A world record high dive into the Yarra in

1918 – not something you'd expect with a

river like this, which has never seemed

especially deep and whose murky brown

waters are hardly inviting. Pausing on the

bank a few hundred metres upstream from

Dight’s Falls, I read the historical plaque

again, looked across the water to the cliffs

opposite – layers of pale brown and cream

sedimentary rock studded with small trees –

and tried to imagine someone jumping off the top. Well done Alick Wickham, I thought,

whoever he may have been – it's not something I'd choose to do myself.

I walked past these cliffs at Deep Rock regularly, occasionally giving the plaque another

glance and trying to imagine the area as the popular local swimming hole it used to be in

the early decades of the twentieth century. One day, reading about Wickham’s feat again,

the height of the dive – a very specific 62.7 metres – snagged my attention. The cliffs

were reasonably impressive, but trying to

estimate their height – well, I'd have guessed

somewhere in the region of 30 metres, using

a somewhat rubbery technique involving

imagining very tall people standing on each

others heads. The sign did say that Wickham

dived from a tower, but even so – it just

didn't seem to add up.

My interest was piqued sufficiently to plunge

into the internet when I got home.

Surprisingly the Guinness Book of World

Records failed to mention the highest dive,

though I did discover the longest dive by a

pig (3.31m by Miss Piggy in Darwin, 2005)

and the youngest person ever to dive to the

wreck of the Titanic. Googling "world record

high dive" seemed to suggest that the record

was held by French stuntman Oliver Favre,

performing a cliff dive of 54 metres in 1987, severely injuring himself in the process, and

beating previous jumps by Randy Dickson (53.3 metres, broken leg) and Dana Kunze

(reverse triple somersault from 52.4 metres, miraculously unscathed, and watchable on

YouTube by anyone who doesn't suffer from vertigo). A dive of 62.7 metres into the

Yarra was seeming even more improbable. Another search for "Alick Wickham record

dive" however turns up plenty of references to a "205 foot 9 inches" dive into the Yarra,

"a world record which still stands" according to the Sport Australia Hall of Fame. The

deeper into the search results I sank, the murkier the whole thing got.

The newspaper reports of the time should, I thought, provide a bit more clarity. A quick

search soon pinpointed the date of the dive – 23 March 1918. But as to the height – even

those who were there at the time couldn't agree. It was advertised in the Argus the day

before as 250 feet:

Prince Wickyama? Presumably Alick Wickham, complete with a new moniker more

appropriate to the breathless hyperbole of the rest of the text.

In the next day’s papers it had dropped to 205 feet – possibly the previous advert had

simply transposed a couple of numbers:

DEEP ROCK CLUB CARNIVAL.

The patriotic swimming carnival which will be held on the Yarra, near Dight's

Falls, this afternoon has been organised by the Deep Rock Swimming and

Lifesaving Club in aid of the State War Council's Fund. Councillor Tapner will

declare the carnival open at 2 pm. Most interest will centre in a thrilling dive by

Alec Wickham, the well known swimmer. A special platform has been erected,

and the length of the dive, as officially measured, will be 205ft. Wickham will

compete in the Deep Rock Hundred and 100 yards Breast-stroke Handicap and

"Dicky" Cavill in the Hundred.

By the time the event was reported in the Monday papers, further doubts had appeared

about the real height of the dive: "The height of the platform appeared to be anything

from between 100ft to 150ft but officially it was claimed to be over 200ft", said the Argus

correspondent. The "still standing" world record was beginning to look like nothing

more than a typically extravagant sporting promotion by the President of the Deep Rock

Swimming & Life Saving Club – John Wren.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Everybody was aware that John Wren was a patriot – he wasn't shy about letting people

know. When he offered £500 to Australia's first Victoria Cross winner in the Great War it

caught people's attention, and if some felt that it was in poor taste, he followed through,

not only giving Albert Jacka the money but setting him up in his own business. Despite

being a wealthy businessman, Wren himself enlisted as a private in the Australian

Imperial Forces at the age of 44 – amidst great publicity – before he received a medical

discharge some months later. His friendship with Archbishop Daniel Mannix

notwithstanding, he was also a staunch supporter of conscription.

