Queensland making a splash: Memorial pools and the body politics of reconstruction

AbstractIn April 2015,The Poolemerged as the winning proposal for Australia's exhibition at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale.1Creative directors Aileen Sage and Michelle Tabet explained that the pool was ‘a lens through which to explore Australian cultural identity’ and ‘aptly represents a distinctively Australian democratic and social space’.2In Australia, the public pool was popularised in the post-war period, particularly in Queensland where it offered relief from the long, hot and humid summers. Although Brisbane already had several floating baths along the Brisbane River from the mid-nineteenth century, large-scale, in-ground pool construction in the state did not start in earnest until the mid-1950s, when the personal and social benefits of recreational time with family and friends became well established. In Queensland, as elsewhere in the country, the government encouraged the construction of swimming pools, and many became memorial pools, dedicated to those who had fought to defend an Australian ‘way of life’. Their design was to reflect the civic and social foundations of the initiative, and in Queensland architects took delight in all the opportunities it afforded. The result was a widely diverging collection of predominantly humble and economical structures that were rarely ordinary or dull. Analysing three key pools that were constructed in regional Queensland between 1955 and 1965 — in Rockhampton, Mackay and Miles — this article draws out some of the defining features of Queensland's modern memorial pools, and highlights how this typology became the quintessential ‘Australian democratic and social space’.3