Bronte Baths

This guide to Bronte Baths in Sydney centers on a handicap swimming race here in 1898, when a ten-year-old boy named Alick Wickham, working as a house-boy after arriving from the Solomon Islands, lined up against grown men using a stroke he had learned swimming the lagoons of Roviana. It traces the pool's own origins as a tidal bogey hole carved into sandstone in 1887, long before lane ropes existed. Listen at the cliff edge, where the sandstone drops straight into the water.