The pub in the tiny town of Underbool, in the hot wheatbelt west of Victoria, has been closed since 2016. A few years ago, its nine-hole golf course shut down. The town is closer to Adelaide than Melbourne. The nearest regional centre, Mildura, is 150km away. To access most amenities, Underbool’s 220 locals have to drive a very long way.
What Underbool does have, and what the town has been fighting for 10 years to keep, is a swimming pool.
From the day it opens in November through to the end of March, Underbool’s swimming pool is a community hub. Children learn to swim there. Teenagers spend school holidays there. Adults swim laps. Older people use it for water exercise and physiotherapy. Events like birthday parties, Christmas parties and barbecues are held there. Data shows Underbool residents use their pool at a rate more than triple the national average.
Lydia Morrison, 15, is first in the pool for 6am lap swimming on a Friday morning. Bill Morrison, 13, eats breakfast after his regular Friday-morning lap swim.
Sign up: AU Breaking News email
When Sonia McVicar moved to the town with her husband and young son 20 years ago to farm sheep, wheat and barley, the pool quickly became “a relief point” for her, physically and emotionally.
“You can get 45, 46C over summer for consecutive days,” McVicar says. Harvest periods in November and December were particularly tough. “You become like a single parent at that time of year because [the men are] out on the tractors and the harvesters for 14 to 16 hours a day … So, as a wife looking after the kids, I was taking my children to the pool.”
But McVicar soon learned the town’s beloved pool was in very bad shape.
Underbool resident Sonia McVicar spearheaded the effort to secure funding for the pool upgrade.
“It was an older pool – one of the pools that had been built by the community and funded by the community,” McVicar says. “It had severe water usage because of leaks.” It needed a new filter, shell, decking, accessibility alterations and much more.
“So I started writing to the council,” McVicar says.
That was a decade ago.
If Underbool didn’t have a pool, it would be a 100km round-trip to the next nearest water body: Ouyen Lake.
“A lot of people wouldn’t go and swim,” McVicar says. “It would just be too much of an inconvenience … You’d just say to the kids, go out and get under the hose.”
A nation of ageing pools
Like many regional public pools, Underbool’s was built after the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, when a wave of swimming pool construction washed over the nation in the 1960s and 1970s.
More than half a century later, those pools are falling apart. Since 2022, Royal Life Saving Australia has warned that an estimated $8bn is needed to repair or replace the 500 public pools reaching the end of their functional lifespan by 2030. Local councils struggle to fund maintenance and repair, with regional and remote areas most at risk of pool closure.
They also have the most to lose. The lakes, rivers and dams popular with rural swimmers are susceptible to toxic algal blooms, especially over summer and during droughts, making them less reliable than public pools.
An aerial view of Underbool pool at dawn.
Goulburn-Murray Water’s water quality coordinator, Bianca Atley, says in the 12 months since December 2024 the agency issued 17 blue-green algae warnings, including for Lake Eildon, Lake Eppalock, Lake Boga, Lake Charm, Hepburns Lagoon, Cairn Curran Reservoir, Tullaroop Reservoir and Laanecoorie Reservoir, all of which are used for recreation.
“The number of blue-green algae warnings GMW has issued over the years has fluctuated greatly,” Atley says. “Many factors influence the growth of blue-green algae including weather and nutrient levels but no one factor can be pinpointed as a cause of high levels of algae.”
On 13 February, Underbool and Tempy primary schools (which each have about 20 students) held a joint swimming carnival at Underbool pool. Students from each school were split into red and blue teams, to encourage interaction between children from each town.
Algal blooms are becoming more common globally as the Earth warms, with catastrophic consequences. The recent algal bloom in South Australia was described by experts as “one of the worst marine disasters in living memory”, rendering beaches inaccessible and killing more than 109,000 animals, according to the latest data from the SA Marine Mortality project. A 2023 La Trobe University report for the Murray-Darling Basin Authority concluded that the region could expect to see levels of toxic algae increase with the elevated temperatures, reduced rainfall, intensified storm events, and longer and more frequent droughts caused by climate crisis.
Pools are also the safest place to learn to swim, and the only inland water bodies patrolled by lifesavers. The exception is Apex Beach on the Murray River at Mildura, where a lifesaving service was established in the 1960s after a spate of drownings.
The 2025 national drowning report showed Australians’ swimming skills were at crisis levels, with a 27% increase in drowning deaths on the 10-year average. Royal Lifesaving Australia research shows people living in country areas are at higher risk of drowning in inland waterways, and benefit most from the access to swimming and water safety programs made possible by local pools.
Underbool takes water safety very seriously. They run regular swimming lessons and water safety classes, and regularly compete in pennant swimming events. In 2019, the local swimming teacher, Maureen Wandel, was awarded an Order of Australia.
Joanna Morrison began lifesaving at the pool when she moved into the area 10 years ago. She is passionate about water safety.
“Most drownings happen in beaches and rivers,” Morrison says. “And because our families from the country do tend to take holidays either at the beach or at the river, having the opportunity to learn to swim and survive, the different skills … without it, you’re just behind the eight-ball.”
Restoring the Underbool pool would cost $3m. It was easy to get the locals on board for a campaign, McVicar says. “We asked for some people to write some letters as support, and we were actually overwhelmed with the amount of letters we got. The schoolchildren, they wrote letters, they drew pictures.”
Eventually, Underbool convinced Mildura city council of the pool’s importance. Last year, a combined effort from the town and council saw the state government commit $1.16m to fund restoration works through its regional community sports infrastructure fund. The council will also fund more than half of the project, putting in $1.7m.
Annie Brown leaves the pool after her regular Friday-morning lap swim.
“Underbool [pool] would probably have been shut down if this work wasn’t going to happen, it just wasn’t safe,” the Mildura deputy mayor, Helen Healy, says.
Healy says it was “a big deal” for the council to spend so much money on a facility in a town of only 220 people, but Underbool residents had demonstrated that the pool was integral to life in the town, and that Underbool punched well above its weight with its economic contribution to the region.
“Quite often councils get a huge amount of flak for where they decide to spend their money, but there was not one negative about this,” Healy says. “This community is fully deserving of this.”
The works are due to begin after the pool closes for winter and will take two years to complete. But only in the off season.
“That was very important,” McVicar says. “We couldn’t have it shut over [the summer] period. It’s too vital.”
