The first of Sydney's seaside pools, the Domain Baths, was built on the edge of Woolloomooloo Bay in c.1825. Since that time these pools have become a unique tradition, exploiting nature in a manner at once proud, provocative and intensely pragmatic.
Shelley Beach Park 2000

In the beginning it was an attempt to combat the dual threats of shark attack and random nude bathing that impelled their construction. Subsequently, as the 19th century 'bathing' was overtaken by competitive swimming - a field in which Sydney quickly excelled - dozens of such pools have been constructed up and down the coast. From Palm Beach to Lilli Pilli, Sydney's seaside pools have been cut out of rock, built from beachstones, staked out with hardwood piles, defined by weighted shark nets, and suspended from floating pontoons.

From Roman times, bathing in Europe had been largely the preserve of the well-to-do. Sydney's pools were quite the opposite. Owned and maintained on the whole by local councils, these pools have provided a service that was free, clean and genuinely public. Many were built in the 1930's, under job-creation programs of the Great Depression. Their architecture tended to the hasty and expedient, consisting at most of serried timber bathing sheds.

Now, however, the increasing incidence of both harbour pollution and private pools, and the expectation that public baths should shomehow pay their way, are combining to threaten the continued existence of many of the pools. only two - the Dawn Fraser Pool in Balmain and Wylie Baths at Coogee - enjoy any formal heritage status.

Barefoot and pristine, our public baths are a final bastion of larrikin values. Arguably, in this driest of continents, the motile and ambiguous tidal fringe is where we live - not most often, but most fully. Our oceanside pools - contrasting starkly with our forlorn and godless oceanside suburbs - are one of Sydney's finest traditions: loveable, eccentric, irreplaceable, authentic, even.

Lets keep them that way...

Oceanside Pools Rise Above the Coffee Culture Froth - Sydney Morning Herald 23.10.2001 - Elizabeth Farrelly