The secrets of Box Hill's Surrey Dive, Melbourne's 'death trap' lake

Updated

On any given Sunday at a picturesque lake in Box Hill, in Melbourne's east, you'll find battleships, paddle steamers and speedboats cutting a swathe through the water.

The lake is home to the Surrey Park Model Boat Club, and more than one of the replica craft must've sunk to the bottom over the years.

If you believe the rumours, they wouldn't be the only things at the bottom.

The lake — or Surrey Dive as it's known — was once one of Australia's premier swimming venues and was the first, in fact, to be considered Olympic standard.

But it has a peculiar and sometimes tragic history that goes back more than 130 years.

Curious Melburnian Allan Smales lived in Box Hill in the 1960s and has memories of swimming at the site in his youth.

He asked us to investigate the history of Surrey Dive and whether some of the stories about it were true.

"Surrey Dive always held a slight fear in my mind whenever I went to swim there. I was always fearful of diving very deep into it," he said.

Allan remembers tales of 'the dive' being bottomless and of swimmers disappearing in its murky depths.

"There was a story going around that at some time in the past a guy took a very deep dive off the cliff side and simply disappeared," he said.

"Then, sometime later, that guy's body was found floating in Blackburn Lake."

Given that Blackburn Lake is close to five kilometres away, that would be some story.

So how did this mysterious stretch of water — almost perfectly circular and more than 100 metres across — become a renowned swimming venue?

The answer is both fascinating and tragic.

A big hole

Surrey Dive is not a lake at all — it's just a great big hole in the ground.

It was dug to provide clay for the nearby brickworks, which was established around 1880, and initially flourished as demand for new buildings in the area grew.

The brickworks still exists, although it hasn't operated for decades and has become a target for vandals and graffiti artists over the years.

Fenced off and derelict, its enormous smokestack still casts a shadow over the dive.

Production at the brickworks was suspended in 1892, after a downturn, and it didn't resume until 1905 under new ownership.

In the meantime, the enormous clay hole slowly filled with water from an underground spring that had reportedly been pierced as workers dug ever deeper.

There are tales of workers being trapped and drowned as water gushed forth from the ground, but no record of such an event exists.

In reality, the hole is likely to have filled slowly and steadily over the course of years, like somebody had left a tap on in a massive bathtub.

'A death trap'

Surrey Dive was known as a drowning hazard for years due to its extraordinary depth and the steep rocky cliffs around its edges.

The size of the hole, before it filled with water, was estimated to be up to 40m deep and 100m across.

It's not clear how many people drowned in Surrey Dive during its existence as a swimming hole, but it certainly claimed more than its fair share of lives, either through accident or suicide.

One police officer told an inquest into a boy's death in 1928 that the swimming hole was "a death trap", saying "if a swimmer took cramp in the middle of the water he would have no chance".

The hole had claimed lives well before even a drop of water lay in it.

Newspaper reports chronicle the deaths of at least two workers crushed by falling debris in the clay hole in 1890 and 1891.

But it was a death at the site in 1905 that would be a catalyst for the site's development into something more than a hole in the ground.

By that time, the dive was under the ownership of the Nunawading council, which was at a loss over what to do with what was, by then, a popular but clearly dangerous swimming spot.

Thomas Henry Walsh, 14, and a younger friend were throwing stones into the deep water at the edge of one of the site's cliffs when he overbalanced and fell. His friend reported seeing the boy surface twice before disappearing.

The search for Thomas Walsh went on for two weeks — council workers lost a number of grappling hooks in the deep water and even used 20 charges of dynamite to try to raise the body, without success.

Under significant pressure from the boy's family and sympathetic residents, the council gave serious consideration to pumping the hole dry.

An engineer estimated the amount of water in the pit to be 36 million gallons — the equivalent of around 50 Olympic swimming pools.

But before a decision was reached, the boy's body floated to the surface.

Surrey Dive is born

After the death of Thomas Walsh, the Nunawading council was left with the conundrum of what to do with the site.

