There is a corner of Melbourne’s Banyule City Council that is sliced in two, the major arterial of Bell Street marking its middle. North of that divide is West Heidelberg, home to a diverse working-class community. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, West Heidelberg has a median weekly income of $1,257, with 27 percent of households being classified as low-income.
Thirty-four percent of households are in public or social housing, and almost 40 percent of the population was born overseas. In a poorer, multicultural suburb like this, public services that give people space to socialise, exercise, learn and grow are essential to quality of life. People living week to week can’t furnish their lives with all these private luxuries, so they rely on public amenities to live well.
The Olympic Leisure Centre was a modest but meaningful sanctuary for the people of West Heidelberg. Kids had their swimming lessons there, older residents with chronic illnesses did water therapy there, and Muslim women relished the women’s only fitness programs that let them access services in a culturally appropriate way. Not bad for a pool that was built for Olympic athletes in 1956.
But on 23 June 2025, Banyule council voted eight to one in favour of shutting down this sanctuary. The reason they gave for the decision was that the council did not have the money to maintain the facility—it had degraded due to years of neglect and would cost tens of millions to revitalise if they did want to break the pattern of accumulating disrepair. Instead, the council chose to close this vital community space. They must have known the scrutiny they would face, because they gave just five days’ notice of the vote.
Even so, they got more than they bargained for from the irate community. As soon as they heard about the slated closure, residents mobilised to save their beloved pool. They collected more than 2,500 signatures, held community rallies, wrote open letters and drew support from various advocacy groups. Even the Australian Medical Association, not known for its radicalism, pointed out the potentially dire consequences of losing the pool. In the face of all this, the council still went ahead and closed the Olympic Leisure Centre last summer.
Now let’s look south of Bell Street—to the Ivanhoe side of Banyule. The median weekly income in Ivanhoe is $2,232, only 2 percent of housing in that suburb is public housing, and the median three-bedroom house price is $1,285,000. Ivanhoe is home to a prestigious private high school, Ivanhoe Grammar, numerous parks, a well-stocked public library and, at its southernmost point, two golf courses side by side. It also ranks 80th of Greater Melbourne’s 481 suburbs for the highest number of backyard pools according to analysis by Nearmap (West Heidelberg comes in at 426).
All that luxury prompted a question for Banyule City Council—what gift could they give the suburb that has it all? Well, at a council meeting on 4 May, the council answered that question by voting to upgrade the Ivanhoe Aquatic Centre to the tune of an estimated $46.3 million. That’s right: precisely what was denied to residents north of Bell Street is being given to those to its leafy south.
Lucas Moore, a member of the Victorian Socialists and local resident involved in the Save Our Pool campaign, said of the decision: “A lot of people are pretty furious with Banyule council about the Ivanhoe announcement. I mean it’s class warfare really”.
Both Ivanhoe Aquatic Centre and the Olympic Leisure Centre were constructed for the 1956 Olympics, and both require expensive upgrades to continue functioning. But only one will get an upgrade. Moore recounts, “[The Save Our Pool campaign] were told straight to our faces that council couldn’t afford to even keep Olympic Village open for one more summer. We argued they should take out a loan and act on plans to revitalise the centre. We were told that wasn’t possible, and now they’re doing just that for Ivanhoe”.
Governments, from the local council all the way up to the federal level, deflect blame for their policies that benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor onto seemingly unchangeable circumstances detailed in reports written by expensive consultancy firms. But neglect and deprivation are not passive realities we have no choice but to accept. They are the long-term accumulation of decisions like this one. Moore puts it well: “It’s heaping disadvantage on disadvantage, privilege on privilege. Labor, Liberal, Greens, everyone on Banyule council should be ashamed of themselves”.
But the people of West Heidelberg did not take this lying down. They fought to defend their pool and to hold their representatives to account. To have defeated the council decision, the campaign would have had to raise the stakes through tactics like mass occupations, physical disruption and coordinated resistance by workers tasked with carrying out the closure. But what the campaign did achieve was systematically to rebuke every piece of propaganda the council put forward. They made it clear, through their petitioning and rallies, that the decision had no democratic mandate, and made sure the council wasn’t able to cover up its class bias and contempt for its poorest constituents.
The campaign also brought people together, which will be important for the next battle. Moore gives perfect voice to the community’s spirit of defiance:
“There were times when I thought the fight might be over, but people kept turning out. The petition exceeded all expectations. I lost count of how many council meetings we protested outside of. We hosted a pool party at the centre and hundreds of people came. We couldn’t save the pool, but we put up a hell of a fight.”
