At the end of Bunya Parade, South Coogee, a set of stairs lead down to the Ivo Rowe Pool. (It is often mistakenly called the Ivor Rowe Pool - but the first word is actually Ivo). It is one of the smallest ocean pools along the coast and is a natural, shallow rock pool perfect for wading or cooling down. Nestled under the cliff face and on the ocean rock platform, the small, shallow ocean pool is popular among locals for its natural beauty.

A new staircase has just been installed by Randwick City Council to improve safety and accessibility to the rockpool. It replaces an old concrete, rocky pathway, and is constructed of durable fibre reinforced polymer mini-mesh and stainless steel to protect it from the harsh coastal elements.

Ivo Rowe Pool, South Coogee

New access stairs to Ivo Rowe Pool

History of the Pool
The rock pool is a naturally occuring geological feature, known as a "pothole". Potholes are formed by the action of waves and their backwash grinding the rock platform with stone fragments. Stones are caught in a depression and then swirled around to deepen it into a pothole. As the hole grows it traps larger rocks which grind a larger hole. It has been used as a swimming hole for as long as anyone can remember.

Tracking down the origin of the name seemed, at first, a simple enough task but turned into a bit of detective story taking us down many side passageways and alleyways of history.

Ivo Rowe
A Randwick City Council plaque that used to stand at the pool said that it was named after a local identity Ivo Rowe, and that in 1965 an APEX club project enlarged the pool by filling in a channel. Ivo Rowe lived nearby and older local residents say that he helped to maintain the pool named after him. According to correspondence with his grand-daughter, he and his wife were very active in the local community. Ivo belonged to the South Coogee Progress Association and was instrumental in helping to establish the South Coogee Public School. A school house is named after him.

Ivo Rowe enlisted in the Australian Army (Militia) as a Captain in the Ordinance Corps during World War Two, and had a hand in the acceptance of the famous Owen Sub-machine gun into service with the Army.

Rowe Family
Ivo Claude Leslie Rowe was born 22 January 1887 at Wagga Wagga, son of James Rowe (b. Madron, Cornwall, 25th October 1845) and Agnes Rowe (nee Campbell Glass 1847 - 1937) who were married in Victoria. (See Note 1.) Ivo was the youngest of ten children. The family's Cornish connection is perhaps the reason he was named "Ivo" (note, not Ivor), a name originating in Cornwall.

Ivo married Ellen Coleman in 1911 at Paddington. Their first daughter, Merle Isabella was born at Rockdale in 1915. Other daughters Nancy and Jean followed. By 1930, according to Sands Directories, the Rowe family was living at 13 Evelyn Street, Coogee.

Ivo or Ivor?
There is some dispute about the spelling of Ivo Rowe's first name. Many documents and websites refer to it as "Ivor Rowe Pool" with the assumption that it should be "Ivor" and the missing "r" is just a typographical error. However, Births, Deaths & Marriage records show that it was indeed "Ivo", something that we have confirmed with other documents and members of his family.

An old legacy sign on site still refers to it as "Ivor Rowe Pool", but after we pointed the error out to Randwick City Council, their communications and online references now gives it the correct name of "Ivo Rowe Pool". Perhaps as the current round of improvement are completed, new signage will be installed with the correct name.

As an aside, another person called "Ivo" was Ivo Bligh, who became the 8th Earl of Darnley, (1859 - 1927), a British noble, parliamentarian and cricketer. He is best remembered in Australia as captaining the first ever England Test cricket team to visit Australia when the Ashes were at stake in 1882/83. While in Australia, Bligh met and married an Australian girl, Florence Rose Morphy (1869-1944), daughter of John Stephen Morphy, of Beechworth, Victoria, in February 1884. She had been a music teacher at Rupertswood, where her future husband had stayed during his tour of Australia. The Ashes urn has a poem inscribed on its side beginning with the words:

When Ivo goes back with the urn, the urn;
Studds, Steel, Read and Tylecote return, return;
The welkin will ring loud ...

