What was the main convent building is now a Catholic aged-care facility. She wrote a letter to say that were the baths to become mixed, the nuns and boarders at her school would no longer be permitted to swim there.īrigidine, though far smaller that it was in the postwar years, is still in operation today. In 1946, when the council tried to open McIver’s to men, the mother superior at Brigidine convent, Randwick, came to its defence. In June 2018, the exemption, which had been valid until 2020, was modified to become “indefinite”. McIver’s was granted an exemption on the basis it was a place, not a service. In 1995 a local man took the committee that looks after the baths to court on the grounds that the baths defied the New South Wales Anti-Discrimination Act, which applies to services. The baths have twice had to fight to remain exclusive to women. A 1996 ABC radio story features a young Cate Blanchett as the voice of Durack, arguing the case for mixed bathing.

(Comments for other parts of the city include: “Man called me a bitch while I was entering my building” “I saw a man spit at a woman passing by for no known reason” “A man going around filming girls sunbathing around the outdoor showers”.)įanny Durack and Wilhelmina “Mina” Wylie, who in 1912 won gold and silver medals respectively for swimming at the first Olympic women’s swimming event in Stockholm, trained at the baths because they weren’t allowed to train with men. Another describes it as “my favourite place to be a woman in Sydney”. “The safest I have felt as an adult woman,” declares one accompanying comment. On an interactive map called FreeToBe, which asks women to log safe and unsafe areas in Sydney, several women have dropped “safe” pins at McIver’s. It lies at the foot of a two-storey yellow sandstone cliff face, crowned with railings, a grass bank, a cement pathway and change rooms.

Waves crash into the pool, spilling white foam into its far corners where, beneath the surface, small fish and the occasional octopus take shelter. McIver’s is a natural sloped hollow in a stone shelf, deepened and walled in on the sea edge.

Moons of madness bookshelf puzzle