Is this your ancestor? Old photos of Golden Square pool users unveiled

The photos date back more than a century to the pool's foundation and hint that recently the pool has a habit of making itself felt in council debates.

Barbara Lomas unearthed newspaper images capturing some of the first community events at the new gravel-bottomed pool in the 1910s, using records available through the National Library of Australia's Trove website.

They have been reproduced in a mural to be unveiled at a free pool party thanking the public for its support.

One shows a huge crowd of men and women watching children with wash tubs compete in a race.

It is not clear from the image alone whether they have all fallen out of their tubs mid-race. Two boys are leaning nonchalantly against a light pole sticking out of the water - a detail that would surely give modern-day occupational safety officers heart palpitations.

Others are clear enough that long-gone faces peer back at the viewer.

Could some of them belong to ancestors of modern-day pool users? Ms Lomas sees no reason why not.

"We have people all the time who say their parents and grandparents used to come," she said.

"There's plenty of people in Golden Square who've had family here for many generations."

Volunteers have been running the pool since 2013, when the City of Greater Bendigo abandoned ideas of shutting it down.

But questions about the pool's viability appear to have stretched back to the city's early days.

Miners desperate for a place to cool down began pushing for a facility 150 years ago.

One of the earliest calls for such a bath appears in an 1877 edition of the Bendigo Advertiser.

More news: Hero child's tale reveals dangers that once lurked beneath Bendigo's surface

"Troops of men and boys" kept annoying respectable sorts by skinny-dipping in dams and ponds, the writer lamented.

Golden Square's scourge of naked bathers was more than just an irritation for high-minded residents.

Dams are dangerous enough places for people who can swim.

An appalling number of children drowned in Bendigo well into the 20^th century, often because they had nowhere to learn and practice basic life-preserving skills.

But council leaders did not hurry to give Golden Square its own pool.

"Other places are provided with them," one frustrated letter-writer told the Advertiser as petition after petition to councils failed.

"They have been agitated for by the ratepayers, promised by all the candidates from time to time, placed on the estimates, more than once a vote granted by the government [for] the purpose, and several inspections made by the councillors.

"Now sir, I would be interested to know how much longer the residents are to be deprived of what they are so justly entitled to."

The answer turned out to be half a century, judged from the moment the topic was first raised in local newspapers.

The Golden Square Baths finally opened in 1916.

The facility did more than offer a place to cool down in stifling summer heat or allow local children to learn how to swim safely, close to home.

It broke new ground for women's access.

The new baths successfully introduced "mixed bathing" to Bendigo.

Getting that to happen safely - and "with every regard to propriety", as the now defunct Bendigo Independent newspaper put it - was a big deal in what was still very much an Edwardian-era city.

The first rule at the baths was that no-one could enter unless wearing a "proper Canadian bathing costume".

"That's the sort of thing you might see [1970s comedy trio] The Goodies wearing, with the striped, one piece shorts and sleeves," Ms Lomas said.

And no-one could simply waltz around in a bathing costume out of the water. They were to immediately resume ordinary clothing.

The mixed-bathing policy was a huge success and caught on across the city, Ms Lomas said.

This legacy was one of many that modern-day volunteers wanted to keep alive, president Sam Kane said.

He encouraged people to come to Saturday's pool party.

"It's going to be great weather and entry will be free, so we are hoping to see lots of people there," he said.

This story is part of our history series entitled 'WHAT HAPPENED?'