It was leaning towards filling the massive hole when a group of local swimmers, who'd been using the hole unofficially, pressed to be allowed to turn it into a recognised swimming venue.

They argued they could use it to teach people how to swim, which would save lives.

Not everyone agreed. One reporter, writing in The Telegraph, said using the site as a swimming venue was an accident waiting to happen.

"A more unsuitable spot for swimming baths could not be conceived," he wrote, referring to the site's 60-foot (18m) cliffs on all sides.

"In fact, the place is a veritable death trap."

But the council relented, and the newly formed Surrey Park Swimmers Club was given approval to take over the site just a month after Thomas Walsh drowned.

The club would be allowed to use the stretch of water under a few conditions: that swimming be restricted to those aged over 16, that the council be relieved of any responsibility for people who chose to swim there, and that the wearing of swimming trunks be "rigidly enforced."

'It gave me nightmares'

The reputation of Surrey Dive as a swimming venue grew quickly and, before long, it was considered one of Australia's premier venues.

An impressive clubhouse and starting blocks were built along with dedicated water polo facilities.

In its heyday, up to 5,000 spectators would line the Surrey Dive's precarious cliffs to watch the country's best swimmers in action.

Brass bands would play at the club's carnivals and there'd be lifesaving and high-diving displays.

Getting the best view meant risking a life-threatening fall down a sheer cliff-face in your Sunday best.

The Surrey Park Swimmers Club hosted its first "Grand Aquatic Carnival" in 1907, which included the Mile Swimming Championship of Victoria.

Among those to take part was Frank Beaurepaire, who would later become an Olympian and world record holder before starting his successful tyre business.

Beaurepaire would win more than 200 state, national and international titles — fittingly, his 200th came at the Victorian Championships at the Surrey Dive in 1928, when he was nearly 40 years old.

As Surrey Dive's popularity grew, so too did the mystery and speculation about what lay beneath the surface.

The rumours struck a chord with visiting British Olympian Joyce Cooper, who confessed to finding the venue particularly creepy.

"In fact, it gave me nightmares," she told a local magazine after winning the Victorian Championship in 1934.

"Everyone told me it had never been fathomed and that hundreds of pounds worth of machinery had been sent to the bottom."

Secrets of 'The Dive'

Surrey Dive remained a competition venue until the 1930s when a new, more modern swimming complex was built adjacent to it.

Access to the dive was limited to experienced swimmers and its popularity began to dwindle.

A severe drought in the late 1960s sealed its fate and a decision was made to drain the pit and use the water to irrigate trees in the local park.

It was then decided, as a Bicentenary project in the 1980s, to fill in the hole and create a much shallower ornamental lake.

So, what was found at the bottom when Surrey Dive was eventually drained? Not much it seems.

Rumours of tonnes of machinery being at the bottom appeared to be no more than that.

Pictures from the time show mud — lots of mud.

Whatever workers did find at the bottom was apparently not worth making much of a fuss about.

If Surrey Dive does still hold some secrets, they're now buried beneath tonnes of rock and dirt excavated during local road projects and dumped at the site.

An early morning visit to the lake at Surrey Dive these days will see you share the space with dogwalkers, a few Tai Chi practitioners and some rather splendid ducks.

The few people the ABC spoke to there were mostly unaware of the lake's history other than that it used to be a swimming hole.

But nobody swims there now — only the ducks, and maybe some model boat enthusiasts trying to salvage a sinking steamboat.

Who asked the question? Photo: Allan Smales wanted to know about the history of Surrey Dive. (Supplied: Allan Smales) Allan Smales was born in South Melbourne, raised on his parents' dairy farm in north-east Victoria, and lived in Box Hill as a teenager in the 1960s. He would swim at Surrey Dive in the summer months and heard stories about the swimming hole's mysterious past. But he says he's never been back there, and is now a retired "gentleman of leisure", happily living with his partner of more than 21 years.

Topics: history, community-and-society, swimming, lifestyle-and-leisure, box-hill-3128, melbourne-3000, vic

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