It's also fair to say that he enjoyed his sport. Though

short – and bandy as a result of an early broken leg

– he was a useful cricketer, footballer and boxer in

his youth. A colourful life was capped by a legendary

death of a heart attack following Collingwood's 1953

Grand Final win, after he had pushed his way behind

the goalposts for the last quarter as Geelong were

making a spirited comeback against his beloved

Magpies. It was the turf though where he made both

his fortune and his reputation. His Collingwood Tote

engaged in a running battle with the Establishment

for many years, and by the time it was closed down

he was already a rich man, no longer reliant on the

proceeds of gambling on other races but owner of

several racecourses himself. As well as founding the

Victorian Trotting Association he was also

diversifying his interests into other sporting arenas where there was money to be won,

such as cycling and boxing. Rightly or wrongly he developed a reputation as a race fixer.

In 1905 he moved into boxing promotion, and within a decade his Stadiums Ltd

company had a stranglehold on the sport throughout the eastern states. He got involved

with wrestling too, an activity even more associated with over the top publicity than

boxing – and possibly as much connected with his entertainment interests as his

sporting ones, for as a sideline he had purchased several Melbourne theatres and

suburban cinemas.

Not that he neglected to support sport in the local community. Apart from his lifelong

passion for the Collingwood Football Club, as President of the Deep Rock swimming club

he gave money towards the creation of a swimming basin along a stretch of the river at

Yarra Bend where the young men of the area would meet for both recreational and

competitive swimming. The club also taught lifesaving techniques, a vital skill at a time

when people regularly drowned in the Yarra. Deep Rock was not that far from where

Wren lived, as it happened – he never liked cars, preferring to walk from his home at the

top end of Studley Park down Johnston St to the city – and on his way he would have

passed not only the site of his old Tote, but pretty close to the swimming basin as well.

Patriot, sportsman, showman – what better way for John Wren to combine his passions

than to stage spectacular sporting events to raise money for the war effort? He had

mixed these elements before: his boxing programs were frequently interspersed with

vaudeville performances, a 1915 example featuring Lilian Thomas singing "Your King

and Country Need You", comedians, gymnasts and acrobats as well as "Male

Impersonator" Miss Elsie Norris. At some point, perhaps watching the swimming races

down at the Deep Rock basin, looking up at the cliffs across the river, Wren conceived

another plan – a swimming carnival, to be capped off with a world record high dive into

the Yarra, entry sixpence, all funds to go to the Returned Soldiers Amelioration Fund.

That would pull a crowd, surely, especially with a few puff pieces in the papers in the

days beforehand. But who could perform the dive?

Perhaps Wren already had Alick Wickham in

mind when he came up with the idea. Wickham

was well known in the Australian swimming

world: the teenaged Solomon Islander had

stunned watchers with his speed at the Bronte

Baths in Sydney in 1901 by using a radical

swimming style. According to legend, a

swimming coach cried out "Look at that kid

crawling!", and thus the Australian Crawl was

born. In reality, the Cavill brothers had been

experimenting with the stroke for a couple of

years, but it was Wickham's use of what was

the standard swimming technique in the

Solomon Islands that really captured the public

imagination. His successful swimming career

was matched by equally significant

achievements in the still new sport of diving,

where he dominated the NSW state

championships. Again, his background had

served him well, as high diving into the

Roviana Lagoon from the sea platforms known

as ku-kus was a well-established recreation for young Solomon Islanders. Wickham

himself started a troupe called the Roviana Divers which performed at various Sydney

swim meets in 1907.

Alick Wickham himself was considered "exotic", and his achievements further fostered

an emerging racial stereotype of Pacific Islanders as excelling at aquatic sports, as

'nimble savages'. Despite racially derogatory terms being applied to him in a small

number of early press reports, he was more commonly referred to as a "dusky

champion", copper-pelted or bronzed (an increasingly positive term given Australia's

emerging beach and sun-worshipping culture). The name Alick Wickham, though,

however well know to contemporary swimming aficionados, was apparently not seen as

sufficiently colourful. This perilous

diving feat would now be billed as

being performed by "Prince

Wikyama". I can find no evidence

that this name was used either

before or after the Deep Rock dive,

and it seems to have been a

creation of Wren's publicity

machine, already attuned to the

crowdpulling nature of exotic

ethnic identity through the regular

promotion of wrestling matches

involving such luminaries as Big

Chief Little Wolf and his "Indian

deathlock". The name was probably

also influenced by Duke Kahanamoku, the pioneer Hawaiian swimmer and surfer whose

visit to Sydney in 1914 was an important moment in the development of Australian

surfing culture. "Duke", though, was the name Kahanamoku was christened with rather

than a signifier of royalty. Either way, the use of the name Prince Wickyama and

hyperbole of the advance advertising was reminiscent of the purple prose ("the greatest

Fistic Festival ever presented to the Australian people") churned out by Wren's boxing

promoter, Barney Reynolds – and though Reynolds had died a couple of years earlier,

Wren had obviously found a worthy successor.

