BILL DECIS IS mad about water. He’s got nearly two million litres of it in his care. Every day he filters it, adds chemicals to it, pumps it this way and that through great pipes, takes morning and evening samples of it, and picks small imperfections off its surface with a strainer on a long metal pole. Teaching people how to move through water is the passion of his life.
His baby is Melbourne’s Fitzroy baths. He has worked there for eleven years. Thousands of motorists pass the pool every day on their way along Alexandra Parade off the F19 freeway, ignorant of the treasure which lies modestly concealed, rippling faintly in the early morning air, behind an anonymous cream brick wall just east of the Brunswick Street intersection.
The locals know where it is, though. Every summer fifty thousand swimmers and layabouts click through its turnstiles. Bill Decis knows, as do the parents of the area, that the neighbourhood pool is the biggest and cheapest child-minding centre ever invented. Bill’s been in the water game so long now that even when he’s on holidays or at the beach his eyes can’t stop their constant patrolling.
The blokes at the Royal Derby in Fitzroy call him ‘Johnny Weismuller’. He’s fifty-eight and has the powerful shoulders and tapering torso of the lifelong swimmer and water polo player. He’s a moulder by training, and did his apprenticeship at the foundry of H.V. McKay Massey Harris where the basic wage, he says, was created; but he’s a swimming coach, a teacher, by inclination and experience. He’s lost count years ago of the kids he’s taught to swim, of the champions he’s coached to victory, though he has a couple of suitcases bulging with memorabilia.
He is as brown as leather; his white shorts are pristine. The wraparound sunglasses he wears when he’s on duty have been in and out of fashion several times. He strolls round his pool with hands crossed behind his back, and his manner with those he considers miscreants is direct to the point of giving offence. He doesn’t care. He runs a very trim ship.
His is the disembodied voice which barks orders over the PA. ‘All right, you fellers, stop your running around. That boy who bombed, report to the manager’s office. I saw you. That little lass in the spotted bikini. You can’t swim. Go back to the shallow end till such time as you learn. Do that once more, that lad in the red togs, and I’ll have you out of the water, I’ll dress you, I’ll send you home.’ After each announcement a light hush descends on the mob; then hilarity reasserts itself. Hilarity is OK with Decis, as long as it’s disciplined hilarity. No one drowns at his pool, and no one gets hurt. If he has to be a child-minder, he’ll do the job properly. ‘I use the mike as a weapon,’ he says, ‘I believe we’re here to educate people.’
Bill Decis works at Fitzroy but he lives and coaches professionally at Footscray, where he was born, and he still calls Fitzroy ‘out here’. When he was a lad, the western suburbs were cut off from the city by the Maribyrnong, at the time spanned by only four bridges. The river was so clear, in those days between the wars, that from the top of a bridge you could see your mate underwater. Young Billy and his gang used to take particular delight in bombing violently beside the cabin cruisers which bore the leisured classes up and down the river on Cup days. ‘They used to have pianos going, parasols, the lot—us snotty-nosed kids would be waiting on the bridge, and as they came under we’d do a big honey-pot from forty foot up and drown ’em. Old Commodore Harding used to threaten to kill us.’
The Footscray baths opened in 1929. ‘Boys swam naked back then,’ says Decis. ‘Course, it was segregated. When we got togs we thought we were lucky. They were cotton Speedos, two and six a pair at Forges, and they had to last four years. Our mums were always mending them, sewing cloth badges over the patched parts. They were our pride and joy.
‘I taught my first pupils when I was twelve, and I’ve been in the game ever since. Of course, sport was different back then. It was our social lives, as well as keeping us fit. We went swimming to get better, not just to muck around. I’ve seen forty furniture vans lined up outside the old Beaurepaire pool near the Yarra there, each one decked out with the banners of a different amateur swimming club, for our annual joint picnic to Mornington. Those things went out, eventually, as sport became more individualistic.
‘Another thing that went out was all the illegal things we had to do to raise money to get our athletes out of the country—we sold sly grog, we had raffles, we ran crown-and-anchor games—everything illegal. It was the Australian way of life!
‘I got my merit certificate before I was fourteen, so for the last year of school my job was to keep the pool clean, with a mate. Back then there was no chlorine. The pools used to have to be emptied twice a week and scrubbed out with sand soap and ordinary scrubbing brushes. We didn’t have heated pools, either. We had to take the temperatures as they were and get used to it. People have changed. Parents send letters to the teachers now, saying the water’s too cold for the kids. The Education Department has set a limit of sixty-eight degrees—any colder than that and the kids don’t have to go in.’
On his office wall Decis has a wonderful photo of the opening ceremony of the Fitzroy baths in 1908. At the western end, where the brick wall now bears the misspelt sign AQUA PROFONDA, a throng of bewhiskered gentlemen and gracious ladies draw back their spats and skirts from the edge of the pool, upon which float two formally dressed persons in a rowing boat.
