page_title: Swimming hole
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Swimming hole / History
caption_attribution_description: Illustration for John Milton’s “Paradise Lost“
context_page_description: A swimming hole is a place in a river, stream, creek, spring, or similar natural body of water, which is large enough and deep enough for a person to swim in. Common usage usually refers to fresh, moving water and thus not to oceans or lakes.
  In the UK swimming at natural swimming holes has a long history and has recently become known as "wild swimming", especially since the publication of bestselling books on the subject by Kate Rew and Daniel Start. In southern Australia, a compendium of swimming holes was first characterised by Brad Neal in his 2004 publication of the first edition of the Guide to Freshwater Swimming Holes in Victoria, Australia.
  Nude swimming is a well-established tradition at some more remote swimming holes and is an attraction for many natural swimming fans, but in many parts of the world remains an illegal activity.
context_section_description: In Europe, as the nineteenth century dawned, a new era of contemporary artists were rediscovering the appeal of the swimming hole. The waterfall, surrounded by trees and mountains, was now regarded as the quintessence of beauty. William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas de Quincey spent much time bathing in the mountain pools of the Lake District. The study and search for the ‘picturesque’ and ‘sublime’ – an almost scientific measure of loveliness and proportion in the landscape – had reached epidemic proportions. The fashionable tours of Provence or Tuscany were replaced by trips to the valleys of Wales, and the dales of the UK's Cumbria and Yorkshire, as Turner and Constable painted a prodigious flow of falls, tarns and ponds.
  In southern Australia, swimming in natural swimming holes was popular until around the time of the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne.  In the first half of the 20th century there were several swimming clubs along the Yarra River in Melbourne , such as at Deep Rock, for example.  Numerous chlorinated, municipal swimming pools were built across Victoria in the lead up to the 1956 Olympics, which changed the community's swimming preferences to the local pool, rather than the local river.  The swimming clubs along the Yarra River closed in response to this change in preferences.  Some of these pre-Olympic swimming pools still exist, such as at Hepburn Pool in central Victoria, and Seven Creeks in Euroa.
caption: A man and woman at a swimming hole, in this case a creek.
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