Brisbane's Oldest Swimming Baths

Looking at the Brisbane river today it’s hard to imagine that it was once Queensland’s answer to the Riviera, where on hot summer days crowds flocked in neck to knee gear to splash and frolic in the water.

Mind you, back then by all accounts the Brisbane River was a pleasant palish green and the river banks were nothing like today’s quicksand-like sludge that threatens to swallow anyone hapless enough to walk on it. Indeed in the mid nineteenth century South Brisbane’s river banks were recorded as having fine white sand, although this observation may or may not be due to the describers’ having never sighted a Gold Coast sand dune.

Davies Park Swimming Baths - Courtesy of State Library of Queensland

Of course the popularity of Brisbane river as a recreational swimming hotspot was helped greatly by the fact that Surfers Paradise was yet to be a glint in the eye of hotelier Jim Cavill and the Sunshine Coast largely a sparse collection of little sea ports and farming hamlets.

Trendy 19th century sorts would take the train to Sandgate which was Brisbane’s version of Blackpool (except more quaint and charming) for a seaside promenade but otherwise the river was where it was at. 

The main problem with river swimming in early times was that Lawrie Lawrence was yet to be born and most people couldn’t swim so to avoid accidental drownings, death by shark and other aquatic mishaps, the town councils took to fencing portions of the river, creating floating swimming baths. 

Metropolitan Baths - Courtesy of State Library of Queensland

One of the most popular of these was the Victoria Baths, which were the first to be built in 1857 and located just downstream from the Victoria Bridge. Another was the Metropolitan Baths (above), which began their floating life in the region of Howard Smith Wharves and, upon completion of the wharves were towed up river and attached in the vicinity of Edward and Alice St by the City Botanic Gardens. It was at these baths that Brisbane’s first swimming club “The Old Brisbane Amateurs” formed and met. 

Meanwhile in the suburbs, both Dutton Park and Mowbray Park (you can still see the steps and rails alongside the ferry stop pontoon at low tide) were home to well-patronized swimming baths, while, in the absence of any council regulations, some residents with waterfront properties took it upon themselves to build their own little floating baths, the city’s predecessor to air-conditioning on hot summer days.

All of this led to a brief time when Brisbane river was awash with swimming baths, with the public ones sporting strictly separate bathing times or enclosures for males and females. Of course hygiene was hard to come by, river nasties would find their way through the enclosures and the state of the river was gradually deteriorating. 

So when the Spring Hill Baths (below) opened in 1886, initially filled with water that would be pumped downhill from the city’s water supply at the Spring Hill Reservoirs, and with a spring-boarding Mayor as their first customer, the nature of swimming in Brisbane was to change forever.

While Brisbane’s floating and tidal swimming baths are all long gone, we are lucky to have the Spring Hill Baths, which have the honour of being the oldest public swimming baths in the southern hemisphere, beautifully preserved in our midst, right down to the coloured change sheds and the signs warning men not to loiter.

Another iconic Brisbane public pool to open, the Valley Municipal Baths, (which replaced the earlier Booroodabin Baths), is also around today, and while the early multi-storey diving platforms have gone the imposing 1920s façade and grandstand ambience remains.

Meanwhile visitors to the public pool nestled below the fig trees in Paddington, would be unaware that Ithaca Pool opened almost a hundred years ago.

And down by the bayside, Sandgate’s sea pool may be a distant memory (although its relic posts are still visible at low tide alongside Shorncliffe Pier) but the Depression era tidal pool at Wynnum is as popular today as it was when it was built.

Top Image: Metropolitan Baths, Brisbane. Image courtesy of State Library of Queensland