Krambach Pool

How the pool was nearly lost — and saved

The pool first opened on 18 April 1987, funded by local fundraising on land donated by a resident — genuinely a community-built facility from the start.

In October 2023, a MidCoast Council operations review recommended closing Krambach Pool entirely, along with major changes to several other district pools. The proposal caught the village by surprise — nobody knew it was coming until the council meeting agenda was published online on Friday, 20 October. Locals mobilised within days, turning out in force to the public forum ahead of council's ordinary meeting that month.

It worked. Rather than closing the pool, councillors instead ordered a feasibility assessment into continuing and upgrading it. Out of that campaign came the Krambach Pool Action Group, which kept up the pressure through council's ongoing consultation process. At a council pop-up session at the pool on 12 December 2023, attended by around 70 locals, the Action Group's Laura Pennington put the community's frustration plainly: people were “still hurt about the sudden announcement that the pool would close and are struggling to understand why they weren't consulted weeks, if not years, ago.”

The upshot: Krambach Pool stayed open. It now runs unsupervised with entry managed through an electronic system and a paid season membership — one of the outcomes of that same review — and, thanks to a village that showed up when it mattered, it's still here for the next generation of kids to learn to swim in.