Wickham apparently disliked his new stage name, which raises the question as to why he

chose to perform such a dangerous dive, one for which a world record was claimed and

which was certainly significantly higher than any dive he had previously performed. A

couple of days after the event, he indicated that he "was pleased to do anything he could

to help the soldiers": his younger brother Ted had already been killed in the war, and he

himself would have been fighting in France had his offer of service not been rejected.

Wren also gave him £100, but this seems to have been after the fact rather than an

agreed payment. Perhaps Wren made up his mind to present Wickham with the gift once

he had seen the dive and belatedly realised how much of a risk had been taken.

Wren and Wickham inspected the dive site on the day before the carnival. The latter had

walked out along the platform over the river. Asked what he thought, he said "It's pretty

high, but it's an ideal spot for diving… come over close to the edge and have a good look

down Mr Wren”. The latter jocularly excused himself on the grounds of an urgent

appointment elsewhere: "I'll get all my looking through field glasses tomorrow, from

across the river". Or so runs an unattributed story published forty years after the event.

Other accounts have Wren tricking Wickham by building the tower to increase the height

of the dive only after an initial inspection the day before. Wickham, seeing the new setup

only on the day itself, felt unable to back out without disappointing the huge crowd

despite his concerns.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

The big day itself was everything that Wren had hoped for, crowds, spectacle and money

raised for the returned soldiers. Even the weather was perfect, fine and warm, running to

hot in the afternoon sunshine.

Several independent estimates put

the crowd at over 60,000 people,

and whilst some broke through

the barriers and got in for free, the

police restored order in quick and

determined fashion. Spectators

spread out along the banks of the

Yarra and up the grassy slopes

behind for half a mile, scores

deep. They climbed trees, perched

on the clifftops, clung to shrubs

and pottered around in canoes to

find the best vantage point. Many did not see the heats and final of the Deep Rock

Hundred during the afternoon, contested by Wickham and Dick Cavill amongst many

others, Wickham finishing second just behind local hero Carter after giving him a

sporting head start of several seconds. But those that missed the swimming did not really

care: they were waiting for the dive. At 5 o'clock Wickham was rowed over the river in a

canoe, and as he climbed the track up to the clifftop and then up the huge wooden

platform built yet another 30 feet higher on top of it, the hubbub began to drop as the

crowd found focus.

As Wickham reached the top of the

platform the crowd broke out in a

loud cheer, which quickly died away

again as a bugle sounded. He

walked out to the edge to silence.

Later newspaper reports stated the

he stood for some moments

surveying the scene. Looking at his

diminutive form one could more

easily gauge the magnitude of his

task, and it seemed too hazardous

for any man to undertake. He

turned back, spoke to the officials

on the platform, and returned to

the bank. A feeling overcame the

crowd that he would abandon the effort. (Wickham said afterwards that his hesitation

was to give people plenty of warning before he dived and that he had always felt

confident). He returned to the platform, whereupon the Expeditionary Forces bugler

sounded a second note, Wickham crouched, once, twice, jumped. No-one breathed.

Complete silence as he fell. His body quickly assumed the graceful curve of the swallow

dive, and the speed at which he descended thrilled and even terrified the spectators. He

rotated his arms rapidly to maintain balance. Towards the end he seemed to crumple

slightly, and there appeared to be a danger that he would strike the embankment but

he rapidly recovered, and made a

beautiful entry… he took the water head

on, with hands crossed to act as a break

in as perfect a dive as could have been

seen. He was in the air for two and a half

seconds. When his face re-appeared

above the surface, smiling, the storm of

applause … reminded many of the wild

enthusiasm that followed Carbine's

success in the Melbourne Cup of 1890.

