At 4.30 on most mornings, before the cafes of Newcastle have pulled their first espresso, Peter Wickham is already in the water. The retired nurse has made the drive from Maitland to Newcastle Ocean Baths for thirty years, completing a 1.5-kilometre swim before most of the city stirs. The swim matters, he says. But so does what comes after.
"It is our third place," says Wickham, president of the Friends of Newcastle Ocean Baths. He describes the post-swim congregation in the open-air change rooms: a retired scientist, a solicitor, former labourers, all drying off and talking in the salt air before migrating to nearby cafes when they open. It is the kind of informal community infrastructure that city planners spend millions trying to manufacture and rarely succeed.
Now that third place is under threat. Newcastle City Council has lodged a $40 million development application to revitalise the baths, a project being assessed by the Hunter and Central Coast Regional Planning Panel. Among its features: a licensed cafe, modernised toilets, and a large wave-shaped opaque roof over the historic open-air change rooms. The roofing proposal, first floated during revitalisation discussions in 2014, has never been popular. The formal DA has made it explosive.
Of 270 public submissions lodged in response, 257 objected to elements of the proposal. Some 170 of those specifically took aim at the change room roof. "If the open-air change rooms are taken out, say goodbye to heritage," reads one representative submission.
The heritage dimension adds real weight to this dispute. The baths were state-heritage-listed in 2024, a listing that acknowledged how the facility had reflected changing Australian attitudes toward nudity and morality over a century. When the baths opened in 1922, they were marketed with considerable fanfare: safe swimming, no shark scares, shallow water for children, and what the advertising proudly called the "best dressing accommodation in Australia." The open-air design was deliberate. Public decency, the listing noted, no longer required that sunbaking occur behind closed doors.
The council's case for enclosure rests on several grounds. It cites privacy recommendations from a NSW upper house committee inquiry into public toilets, two recommendations from which the NSW government endorsed last week. The council also points to reported incidents of indecency at Newcastle area baths, including Bar Beach and Merewether Ocean Baths, and raises concerns about drone photography and vandalism. Architects Tonkin Zulaikha Greer say the new design attempts to reproduce the effects of open-air change rooms using carefully positioned windows and minimal mechanical ventilation, with the roof protecting the heritage facade from the coastal environment.
These are not unreasonable points. Any council responsible for public infrastructure must weigh safety and liability. Heritage listings protect character but they do not freeze a facility in amber; they require that changes be made sensitively, not that no changes occur at all.
The counter-argument deserves serious consideration, though. Wickham and the Friends group say the safety case has not been demonstrated with evidence. Freedom of information requests, he says, produced no records of drone incidents at the baths. More than 2,500 people have signed a petition to preserve the open-air change rooms, which Wickham reads as a community verdict on whether people actually feel unsafe. "Speculative 'pervert panic' is being used to justify enclosing one of the Baths' most cherished features," he said. "This roof isn't responding to community experience, it's overriding it."
An epidemiologist from Deakin University, Dr Catherine Bennett, submitted in support of the enclosure, noting that pandemic-era research showed swimming was generally safe outdoors but that infectious disease transmission rose in enclosed spaces. That contribution cuts both ways: it supports open-air swimming but raises questions about enclosed change rooms.
The fundamental question is whether councils should be permitted to use precautionary safety arguments to override documented community preferences and heritage values when the evidentiary basis for those arguments remains thin. That is not a trivial question. If the standard for overriding community will is merely that harm is theoretically possible, then no piece of public infrastructure is safe from well-intentioned but evidence-light intervention.
At the same time, dismissing safety concerns entirely because they cannot be proven after the fact would be a different kind of recklessness. The council's decade of consultation, the redesign to increase roof height and natural light, and the genuine complexity of maintaining century-old infrastructure suggest this is not bureaucratic indifference to community feeling. It looks more like a genuinely difficult trade-off between competing legitimate interests: heritage, safety, accessibility, and the character of a place that has served Newcastle for over a hundred years.
Reasonable people are landing in different places on this one. The planning panel will have to decide where the balance lies. What the community has made unmistakably clear is that this decision carries weight well beyond the price tag of the development application.