Plucky, pioneering Gungahlin still lacks lots of the facilities Australians expect from civilisation (for example there are no cinemas, no shopping malls, no tennis courts and, incredibly, there is no Bunnings, yet). But now at last it has that hallmark of a civilised Australian conurbation - an Olympic pool.
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Until now, ever-growing Gungaghlin's approximately 60,000 souls have had to travel to Civic or to Belconnen to swim, but this Saturday sees the opening of the indoor Gungahlin Leisure Centre. It is a $28.7-million facility, to be managed by the YMCA, and is blessed with both a 50-metre and a 25-metre pool, the latter blended with a delightfully splishy-splashy and fountain-rich children's play area.
On Thursday, as centre manager Darryl Clemson gave The Canberra Times a poolside tour, it was only the splishing and splashing of the fountains (they spring up out of little tiled lily pads and the lily pads have pretty beetles and butterflies on them) that broke the otherwise eerie silence of the expectant, gleaming, pristine place. Occasionally, for busy last-minute work is still going on ahead of the opening to the public, there was the distant shrill of an electric drill. Every few minutes the musical constant splishing of the fountains was joined by a substantial splash as some tall, stylised flowers on four-metre "stalks" threw down small bucketings of water. How the kids will love it!
On Thursday the millpond-like waters of the 50-metre pool (above pale blue tiles that give those tropically warm waters a blue Pacific look) were bracing themselves for Saturday's onslaught although in fact, Clemson reported, the waters have already had a rehearsal, a baptism. Last weekend the Australian men's water polo squad practised there, and pronounced themselves delighted.
Highly civilised features of the centre's pools include a long, gently-angled ramp that takes the wheelchair bound down and through axle-deep water into the 50-metre pool's shallows. The smaller pool has some stepless, "beach" approaches, a boon for the very young and for those of us who have wobbly knees and complaining hips, enabling us to walk into the water in the effortless way one walks into the sea at a beach.
Outside through enormous windows there are substantial lawns of synthetic grass for swimmers to lounge and flirt on, and when you approach the whole long, low, blue-painted centre from the town centre direction there is a grand wall that prepares patrons for an aquatic experience because it is decorated with painted whales, dolphins and sharks and with what may be the finest public art jellyfish anywhere in the world.
One of the earliest, most enthusiastic plungers into the new waters will be Gungahlin Community Council president Ewan Brown. He's invested in the bargain of a Foundation Membership and of course, given that he and his council are in the vanguard of fighting for facilities for new and perhaps neglected Gungahlin ("this is the new nappy valley") he feels that the opening of the centre is of great pragmatic and symbolic importance for Gungahlin.
Although he's still ready to list the boons that Gungahlin doesn't have (for example he and his council hanker for a shopping mall, for some office blocks brimming with public servants, for some tall and teeming apartment blocks), he does point to how things are getting more civilised all the time.
For example he has faith that there will be a Bunnings, because a yawningly impressive chasm has been dug to receive its foundations. There is movement on the station in the matter of a cinema. He rejoices that there is now a high-quality enclosed sports ground and sure enough there it was on Wednesday, just a substantial footy kick from the Leisure Centre and decorated with a swish contemporary grandstand and with the slender, minimalist sculptures of state-of-the art floodlight pylons.
Brown feels that the centre is an especially essential thing for Gungahlin because the town has an unusually high population of migrants who come from nations where there's no beach culture. It's vital that the children of these folk be taught to swim and the new centre will offer swimming classes galore.
Chief Minister Katy Gallagher and Minister for Sport and Recreation Andrew Barr will open the Gungahlin Leisure Centre at 10am on Saturday.
