Hopes of driving away the ibises causing a stink at the last remaining part of the old Municipal Baths will depend on the City of Greater Bendigo’s design process.
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The council’s Parks and Open Space manager Paul Gangell said the ibises are likely responsible for making the site smell.
Neighbours of the water body, which sits next to the Faith Leech Aquatic Centre, say ibises have moved in en masse in recent years.
The pond once formed part of a larger body of water spreading down to Camp Hill Primary School and over towards the QEO.
That body, known to many locals as the “Muni”, was largely filled in during the 1950s as the city aspired to long-held ambitions for an Olympic swimming pool.
The council is drafting plans to revitalise the pond and one of its goals is to make the area less appealing to ibises.
That cannot come soon enough for a number of people living and working in the area, with resident Elaine Clark saying there is no doubt what the main problem is.
“The issue is the number of birds there is making it smelly and noisy. It’s not appropriate in the middle of town,” she said.
Andrew Brown is the greenskeeper at the Bendigo Bowls Club and said the ibises next door can drive you crazy.
“They are vile. Every morning in summer it reeks. When it gets hot and humid you can nearly dry retch when you get in to work,” he said.
Mrs Clark is concerned about what the birds were doing to water quality at the pond.
Mr Gangell said the council will investigate water quality and improvements that could be made as part of the design process.
Ibises have been drawn to the pond because it provides a refuge from predators. Their chicks are born naked and helpless and parents prefer swamps, lagoons, floodplains and grasslands for nesting.
However, in the past ibises have taken a shine to some of Bendigo’s local urban parks, gardens and water bodies.
Some Barnard Street residents believe many of the birds roosting at the Bendigo Municipal Baths pond are among those who were moved on by council when it cleared vegetation on an island at Lake Weeroona in 2017.
There too, ibises had created odour issues.
Mr Gangell said part of the challenge of ridding the pond of ibises will be that they might create headaches in another area of the city.
“The ibis are very likely to move to another area when the works commence,” he said.
How the Municipal Baths have shrunk over time
Liz Beck swam at the Municipal Baths before it was transformed in the 1950s.
In some ways, she said, the water body was “abandoned” to trees and weeds after the rest of the water body was chopped off and turned into parkland and pools.
Mrs Beck also recalls a fence going up around it – she believes it must have been in the 1950s – over concerns about drowning risks.
Drownings were regular problems at many of the water bodies people swam in around Bendigo, she said.
The Annals of Bendigo record a tragedy at a grand opening of the baths in 1913, with a crowd packing all available space on platforms that ran out over the water as well as other buildings.
“A carnival was held in celebration of the opening. Unhappily it was marred by a drowning fatality,” the annals noted.
Yet what Mrs Beck remembers about the Municipal Baths was their glory days and her endless summers in the water.
“We just spent all our school holidays swimming, sunbaking and jumping off diving boards,” she said
Mrs Beck contributed her memories to an exhibition at the Bendigo Library in 2017, and its organisers at the Bendigo Library and the Bendigo Historical Society provided information for this story.
Mrs Beck has mixed feelings about the replacement of the Municipal Baths in 1958 with a concrete-bottomed Olympic pool.
On the one hand, the water quality there and at other swimming areas around town has improved.
On the other, things changed when the Olympic pool opened.
“There was a lot of freedom there (before the change) and it was a lot of fun. Now it’s more expensive to go down there and a lot of people have backyard pools,” Mrs Beck said.
“We knew all the families down there. I still have friends from the days when I swam there.
“Everybody swam back then. I’m not sure that they do it quite like that anymore.”
Mrs Beck swam competitively in her youth and still has an Australia-shaped rock she pulled from the bottom of the Muni. She had felt for it with her fingertips.
“You could not see the bottom,” she said.
Mrs Beck said the length and depth of the baths helped her swim faster, joking that it was because she was scared.
“If I swam faster I would get to the end quicker,” she said.
She described most of the swimming spots around Bendigo at the time as “various mudholes”.
“A lot of these were mining dams and they then became swimming holes,” she said.
The Muni’s raft, which many people would swim to, was on a steel structure atop what was said to be an old mine shaft, Mrs Beck said.
“I don’t know if that was the case, but it was very deep there, as it was up where the diving towers were,” she said.
The facility now known as the Faith Leech Aquatic Centre was a long-pursued dream in Bendigo.
People had decided the Muni was inadequate for competitive swimming in the 1930s, but plans for change were stymied by World War Two and post-war austerity.
In his remarks at the 1958 opening of the pool, then-mayor Thomas Flood said the long cherished dream “will provide a great deal of pleasure not only to ourselves, but to our children and to their children in years to come”.
Now, long after those children of Bendigo have grown up, the Muni is a place of wildlife and memories.
The council’s draft plans to revitalise the pond will be available for public comment in 2019.
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Tom O'Callaghan
I grew up in Bendigo and I want to tell your stories.
I grew up in Bendigo and I want to tell your stories.
