A short history of bathing in Australia

The earliest bathing infrastructure in this country was geological. Long before anyone built a pool or piped in mineral water, the Great Artesian Basin was pushing hot water to the surface across a vast stretch of inland Australia, and people were sitting in it. The water and the sitting predate European settlement by a very long time.

The habit of getting into hot water together is older here than almost any other shared ritual.

What the colonial era built

When European settlers began moving through the interior, they found the artesian bores useful quickly. By the late 1800s, small bathing spots had formed around outback bore drains in Queensland and New South Wales, some of them little more than a concrete trough and a hand-painted sign. The Pilliga Artesian Bore Bath, in Pilliga in New South Wales, is a direct continuation of that tradition. So are the Artesian Mud Baths in Eulo, Queensland. Both are thermal springs. Neither is a resort.

Meanwhile, in Victoria, the mineral springs around Hepburn and Daylesford were drawing visitors from Melbourne by rail. The spa culture that developed there was self-consciously European, importing the idea that taking the waters was a respectable medical activity. The bathhouse at Hepburn Springs dates in some form to the 1890s; Hepburn Bathhouse & Spa, in Hepburn Springs, still operates today. The Mineral Springs Hotel is there too. The whole area carries the layered quality of a place that has been doing the same thing across several eras of justification: first medicine, then leisure, now something people are less quick to name.

The long middle

For most of the twentieth century, communal bathing in Australia contracted. Surf beaches did the cultural work. Public baths closed or were repurposed. The idea of a bathhouse sat somewhere between medical facility and foreign habit, neither fully claimed.

The artesian spots in the outback kept going quietly. Bitter Springs at Mataranka in the Northern Territory was always there for anyone heading that way. These weren’t fashionable. They were just useful, the way a tap is useful.

What’s happened recently

The current wave, bathhouses in inner suburbs, hot springs operations on peninsulas and in regional Victoria, is genuinely new in scale, even if the impulse is old. Sense of Self in Collingwood, AUN Bathhouse in North Melbourne, Pond Bathhouse in Mornington, About Time Bathhouse in Torquay: these are recent. They sit in the same tradition as Hepburn but draw from different influences, Scandinavian bathing culture, Japanese onsen, Korean jjimjilbang, and they sit in suburbs instead of at the end of a day’s travel.

Whether this represents a trend or a more durable shift is hard to say from inside it. What’s clear is that the geography is still uneven. Victoria accounts for most of what’s currently listed on this site, which reflects where the investment has gone instead of where the desire is.

The desire, in some form, was always here. The water often was too.