Amongst the deafening noise, hats were

thrown in the air, some into the river,

where they floated downstream towards

the falls. Wickham was plucked out of

the water by a launch, Wren himself

lending a helping hand and nearly falling

overboard in the process. The boat then

took Wickham up and down the river

past the crowds to receive applause. He

made no speech – Wickham said he

would rather dive off the cliff again than

do so. He later told reporters that he had

full control of himself after the first 30

feet of the flight, and experienced not

the least anxiety. He described the sensation of the early stages of the descent as much

the same as that experienced in the descent of a lift.

A fine day's entertainment was rounded off by "an exhibition of plain and fancy diving"

from the lower height of 70 feet, by Mr W Griffiths, and a "very entertaining display of

eccentric diving was given by Corporal Levison, Messrs J Ford, D O'Connell and others".

A good time was had by all – well, almost. Amongst the glowing praise in the Melbourne

press over the next few days, a couple of dissenting voices could be heard. The Weekly

Times gave low marks for the entry (did not strike the water too neatly) whilst the

Australasian wondered what the point of it all was: “What good purpose these foolhardy

feats serve is hard to conjecture. Like the man who skates for 24 hours at a break, or

starves for so many hours, and desists only through exhaustion, diving feats from such

heights fail to achieve anything. They are extremely perilous, and in the case of Wickham

– the dive associated with great danger, as it was, for the least mistake would have meant

death – was a severe tax on his nerves, for when he reached the diving stage he was said

to be prostrated. These dives fail to entertain, and they should be discontinued.”

In assessing the entertainment value, the reporter was out of step with the views of the

tens of thousands of hat throwing spectators, and as to what good it did – well, the

thousands of pounds raised exceeded the most hopeful projections, and Wren chipped in

an extra £1000 himself.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

This then was how events unfolded according to the eyewitness accounts of the time.

There was apparently considerable scepticism about the reported height of the dive,

stemming no doubt from the firsthand experience of those spectators who, like myself,

looked at the cliff, tried to do the maths and ended up stroking their chins and furrowing

their brows. Independent testimony was sought. The Brisbane Worker reported that the

“height of Alick Wickham's recent sensational dive into the Yarra is now authoritively

given as 205ft 9in. That is the altitude attested by Sergt. F. Smith, of the State War

Council an Melbourne, as follows: 'This is to certify that I erected the scaffolding from

which Prince Wickyama (Alick Wickham) made his sensational dive at the Deep Rock

swimming carnival, which was held at Studley Park on Saturday, March 23, 1918, and I

hereby testify that the exact distance from the platform to the water was 205ft 9in.' The

certificate, of course, puts the matter of the height beyond question, despite assertions

which have been made throwing doubt upon the remarkable nature of the feat. It is a

world's record.”

The word of Sergeant Smith was enough apparently for

the editors of JJ Miller's Sporting Annual and Athletic

Record, and the dive was immediately fixed as a new

world record in the 1918 edition, beating GW Clarke's

165 foot dive from the Halstead Bridge in Chicago in

1897. It has appeared intermittently in lists of world

records ever since. It remained in Miller’s Annual until

1963, when the high diving category disappeared. The

first Guinness Book of Records was published in 1955,

with the first Australian edition in 1972, but insofar as I

can tell the dive has never made it into either of these

publications: they still list Oliver Favre’s 176 ft dive in

1987 as the record, though they also list survivors of

suicide attempts from high bridges: from Sarah Ann

Henley, who in 1885 jumped from Clifton Suspension

Bridge only to have her 250 ft fall broken by her dress

acting as a parachute, to the number of survivors of the

240 ft drop from the Golden Gate Bridge in San

Francisco.

Compendiums of sporting statistics took off in the late 1960s and 1970s, and Wickham’s

dive reappears in the 1968 Ampol Book of Australian Sporting Records. The account

here though sprouts curlicues of titillating detail that were nowhere to be found in the

eyewitness reports of the Argus, Age and Herald. Wickham had been wearing no less

than THREE costumes, all of which were stripped from his body on impact.

Furthermore, “For days he was in a semi-coma and cried with pain if anyone touched his

body”. Tracing these stories backwards, the claims are made earlier in a 1959 Sydney

Daily Mirror article which stated that "Wickham refused to come aboard until a rug was

draped around him, for the impact of his body hitting the water had ripped his costume

off". Some damage to his costume is not on the face of it implausible: recent accounts of

very high dives where the diver enters the water feet first have mentioned that the

bindings on the feet and legs have been shredded. A more recent and well-regarded book

on the history of swimming, Haunts of the Black Masseur, takes it a step further: days in

a semi-coma becomes a week in a coma; and Wickham no longer needed to be touched

to cry out with pain, only to be talked to. In 2010, And the Crowd Went Wild: Sporting

Days that Thrilled a Nation covered the event and noted the discrepancy between the

newspaper reports of the time and the “folklore and legend that built up around his

dive”, but concluded only that the discrepancy was a “mystery” as “there is no doubt that

some elements of those disparate interpretations are close to accurate considering his

monumental drop to the water”.

