In 1998, deep into the summer holidays between years five and six, I bobbed at the edge of the Canberra Olympic Pool, squinting into the sun to watch body after body plunge from the 10-metre diving tower. Horsies, bombs, backflips - displays of bravado that challenged the staid norms of the public-service capital. "You know someone died up there? They did a belly-flop and split open - they had to close the pool so they could scoop their guts out of the water." Or so my older cousin told me. I didn't jump then, and now I am not allowed to.
The next time I went to the pool, 2018 was only a couple of weeks old. On the five-metre platform I milled about with the other punters contemplating the leap. These days the ladder up to the 10-metre platform has a locked gate over it, so the five-metre platform is as high as Canberrans can get. Next to me a group of boys, about 13, egged each other on to defy the barrier and ascend to the now forbidden heights.
"They don't ever open the 10-metre anymore," I interjected. I had asked at the front desk because I wanted to do what my 11-year-old self didn't have the guts to. "Is that because someone died up there?!" one of the boys asked in a flash, a spark in his eye. Twenty years later it was the same story, told in the same place, by boys of about the same age.
So, is it true? And if not, why has the myth endured for decades? What does the story tell us about the people who tell it? What are the meanings, mythical and tangible? And why has the 10-metre tower been closed?
Doug Boast is a softly-spoken IT guy now in his 50s. But as a teenager in the 1970s he spent a lot of time at the Canberra Olympic Pool, and his recollections show how the closure of the tower is part of a subtle, but pervasive cultural shift. The day my cousin told me the myth, his mother not only drove us to the pool, but sat watching the whole time, along with a lifeguard posted at the top of the tower, and several others around the grounds. Boast heard the same story, in the same place, 20 years before me, but paints an otherwise quite different picture.
"In those days your parents kicked you out of the house when you were young, and that was it," he says.
"They'd give you a little bit of money to go to the pool and buy an ice-cream or something, and the bus fare in there, and that was it. So you had to amuse yourself for the day."
This autonomy extended beyond taking the bus alone. In the 1960s, Boast's wife Lynette did competitive diving and was given the key to the pool so she could let herself in to train on the boards - she was in primary school. It was under this lax supervision that, aged 11, Doug saw one older boy hanging from the tower by his feet, smoking a cigarette before he dropped into the pool. "It was really common - like very, very common - for boys to clown around. You often used to get them jumping up as high as they possibly could off the 10-metre tower, and then doing this massive horsey bomb into the water...you'd get half a dozen of them jumping off at once."
Boast is not the only one who remembers such scenes. Therese Spruhan writes about the place of public pools in Australian culture on the blog Swimming Pool Stories, and in her forthcoming book The Memory Pool. She grew up on Sydney's North Shore, and she told me that back in the 60s and 70s, the diving board at Northbridge Baths, "was where the cool, tough boys hung out". The tidal pool was surrounded by a concrete boardwalk and, she said, "they would have competitions to see who could do a bomb off the board and go as close to the concrete without hitting it". That board has now been removed entirely.
Boast suggests that such behaviour was part of a chauvinistic culture in which men proved themselves by taking risks in public. "It was probably one of the ways that men of the time, or young boys at the time, could show off," he says. It seems that this is something that hasn't changed, even if the young men in question now jump from half the height. The Canberra Olympic Pool is managed by YMCA NSW, and centre manager Dallas Watt says it's predominantly teenagers, and mostly males, who use the five-metre tower these days. "There's a lot of guys here who do push the boundary," he says.
So, the story about someone dying - told mostly by young men - communicates the message, from one generation of daredevil to the next, that jumping is dangerous, and something only the brave will do. Those who jump undertake a rite-of-passage that marks the men from the boys.
Graham Seal is professor of folklore at Curtin University, and a leading expert on Australian cultural history. He has published extensively on the topic of Australian myths and legends, and when I told him the story about the diving board, he pointed me to several other examples, on the Internet and in his hometown of Perth. He says one function of these myths is to act as 'group identifiers' - "knowing the story, even if you don't believe it necessarily, or act upon it...gives you identification as a member of a particular group of people".