Controversy
Back to the Rowe family. During the Second World War, the Rowes looked after servicemen and women by organising social functions for them, which is how two of their daughters likely met their future husbands. Nancy married Petrus Munter Untu Tangilisam in 1944 while Jean married Paul Frederick Umpel also in 1944. These marriages caused consternation at the time because the grooms were Indonesian men from the Celebes Islands (Sulawesi) - Petty Officers on the Dutch KPM line of ships. According to the (Adelaide) News, (24th August, 1944, p. 3) two Sydney clergymen (Rev. A. P. Wade, rector of Saint Nicholas Anglican Church, Coogee and Reverend O. V. Abram, rector of St. Jude's Anglican Church, Randwick) refused to marry them because they disapproved of "mixed race" marriages. The couples eventually married in St. Stephen's Church, Macquarie Street, Sydney in October 1944. The Army News (Darwin NT) of 22 August, 1944, p. 2 reported the girls' mother as saying:

Both my husband and I approve of our prospective sons-in-law. The girls will be married in the city if they cannot be married locally. You'd go far before you would find nicer boys. They are a lovely shade of light brown and very clean. Peter has six toothbrushes. Peter's family owns a copra plantation in the Celebes. Paul's father was headmaster at a Celebes Grammar School."

In July 1945, it was reported that Nancy and Petrus welcomed a newly-born son, Willem Leslie Tangilisam, into the world at the at Lucerne private hospital, in Avoca Street. Randwick.

In the late 19th century and into the 20th century, Australian-born women could loose their citizenship (actually British Subject-ship) and be deported by marrying a non-British alien who was an "aboriginal native of Asia, as part of the White Australian Policy. It is a matter of complex administrative and citizenship law, and I am not exactly sure of when during the 20th century, this no longer applied, but may have lasted until the Nationality and Citizenship Act of 1948. This may have had implications for Rowe's daughters. Were they and their new husbands allowed to stay in Australia? There was also the complicating factor of the Dutch colonial administration's campaign against the Indonesian revolutionary movement for independence. The Dutch were doing all they could to ensure their personnel who had been located in Australia because of the War (i.e. military, seamen, prisoners, administrators, etc.) moved back to "the Dutch East Indies" to support their struggle against the independence movement.

We located the following index entries for records stored at the National Archives of Australia. Until the covid19 lockdown is over, and we get a chance to visit the Archives and retrieve the records, we cannot be certain, but they do tend to raise the suspicion that Rowe's daughters may have been caught up in the arcane provisions of the now defunct White Australia Policy:

SERIES	TITLE	DATE RANGE
A1066	Nationality. Australian Individual cases. Umpel. Mrs J.E. and Tangkilisan, Mrs N. Access status: Open Location: Canberra	1945 - 1945
A435	UMPEL Jean Ellen - Declaration under Section 18A of the Nationality Act - born 17 March 1925 - Dutch Access status: Not yet examined Location: Canberra	1945 - 1946
SP11/5	UMPEL, JEAN ELLEN Jean Ellen UMPEL - Nationality: Dutch - [Australian Born][Box 205] Access status: Open Location: Sydney	1944 - 1945

Circumstances could not have been easy for the two couples. According to Jean & Paul Umpel's daughter, Jean did not follow her husband back to Indonesia, and they eventually divorced. Her sister, Nancy, got as far as Singapore with her young son Willem (Bill), but decided to return back home, and also eventually divorced. Both sisters remarried.

Ivo Rowe's Legacy
Ivo Rowe lived at nearby 13 Evelyn Street, Coogee until his death in 1961. His widow, Ellen Rowe, sold the house in 1970 and moved to an apartment on the corner of Oberon Street and Hendy Avenue before she passed away aged 93 at her daughter Nancy's home at Carlingford in 1979.

Jean passed away in 2019 aged 94, a resident of Southern Cross Care at South Coogee. Nancy passed away in 2020 aged 93. Eldest daughter Merle Isabell Rowe married twice but did not have any children. She died in Rose Bay in 2019, aged 104.

No 13 Evelyn Street, originally a Californian bungalow style home, was sold in 2012 and has since been rebuilt. Ivo and Ellen Rowe's legacy are their grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren and the beautiful, cool, refreshing waters of the Ivo Rowe rock pool at South Coogee.

References & Notes