This folklore seems to have sprung from a short article published in the Sydney sporting

newspaper The Referee nearly a month after the dive, on 17 April 1918. Journalist W.F.

Corbett reported a chat with Wickham, who was living in Sydney with his wife and

working on the tramways. Wickham’s account, at least in Corbett’s version, is quite at

odds with that which he gave at the time, when he told reporters he had been in full

control and had experienced no anxiety.

“looking down at the water and the people the sensation was something I am not

likely to forget soon. To tell you the truth I would have gone back to the earth

again could I have done so with decency but the fear of being branded a cocktail

held me. Death, I thought, was preferable to that.

Nerves! Never knew I had any till then, and they were strongly in evidence. I felt

rattled. I walked to the edge and looked down again. Ugh! I literally shook. And

when somebody cried out, “Don’t do it, Alick” I reached the verge of collapse.

How did I feel during the flight? Well, I can’t exactly tell you. All I know is that I

screwed myself up to a do-or-die tension, and leaped out into space.

Down I sped – 12st 10lb of solid man. The velocity was terrific as long as I was

conscious. Bye and bye – yes, there was a bye and bye for me, though to the

spectator the whole thing was a matter of moments – the displaced air appeared

to enter my nostrils and moth and gather in my head until that part of me felt like

a balloon.

Soon my ears ached badly. They were in a terrible state. And then – well, I can tell

you no more. What happened, for some time afterwards was a blank to me. I

could not say how I reached the water or how I struck it. But I do know that I was

sort and bleeding in places from the chest to the waist. My costume was torn from

neck to knee.

Must have hit the surface with my body you think. So do I.

They told me I was lifted unconscious from the water and, ten minutes

afterwards, when somewhat recovered, I had no idea of how to draw my pants on.

I could not leave my bed till four days had elapsed.”

A dramatic account – but if he had hit the water unconscious, quite apart from the fact

that his survival would surely have been unlikely, it is hard to explain the tens of

thousands of people cheering as he resurfaced, was helped onto the boat and paraded up

and down the river waving to the crowd. If he could not leave his bed for four days, then

how to explain the newspaper article two days after the dive describing his receipt of the

award from John Wren and a speech at the Abbotsford baths? It is also odd that

Wickham would play down the skill involved in pulling off such an extraordinary feat by

claiming that he had passed out and only survived through sheer good fortune. One

wonders about the degree to which Corbett manipulated what he was told. Nevertheless,

this is clearly the source for the later accounts that have Wickham dragged naked from

the Yarra in a coma.

Whilst published sources embellished, local oral tradition transposed and

misremembered. Bill Cox was the Secretary for the Yarra Bend Park Trust for over 35

years from the 1930s to the 1960s, a regular on the Yarra Bend Golf Course, and

seemingly a walking compendium of park knowledge. In his later years he typed up

several short documents on the history of various aspects of the park, some of which

seem to have been used as speech notes to local historical societies. Of the Wickham

dive, Cox stated that

It was in the year 1916 during the 1914-18 War when with the object of raising

funds for patriotic purpose, arrangements were made for Duke Kanamaku, a

noted Hawaiian swimmer, to dive from a raised platform, but on the day he could

not be located and a prominent local swimmer and diver in Alec Wickham was

dressed up with feathers etc, and announced as Count Wickyamo performed the

feat before a large crowd. On inspection one can only marvel at his intrepidness.

It is hard to argue with the last sentence, but the first one contains at least five major

errors, including the date and the spelling of both Wickham’s real and stage names.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

There is something astonishing about high diving, something even beyond the

combination of fear and excitement involved in watching other dangerous feats.

Something that brought tens of thousands of spectators to the Yarra Bend cliffs in 1918.