The fear the myth generates gives the rite-of-passage its meaning, but is it actually dangerous? The ACT government, which owns the pool, certainly believes so - which is why it closed the 10-metre platform to the public in 2015 (although members of the Canberra Diving Academy are granted access, but only under strict supervision and with the proper training).
Garry Gordon, a manager for the ACT Property Group, which manages properties owned by the territory's government, says the decision to close the platform was "based on specific safety provisions that the Royal Life Saving Society of Australia have set for safe pool operation". These guidelines state that a dive taken from a 10-metre platform can result in the diver entering the water at more than 64km/h, which creates a risk of bone, neck and spinal injuries. In 2012 there was a serious accident when "a patron with bone density issues" broke their back jumping off the tower. This, and a few other incidents, made it hard for the pool operator to get insurance, which led to the closure of the tower.
Back at the pool, manager Watt explained that the new safety provisions come down to the need for what's called a 'mechanical agitator' - a hose that sprays water onto the surface of the pool, or an air pump that creates bubbles from below (like in a spa) to reduce the surface tension. "Once you go past five metres in height, the physics comes in to play [and] without agitation [this] can cause serious injury and or death, as the guidelines state."
The Canberra Olympic Pool was opened in 1955, in anticipation of the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games, and Watt notes that while the pool evokes a lot of sentimentality from the public, it hasn't seen a lot of tender loving care over recent decades. "The investment hasn't quite been there to conform to those guidelines or regulations that come in for risk of injury," he laments.
So, no one ever died jumping from the 10-metre diving tower at the Canberra Olympic Pool. However, from an extensive search of newspaper archives, I found that at least two people have died as a result of accidents from 10-metre platforms at pools elsewhere in Australia.
In 1943, a 16-year old died when he hit another person after jumping off the high tower at the Adelaide City Baths, and in 1987 Nathan Meade hit his head on his way off the 10-metre platform as he trained for the Seoul Olympics at the Chandler Centre pool in Brisbane. That Meade was skilled enough to represent his country in the sport shows that no risk can be eliminated entirely. But whatever accidents or deaths 10-metre towers may have caused, they have not become any more dangerous since they were accepted as a benign part of the suburban landscape. Instead, their closure and removal is just one example of a tremendous cultural shift around how much danger our society considers acceptable. The threat of litigation that lurks behind it has made risk-management a household term.
The ACT government is, of course, not alone in its risk-averse approach to the tower. In her research about Australian pools, Spruhan has learned that diving towers have been removed all over Australia. "I've been doing a lot of interviewing people who spent their childhoods in all sorts of places around Australia, and every one of them mentions that there used to be a diving board. But of course that's gone now with public liability," she says.
Watt is very familiar with the legal ins and outs of managing what he describes as a "high-risk, high-consequence" aquatic centre. He explains that the YMCA is bound by the Public Pools Act, which was enacted in 2015 - the same year the tower was closed to the public. If they breach the act they can be found criminally liable, including, potentially, for accidents. The pool must also comply with a range of occupational work health and safety legislation enforced by WorkSafe ACT. Every lifeguard is trained to respond to potential spinal injuries, and every 'incident' in the diving pool is treated as though it might be a spinal injury. When these 'potential spinals' happen, the facility is shut down, the injured person is put on a gurney, and emergency services are called - just in case.
Boast says that while he never saw anyone die back in the 70s, he did witness plenty of injuries, including when a girl didn't jump away from the three-metre springboard with enough oomph. She cut her leg on the metal edge of the board and was bleeding by the time she hit the water. "I remember her hobbling away...She got out of the pool. There was a lot of screaming and carry on!" he says.
"But yeah, I mean, people just took her away, helped her, shrugged their shoulders and then kept on having a good time!"
