Replica recalls daysof bathing boxes

THE Torquay & District Historical Society has created a replica of a well-known feature of the town’s beach history and will unveil it the weekend.

From the early 1900s, the Torquay foreshore was adorned with a colourful variety of bathing boxes that allowed the growing number of beachgoers at the time to put on their swimwear and store their belongings and picnic gear. Before 1920, the state government’s Lands Department collected a fee for the boxes.

From 1920, when the foreshore was handed to locally appointed trustees, a register was kept of the owners and the licence fees came into local revenue.

The register shows the height of the popularity of the boxes was in the mid-1930s, when there were 189 of them.

Owners were both local and from Geelong, as well as from as far away as Ballarat and Bendigo.

Titles were often associated with houses in Torquay, meaning someone who bought a house in the town would also get a bathing box.

By the 1950s, the bathing boxes started to disappear. They were beginning to be in a poor state of repair and subject to the drift of sand, the wind and the sea. People were also buying holiday homes in Torquay and thus had no need of a bathing box.

The foreshore was also changing in in a process of renewal to stop the drift of sand and erosion.

By the end of the 1950s the last bathing box had been removed.

For some years the Torquay and District Historical Society tried, without success, to find a restorable original box but ultimately decided a replica was the only alternative to mark this key part of Torquay’s history.

Society members began the project before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and have now built a faithful replica of a bathing box in the garden of the Torquay Old Police Station at 18 Price Street, where “History House” contains the archives of the Society.

The box contains records and a pictorial history of the old bathing boxes, as well as a display of old swimming costumes and swimming aids.

It will be officially opened this Saturday, October 1 at 2pm, followed by afternoon tea.