‘The Fitzroy Council don’t realise what an asset they’ve got in this pool,’ he says. ‘It’s the antique pool of Australia. It’s the only full-size open-air pool of Olympic standard within a two-mile radius of the GPO. Carlton? Small. Collingwood? Small. With a little bit of updating, this could be the best pool in the metropolitan area. We need to be able to heat the pool up to about seventy-five degrees in March and April, when there’s still plenty of sunshine. Many’s the Easter we’ve been closed during beautiful weather. We could extend the season by two months.’
Decis was on the barricades in 1977 with Fitzroy residents who tried to stop the F19 freeway from going through along Alexandra Parade. The freeway was forced through, and now Decis and his team have their work cut out to keep the pool in tip-top condition, for it lies east–west, parallel with the polluting roadway, ‘in the right position to cop all the rubbish that comes over the wall. We have to hose the decking twice a day.’
But the Fitzroy filter system, installed in 1948, is more than equal to its job. ‘It’s a beautiful unit—the Rolls Royce of filtration,’ says Decis with emotion. ‘With proper maintenance it should last a hundred years.’ Two-hundred-and-forty-six thousand litres an hour pass through its six sand filter cells. Once a month a sample of the pool water is sent up to the Microbiology Diagnostic Unit at Melbourne University. Proudly Decis shows sheaves of test results: ‘I love to see that water flow clear and clean.’
He throws the filter system on a backwash and goes outside to the testing point among the big cream-painted tanks in their wire enclosure. With alarming force the water from the system rushes to the outflow pipe a metre below where he is standing. ‘Young lad got sucked out through a pipe like that once,’ he remarks casually, yanking a few weeds out of a crack in the pavement as he waits for the moment to test. ‘Ended up in the Yarra. He was extruded into the Yarra. By the time he got there he was sausage meat. Not a bone left in his body.
‘Some more modern filtration systems have a porthole in the side so you can watch what’s going on, but we don’t need a porthole. We’ve got the visuals.’ He lowers a milk bottle on a string into the turbulence at the pipe entrance, then pulls it out full, holds it up and examines it against the sky. It is slightly greenish and murky with sediment. ‘See that? That’s all the muck the system’s taken out. If you took a bottleful out of the pool itself, I guarantee it’d be as blue and clear as that sky.’
In 1980 the eastern wall near the babies’ pool was knocked out and replaced by a cyclone wire fence, thus opening up one end of the baths to the outside world. A small, sunken grassed area was created along this fence, the first concession to comfort and conventional aesthetics in what had always been a Spartan institution with its expanses of bare cement and brisk fir trees.
But surprisingly few regulars lie about on the grass. Most are faithful to the high concrete stands, closer to the water and open to breezes. The tireless kids who swim, cark and swim again until it’s time to go home for tea despise the grass over there behind the bubs’ pool.
The grass needs no patrolling, for here the intellectuals congregate. A quick survey of poolside reading matter last weekend revealed a high concentration of serious material on the grassy area: Christina Stead, Barry Hill, William Thackeray, Katherine Mansfield, Marge Piercy, Doris Lessing, Charles Perkins, John Fowles, two volumes of an encyclopaedia on UFOs, an advanced French grammar and the RMIT Radiography Clinical Studies guide, while the other eighty-five percent of the pool turned up only one Spanish newspaper, one Age, one Women’s Weekly, one Time and one Dolly.
‘All that has no meaning,’ said a non-reader who had come to swim her twenty lengths. ‘Everyone’s the same down here, even the punks, once they get their clothes off.’
There is no leveller like a public swimming pool, particularly at four-thirty every afternoon when the sun is lowering, and the boss emerges from the store room with a great white hose lashing in his hands and commences his silent, inexorable progress round the concrete edges of the pool and up the high steps, driving before him with the powerful stream of water all grit, paper scraps, dead insects, icy-pole sticks and sundazed people. It’s the expulsion from paradise: there is no appeal. People leap to their feet, seize their pathetic belongings, and flee like lost souls before the blast.
The beauty of the Fitzroy baths is of an especially Melburnian kind: not thrusting itself forward, but modest, idiosyncratic, secret almost, needing to be imagined, sought out, discovered through familiarity. Bill Decis’s passion for the pool goes deeper than the simple proprietorial loyalty of the bloke in charge. It’s water that fascinates him. He has hundreds of Polaroid photographs of the pool in all weathers, at all times of day, undisturbed by bodies: glassy and pale at dawn, criss-crossed at noon by moving strings of light and shadow. The emotion provoked in him by this volume of water and all it signifies is not an indulgent, modern feeling. It is something altogether harsher and more old-fashioned—a bracing, steadfast sort of love.
1981