About Us | Holland Park Swimming Club

Club and Pool History

The swimming pool owes its origin to the foresight of Mr A Duncan, the Head Teacher during the 1940's. After much fundraising, a pool was completed in 1951, but due to a polio epidemic the pool was not used until the following year. The pool design was unique - large but shallow - resulting in opinions such as - “useless”, “without a deep end”, “just a bird bath”. However, it was acknowledged as a good pool for teaching swimming. Being a ‘fill and draw’ pool, it was emptied, cleaned, re-filled twice a week and manually chlorinated.

In the early 1950's, the Holland Park children were nominated for events in the Primary Schools Swimming Championships - a carnival held in the Valley Baths in March each year. For a couple of years they were “also rans” but by 1959 Holland Park was the premier metropolitan school in junior swimming!!

School swimming races were held on Friday and Monday afternoons - in school hours with many mothers attending. Night meetings began so that the fathers could be involved too. About a dozen pressure lamps were originally used for lighting, which eventually led to the floodlighting of the pool area. The Holland Park State School Amateur Swimming Club was formed in 1970 through the efforts of the then school Principal, Mr Arthur Wood. The first President elected was Norm Seabrook.

During the 1990's the Club fundraised to deepen the pool and reduce the pool length to a standard 25m length. With the support of Education Queensland, the School and the P&C (Michael Wilson and Michael Dowling) the Club was able to complete a new pool over the 1999 winter season. Constructing a new pool enabled a number of other pool improvements to be made including a wet deck and a safety foot ledge around the perimeter of the pool’s deep end. New pool lighting was also installed using part of a $25,000 Federation grant completed by Jan and Tom Arrowsmith and Tim McGahan. The painted blue line around the pool still shows the outline of the original pool.

The remainder of the Federation grant was used to construct a new canteen for the 2003/2004 season. Tim McGahan, Bruce Wallace and Noel Park oversaw this project.

Due to the efforts of Wayne Baillie, Guy Gibbons, Kevin Nicholls and Tom Arrowsmith, the club was awarded a Brisbane City Council grant to extend the pool surrounds, which was completed in the 2003/2004 season.

Further in 2006/2007 the pool was heated as a result of the efforts of the club committee in obtaining a further Brisbane City Council Grant that has provided a more comfortable swimming environment for our members to utilise throughout the majority of the year.

During 2006/2007, the club purchased an electronic timing system, including an electronic scoreboard, the first swim club in the area to do so.

Due to efforts of the 2011/2012 Club Committee, particularly Lexia Willmington, the club applied successfully for a grant to replace the failing electronic stop watches and timing system. The club purchased the latest Dolphin Timing System, portable scoreboard and upgraded the computer software. In addition, the Club replaced the two (2) remaining out dated racing lane ropes and purchased an updated laptop computer.