The act of diving into water in itself has existential resonations, of which Kurt Brereton

has written:

“The trauma of hitting the water head first, at speed, is an ecstatic form of

deathplay. In that shocking death d(r)ive Orphic instant of cleaving the water,

consciousness is freeze framed by the coenesthetic violence of immersion... Myths

of diving nurture our ideas of love and sacrifice. Apollo’s Festival of Leaping off

the island of Leucadia is a symbolic sacrifice (a lover’s-leap for Sappho who

plunged to her death) and therapeutic cure for unrequited love. Diving is also a

swallowing. Fate claims the diver. The waters of Lethe condemns to oblivion those

who enter the underworld. Psychoanalytically, water symbolises, in its unformed

fluid state, the potential for new outcomes, of appearances revealed. Washed

clean, awakened, resurrected, reborn, miracle to be held aloft. The baby Achilles

held by his ankles then dunked head first into the river by his mother.”

It is no surprise then that the story of Wickham’s dive, the height, the aftermath have all

been embellished over time. Perhaps more surprising, riverside plaques and the odd

sporting annual notwithstanding, is how widely it has been forgotten. A ‘record’ dive had

the potential to become a mythological component of the larger national story of

sporting prowess that has formed such an important strand in the development of one

form of an Australian identity. And this notwithstanding the fact that Wickham was a

Solomon Islander: after all, his popularisation of an Islander swimming stroke in this

country was appropriated easily enough as the "Australian Crawl". A world record high

dive could have been enough to establish Deep Rock as a (minor) sacred site of

Australian sport. Yet it didn't. Perhaps it was simply that diving from great heights

remained a relatively unknown activity, the inherent dangers as well as the lack of

suitable venues meaning that with so few people attempting such feats, public

knowledge of them remained sketchy.

The relative obscurity into which Wickham's dive fell mirrored in many ways the decline

of the Deep Rock Swimming Club itself. It remained popular immediately after the war,

and (perhaps inspired by

Wickham's dive) a large diving

platform was built on the bank of

the river opposite the cliffs in the

1920s. However things began to go

wrong for the Deep Rock club soon

after. The huge floods of 1934

washed away the Roseneath St

footbridge that provided easy access

for the citizens of Clifton Hill, the

diving tower became an unsafe

wreck, and the clubhouse burned

down in 1935. Whilst it was rebuilt

in 1938, from this time onwards it

was mainly used for Sunday night dances rather than swimming events. Virtually all the

remaining adult members of the swimming club enlisted during the Second World War

and the site became increasingly abandoned and vandalised. The old children's pool

gradually filled with silt and broken glass, and as the Yarra itself became increasingly

contaminated and the city's beaches became more accessible due to more widespread car

ownership, fewer and fewer people saw it as a site for swimming or diving. One of the

old-timers, Mr P Kennedy, was still taking his morning swim there in the early 1950s,

but he was the last of the line. By this time, "Deep Rock" was known only for the

unsavoury reputation of the alcohol-fuelled Sunday night bashes, and Kennedy wrote to

the Park Trust to suggest that the name, now so despoiled, be erased altogether: "as

there has been such a disastrous ending to such a fine Club, I would suggest that even

the name of the “Deep Rock” itself be changed and its glory be of the past rather than it

should be allowed to sink into the by-word, which is now being spoken by both the

people of Collingwood and Clifton Hill”.

But not completely forgotten. In 1965, the Yarra Bend Park Trust received a letter that

had originally been sent to the Mayor and Councillors of the City of Kew. Mr W.T.J. Gibb

wished:

to draw your attention to an item of public interest in your municipality in which I

consider should be worthy of recognition in some manner. Do you know that in

Studley Park… the world's highest dive (205' 9") was carried out by a Mr. A.

Wickham in 1918 and the record still stands… over the years, I have casually

mentioned the site to different people who have not known of the feat, and their

general answer is "why is it not recognised in some manner"… The cost should not

be great to mark the site by a plaque or cairn as recognition for such an

outstanding feat, also for the interest of the numerous people who visit your

glorious park.

