Places/hotpool.html
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Hot Pool
SLWA (in Facebook):
In the 1930s Dalkeith was a popular camping area which combined the attractions of a beach resort with the advantages of accessibility.
Here for the modest sum of 10/ per week, you could hire a fenced camp site measuring 60ft square possessing many of the conveniences of a home. A sewered lavatory, running water and deliveries of bread, groceries and milk.
There was also a children’s beach free from the "algae nuisance". But the greatest aquatic attraction of Dalkeith was the hot artesian bore, which brought up water of a temperature of 100 degrees from a depth of over two-thousand feet.
The stone-enclosed pool into which the bore discharged was about 30 ft in diameter and two ft deep. People of all ages gathered there to reap the medicinal benefits of the hot mineral water or simply for pleasure.
It was a common sight to see a yacht pulling in and its crew having a short dip in the pool, before sailing homeward with the freshening breeze.
The Dalkeith Hot Pool was also a place for hot gossip.
“On a moonlight night last week, diving into the warm waters a local athlete came up near the wrong girl.” tattled the Sunday Times in 1933. “He was chatting and canoodling long before he became aware it was not his belle and as a sequence her real Romeo sulked and departed without leaving her the fare home.”
There was another report of mistaken identity not long after when a young man mistook a boy’s toes for those of a girl's and was severely reprimanded.
One night socialite Jean Lang organised a huge scavenging party where participants had to collect among other things “A bottle of water from the Hot Pool”. Imagine the surprise of pool dwellers when some eighty merry young men and women in evening-dress advanced upon them! Other things on the list to find included a penny tram ticket from Barrack Street to William Street, a program of ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’ from the Repertory Club, an uncooked sausage and four bronze hairpins!
Another night police descended on the Dalkeith Hot Pool in the early hours of the morning, where they discovered two young men bathing in the nude. Also present two female companions wearing "abbreviated undergarments". The quartet which included truck driver Albert James Cooper (26) and hairdresser Richard Phillip English (26) were charged and fined in the Perth Police Court. Many thought them particularly unlucky, as bathing in the nude on warm nights at the hot pool had been going on for years.
While the Dalkeith Hot Pool controversy almost resuscitated the almost forgotten name of "Naughty Nedlands", it was not the only spot where the amphibious frolicked in the nude. According to the Sunday Times in 1936 - “If a flashlight camera were turned on to a sea basin at North Beach a scatter would ensue and if the names and addresses of the whole bunch were known, local social circles would wobble!”
Image - Bathers in the Dalkeith Hot Pool, January 1935
1935 photograph
Available online at call number: 3542B/212)
snap from Facebook: 1924
References and Links
Davidson, Ron 1994, High Jinks at the Hot Pool: The Mirror Reflects the Life of a City, FACP.
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 15 July, 2021 and hosted at freotopia.org/places/hotpool.html (it was last updated on 17 April, 2024). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.