Coburg Olympic Pool needs your help this summer

Come to the Olympic Pool Summer season community meeting at

Newlands Community Centre
Murray Road
Tuesday 11 November at 7.30 pm

The Coburg Olympic Pool is opening on December 1st, 2008. There will be a pool party on the 14th of December 2008 to celebrate the pool's re-opening and ride to pool day with free entry on the 18th of January 2009. Friends of Coburg Olympic Pool invite all supporters of the pool who have some time and energy to contribute to to making this summer a great season at the pool. So we're holding a planning session at the Newlands Community Centre on Tuesday, IIth of November at 7.30pm. BYO wine, chocolate and enthusiasm. Tea and coffee facilities are available.


Image from the Coburg Courier, 11th of November, 1961

We are hoping to form some teams to
help with events, eg publicity, screen printing, stall minding etc

• work toward improvements at the pool eg petition for extended hours 
• work on the long term preservation of the pool eg history project, building membership of FCOP etc
• write articles, interview people and take photos for the website 
• It should be heaps of fun. Hope to see you there!

FCOP Committee

the diving board that was

by Janet Grigg
This is a picture of the Coburg Olympic Pool diving board I took last summer. It is suddenly, this week, no longer there. Without any warning, an important piece of local history has been reduced to rubble.



This diving board had been closed since 2003 as the the Moreland Council stated that it did not comply with FINA safety regulations (international governing body for swimming. The rungs on the high board had been removed, presumably so that until the pool closed in 2006, there was no danger of misuse. There has been talk of the diving boards being replaced with something that met current safety standards, but the Friends of Coburg Olympic Pool have believed that the diving boards have significant heritage value. The diving boards could have been left as they were, in their shapely glory, pending a heritage survey, and the black diving pool fence extended to allow for another, useable diving platform to be installed at the same time. It didn't have to be an either/or proposition.

Now we will no longer see the glint of steel amongst the trees on a hot day. Even if the towers were to be reconstructed in a similar style, something of their essence, what made them unique in the first place will still be lost forever.

More pictures of the diving board here. If anyone has any pictures of the diving board (old or recent), we'd love to take a copy and record this part of the pool's history for the future. Please email me if you can help out in this way. 

It's still going to be great at the pool this summer, and we're going to focus on the positives, but as I said before it didn't have to be this way.