Soaring mercury and cooling off memories

The soaring temperatures earlier this month brought back fond memories of “dog paddling” as a child in the dams on our property at Lyndhurst to keep cool under the watchful eye of my father, Rowland Hill Archer.
Like my father, I inherited a love of water. Dad was fortunate to have miles of the River Tamar on his doorstep at the family property ‘Landfall’, near Launceston. Dad had a governess who supervised his swimming lessons from an early age.
I can recall my father telling me how eels, which inhabitanted our dams, used to travel overland across the paddocks to other dams. My memory of them will always be that they were like slimy snakes.
When I was a student at Dandenong High School, we had regular swimming lessons at the Dandenong Baths. Life savers were always present.
The heat also reminded me of the days when I wrote stories about well-known Dandenong printer Claude Quist saving adults and children who found themselves in difficulties when swimming in the Dandenong Creek and of Max Curtain and his famous ‘wedge’ pool.
In the 50th anniversary edition of the Dandenong and District Historical Society’s Gippsland Gate magazine, published last year, Carmen Powell wrote of the wedge pool, which Max built in his backyard to “keep the kids out of that bloody creek”.
Max’s contribution to the youth of Dandenong during the 1960s and 70s was outstanding and one that should be remembered and recognised by the community of not only Greater Dandenong but beyond.
Carmen also wrote of a story written by society member George Walker who spent his childhood in Dandenong and who had memories of the creek’s “skinny dip” pools.
He said before Dandenong got its swimming pool on the highway next to the drill hall in 1926, the locals “cooled off” in summer in Dandenong Creek or headed for the beach at Edithvale. There were many swimming holes in the creek when it was dredged – the “quarry” east of the town near Kidds Road; the “wattles” just below the Pultney Street oval; the “reeds” in the cleared area beyond the Dandenong Park.
Browsing through a copy of the Journal dated 3 January 1940, a front page story caught my eye about a heat wave, in which people sweltered through three days of extreme temperatures similar to the exhausting temperatures that hit Melbourne recently.
The bushfire reports this summer have been alarming. I can recall my late father Rowland Archer responding to calls for firefighters when a fire swept through the forests in the Dandenongs. The smoke affected his eyes and it was three weeks before his sight was restored again.
During hot weather our animals were always looked after with adequate water supplies, and we were fortunate to have a number of underground wells and also above-ground galvanised tanks on stands. The long water troughs for the cattle, horses and sheep were checked daily.
Before the introduction of ice chests and the ice man delivering blocks of ice, my mother used to lower our coolgardie safe into one of the the underground tanks to cool the water.