From the late-nineteenth century into the early-twentieth century, springboards were standard equipment at many ocean pools. Diving boards were often removed and locked away in winter

While diving was generally regarded as a graceful activity, part of Annette Kellerman’s internationally successful swimming act was a dive with the inelegant title of the ‘Australian Splosh’. Diving competitions were a standard element of swimming carnivals and comic diving acts were commonplace.

As few ocean pools were constructed specifically for diving, there 

were predictable complaints about ocean pools being too shallow for safe diving. For safety reasons and concerns about public liability, the springboards have now disappeared from ocean pools and diving is now discouraged.

The International Year of the Disabled Person in 1981 focused community attention on the difficulties that people with a disability faced in accessing facilities such as swimming pools.

Access to some ocean pools remains challenging, even for people without disabilities. Provision of special car-parking spaces and ramps has, however,  given people with disabilities better access to many ocean pools. Toilets for disabled people are still relatively rare at ocean baths.

When nineteenth-century British ideas of respectability demanded men and women bathe separately at seaside resorts, nineteenth-century French seaside resorts allowed men and women wearing bathing costumes to bathe together. English tourists therefore referred to this style of mixed bathing as ‘continental bathing’.

By 1912, mixed or ‘continental’ bathing had been recommended and accepted at  surf beaches in the Australian state of the New South Wales as a safety measure. As coastal communities with well established ocean pools and traditions of segregated bathing saw no need to implement such a drastic safety measure in the safer environment of their ocean pools, gender-segregated bathing remained normal practice at many of the older New South Wales ocean pools into the 1930s.

The difficulties of constructing ocean baths can be considerable, but should not be over-estimated. Newcastle’s Bogey Hole was hewn out of solid rock on Australia’s Pacific coast in the 1820s. Pool construction posed few problems in nineteenth century Australian communities skilled in harbour construction, mining or quarrying (Newcastle, Wollongong, Kiama).

Equipment used on baths construction ranged from shovels and horse-scoops to steam engines. When construction of the Newcastle Ocean Baths began in 1912, steam winches and hydraulic jackhammers were used, while high sandbag barricades held back the tide. Draught horses hauled away pieces of rock. Parts of the jackhammer drill are embedded in the rock near the original pumphouse.

Pool construction involves working around the tide.  In a pre-wetsuit era, pool construction was normally only undertaken in the warmer months.

The labour force engaged in pool construction could be the forced labour of convicts that created some of Australia’s earliest ocean pools or the paid or voluntary labour of free workers.

Organisations involved in paid work at ocean pools in the Australian state of New South Wales included:

– NSW Public Works Department (Bronte, Bondi),

– private enterprise (Wylies Baths, Pearl Beach Baths), and

– council workers or contractors working for local councils.

In some cases, use of the excavated material for local roads or other council projects helped justify the development of the ocean pool or at least to defray its costs.

The Australian term ‘bogey hole’ does not relate to any fearsome ‘bogey man’. The term ‘bogey’ derive from a word meaning ‘to bathe or swim’ in Dharawal, an Aboriginal language from the Sydney area.

 The terms ‘bogey’ for swimming and ‘bogey hole’ for swimming place are still in common use in many parts of New South Wales and Queensland.

While the Newcastle Bogey Hole was cut into rock, the Bogey Holes at Bronte, Bondi and Mollymook are ocean pools of the ring-of-rocks type.