaches
Sydney - Eastern Suburbs
Sydney - Cronulla
Illawarra
Shoalhaven Other Relevant Pools
Bermagui - Blue Pool
Forster Ocean Baths
MacMasters Beach Rock Pool
Norah Head Rock Pool
Pearl Beach Rock Pool Related Topics
Campers & caravanners
Hotels & guest-houses
Motels
Public access & transport
Tourism

The Economy - Coastal tourism & real estate sales