Time and tides

WORDS: CAITLIN SYKES • IMAGERY: TASMAN DISTRICT COUNCIL

Public swimming pools filled by the incoming tide were once fairly common along our shoreline, but Motueka’s saltwater pool is one of only a few that remain

You’d be forgiven for assuming it’s a love of swimming that has drawn Bob Cooke to volunteer at Motueka’s public saltwater baths for the past few decades. Turns out, that’s not the case.

“In more than 30 years, I’ve been in the pool once,” he laughs. “We had a big event on the day it reopened, and I did a length of the pool – and that’s the only time I’ve been in. But it’s one of those things where you just enjoy being involved.”

Today the Motueka Saltwater Baths, a Category 2 historic place, is one of only a few of its type remaining in New Zealand. And it’s thanks to people like Bob – advocates and committed community members who have helped to establish, retain and maintain the baths over its lifespan – that it continues to be a well-used facility in the South Island town.

Such pools were once fairly common along our shoreline. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, fresh air and sunshine were seen as a recipe for good health and were promoted through children’s health camps and by organisations such as the Sunshine League, established here in the early 1930s. Saltwater baths were part of this mix.

Built to enclose an area of seawater for bathing, baths filled with saltwater were seen to offer therapeutic, hygiene and recreational benefits. Auckland City Council built its first saltwater baths in the 1860s; one of the country’s few other saltwater baths still in operation, at Dunedin’s St Clair Beach, was constructed in 1884.

The St Clair baths were also constructed to protect seawater bathers from sharks – a factor that similarly motivated the establishment of the baths in Motueka.

Around 1930, the town formed a Safe Bathing Society, aimed at providing a safer place for sea swimming away from sharks. Its original solution was not a pool, however, but an enclosure made of telegraph poles and shark netting.

In 1937 the society began investigating construction of a permanent pool in which bathers could swim at any hour, irrespective of the tide, and the following year the first iteration of the pool was built – formed by a seaward wall and two side wings that sloped upwards onto the beach.

Unfortunately, the pool soon filled with sand. Sensing a solution, the New Zealand Army, which had a large training camp at Motueka Beach during World War II, used the pool as a target for explosives practice and blew out the land end of the side wings in the hope (ultimately misplaced) it would help the tide flush out the sand.

It wasn’t until 1952, as a result of a well-supported community working bee, that a fourth wall was built shoreside, ultimately creating the fully enclosed style of pool that remains today.

It was when the baths faced an existential threat around 1990 that Bob first became involved.

“The council was going to knock the thing down and get rid of the baths. So I, along with Nigel Duff and Bruce Dickinson, called a public meeting to discuss if we could save them. We had quite a lot of people turn up, and the three of us were nominated to look into the possibility of rejuvenating the baths,” he recalls.

Bob explains that Nigel, who had building and engineering expertise, played a significant role in the actual rebuild, while Bruce took care of the bookwork, meticulously keeping track of the money raised for the project. Part of Bob’s role was successfully applying for funding for the project, as well as liaising with the baths’ owner, Tasman District Council, and organising the many volunteers who helped with construction.

“Most of the work was done with volunteers and we had a huge number of local businesses contributing machinery and so forth. It was a large community effort getting it back in good working order.”

A major part of the work involved the reconstruction of the seaward wall, which had to be carried out as the tides allowed. Installing a timber boardwalk and decking around the pool was also part of the project, although Bob says second-grade timber ultimately had to be used after the original load was stolen from the site on the eve of the project.

LOCATION

Motueka is 46km from Nelson and near the entrance to Abel Tasman National Park.

The baths reopened in 1993, and Bob and Nigel have remained part of the team of around 12 volunteers (Bruce has since passed away) who maintain the facility. Between October and April this involves regular cleaning to remove sand, mud and other debris that washes in from the sea.

“We can only do it when the tides are suitable, but it’s around 10 days per cycle. We’ve got a wheel that lifts the floodgate and drains the pool, and as the tide is going out a team of people with ‘squeegees’ – basically big brooms – push the sand and so on out. It takes about an hour and a half, and when the whole pool is clean as a whistle, we put the floodgate down and the tide comes in and fills it up for us.”

Now aged 92, Bob leaves this “donkey work” to others, instead coordinating the volunteers and undertaking other administrative tasks, such as liaising with council contractors. He reports the council recently approved $10,000 of funding for ongoing maintenance, including repair work on the timber decking and boardwalk.

As another summer rolls around, the baths’ continued patronage appears testament to the health-giving properties it was originally conceived to provide.

As to whether the pool has served another of its original purposes, Bob remains unconvinced.

“I’ve been here for nearly 70 years,” he says, “and I’ve never seen a shark.”

heritage.org.nz/the-list/ details/7617