But now, even if people can swim and get out of the diving pool themselves, they are still treated as though they may have a spinal injury. They are all put in a brace and the emergency services are called every time there is an injury at the diving pool.
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As a public servant, Garry Gordon has no illusions about the degree of these changes. He speaks frankly about how what he called 'supervision' and 'reporting' regimes have increased. Aside from a requirement to have qualified lifeguards, and a certain number of staff relative to the number of people swimming, the ACT government is now alerted within 24 hours of an accident, all of which are recorded (there were 305 last year across the ACT's five public pools, if you were wondering). "What we're obviously seeing today is a much more rigorous reporting regime, so that we learn from near-misses and incidents, so that we can minimise the risk of those occurring again," he says. "Today we're much more aware around safety...I think today is very different to what it was like when we were young kids."
While the platform hasn't been closed because someone died jumping from it, there are curious parallels between the dull bureaucratic rationale behind the tower's closure and the myth that youth continue to entertain. Rather than marking out those who have jumped as brave, as it did in the past, the myth now validates the closure of the tower. While the myth is folklore, and the decision to close it government law, they now say the same thing: don't jump from the 10-metre tower because it's too dangerous. At Canberra's Olympic Pool, life has imitated art. Graham Seal says this is a good example of what folklorists call 'ostension', which is the idea that "what we imagine through stories can actually become real, because life appears to replicate what is actually told in the stories". Perhaps it is not mere coincidence that the generation who told that story as kids are now the adults making the rules.
But what are the consequences of our safety-first culture?
Standing on the five-metre platform on a hot January afternoon I hear a girl (yes - there was a group of them) of about 15 say to her friend, "but what if I do die?" Like so many before her, summoning the courage to jump led her to contemplate her mortality and, ultimately, overcome fear. Later that day, after I'd towelled off and found some shade, I heard the girl scream. As she splashed down safely, a cheer erupted from around the tower.
"It's amazing how incredibly important things like this, which appear to be quite trivial, are," says Seal, himself the father of a teenage boy.
"There's a kind of an ongoing need for them to be somehow or other covered before you can move satisfactorily through your life, to the next life stage. I think that it's a very powerful imperative and I think that, even though the official culture decrees that we can no longer do such dangerous things, at least in public places, I think that young men and boys are going to find less public places, and less public things perhaps to do to cater for the same kind of needs."
But it is not only about adolescent bragging rights; navigating risk is an important life skill. While Boast is the first to admit that certain aspects of the culture he grew up in needed to change (he is thankful that attitudes toward gender roles have since matured), he strongly believes that closing the tower is not the right thing to do.
"I don't believe it posed an unacceptable risk," he says
"Now, it's arguable whether you should perhaps put a few more controls in it than when I was going there - so maybe stopping six or eight people jumping off at the same time. But to close it down altogether I think is just the wrong decision. I think people should face risks because facing risk is critical to solving problems." Having raised his own kids, Boast says he understands that adults "need to be able to solve problems in a risk averse way. And if you've never faced risk then you are impaired, or at least not as well equipped to assess that risk, and therefore you may come up with a solution to a problem that is more risky."
When Graham told me about ostension he explained that it works both ways, that as stories justify real-life actions, real-life events are reinforced by stories. He gave the example of an abduction at a shopping center. "In the very rare instances that that has happened, the legends about such events are recalled of course, and thrown around by people in the local communities, and they generate a kind of fear." Have we come to a point that fear about 'what might happen' has triumphed?
When I finally summoned up the courage to jump - from the five-metre platform, aged 30 - the feeling was incredible. The loss of control as I fell was exhilarating and, ultimately, liberating.
In fact it was almost the exact opposite of the feeling of stayed resignation that comes with accepting that I can't jump from the 10-metre tower as a grown adult, but I could have as a child.
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M. Harper Harrington is an anthropologist interested in telling stories that help us understand each other and the world we share.