The Trust decided to get a qualified surveyor to measure the height of the dive: and

found that the distance from the base of the cairn on top of the cliff to the surface of the

river was 106 feet. As the tower from which Wickham dived was reckoned to have added

25-30 feet, this would put the dive at around 130-135 feet rather than the commonly

claimed 205' 9". And there the matter seemingly rested: the Trust declined to take any

action, noting in response that "Although the dive was claimed in the JJ Miller Sporting

Guide to be in excess of 200 feet and a World's record, the depth has always been

suspect". The record disappeared from the Miller Sporting Guide in 1963; Alick

Wickham himself died in relative obscurity in 1967, having returned home to the

Solomon Islands in the 1930s;

and in the early 1970s,

earthworks associated with the

bulldozing of the Eastern

Freeway through the park

diverted the course of the Yarra

(though not the dive site) and

completely erased the former

home of the Deep Rock

Swimming Club. All that remains

is a lonely monument far away

from the water’s edge, the

chiselled letters of which, telling the story of the Club’s foundation and the laying of the

first stone by John Wren, are now so eroded as to be only partly legible.

Myths, though, are harder to erase. In recent years the story of the dive, recording the

height at 205' 9", has been recirculated through ABC television documentaries, scholarly

articles on Alick Wickham, and in his entry in the Sport Australia Hall of Fame. And

Parks Victoria, thirty odd years after the Yarra Bend Park Trust measured the height of

the cliffs and declined to put up a public memorial, decided to erect the plaque with the

false story that led me down the path towards this (truer) one.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

And yet – so what if the height of Alick Wickham's world record dive proved to be just

another piece of John Wren puffery, part of the fundraising theatre that created Prince

Wickyama, another convenient sporting 'fix'. None of this quibbling about the height, or

the questioning of the ways in which the mythmaking process has distorted the story,

should detract in any way from the still extraordinary nature of Alick Wickham's dive on

23 March 1918. It may even still have been a world record for the time – other claimants

for the period, such as Clarke's 1897 dive from the Halstead Bridge in Chicago are also

suspect.

Wickham’s own experience of the truth of that dive has long since sunk from view. Even

the accounts of his own words at the time are contradictory. Was he calm and ‘in full

control’, or utterly rattled? For all the searches that had taken me from the internet to

the spinning microfilm reels in the State Library's newspaper collection, and then into

the Yarra Bend Park Trust archives, I had a lot of words, and a small number of pictures

– but no visceral sense of what might have been going through his mind. And so having

looked up at the dive site from across the river, it was time to follow his steps to look

down on the Yarra from above – insofar as it is now possible, without an additional

tower to climb. The nearest river crossing is about a kilometre upstream at Kane's Bridge

near the boatshed, and from here I climb up into Studley Park and the top of the cliffs.

There is a bike race taking place on the road loop around the park – John Wren would

approve, and if the fix was in maybe he'd be having a bit of a punt. I stick to the edge of

the road skirting the clifftop until I come to the right spot, not only the highest point but

identifiable by the redgum with the large bent branch noted from across the water. There

is a flat area just back from the edge, previously concreted but now breaking up, and a

large stone memorial sits near the middle of it – not as another commemoration of Alick

Wickham's diving feats, but rather, as the streaked and greenish plaque attests, to

Charles Grimes and his crew, “the first white men” to discover the nearby falls, and the

first “overlanders” to cross the river with their cattle nearby.

The cliff edge itself is behind a low mesh fence, easily stepped over. I am now 106 feet

above the water, if the Park Trust’s surveyors can be believed. I want to reach a point

where I can look down straight down at the water and try to imagine jumping off – but

though I can get a little way along so long as I have some sort of small tree or shrub to

hold on to, I freeze at the point where I would have to walk along the edge of the drop

unprotected, my fear of heights suddenly

hits me and my legs go a bit wobbly.

Strangely, this vertigo always seems related

to a fear not of slipping and falling, but that

I will be overtaken by a desire to jump. I

gather – and hope – that this is not

unusual. For a moment the thought crosses

my mind that to really be able to write this

story, jumping and experiencing those two

seconds of weightlessness before

immersion in the brown Yarra is exactly

what I should do. At least Alick proved that

the water below is deep enough to dive

into. But even from here I can see that what

looks like a sheer cliff from the far bank is

actually an extremely steep slope, and it

would take a fair leap (or a tower) to get far

enough out to ensure that you didn't strike

the rock on the way down.

Perhaps it is the spot for moments of madness. Just a little way upriver at the time

Wickham took his plunge lay the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum. As he was climbing the

ladder to the top of the platform, a spectator pointed across to it and called “There’s a

home across the way for such as you”. Looking down, you can see where he was coming

from. I content myself with a couple of photographs, taken with one hand as the other

grips, white-knuckled, a young wattle, before retreating back up the slope and behind the

fence.