Bringing Social Bathing Culture To Australia Melbourne’s new wellness destination, Olympia Bath House, aims to make bathing culture accessible to everyone. We chat to the Founder, EMILY KING.
Please explain your professional background and what sparked the idea for Olympia Bath House?
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rowing up as a sporty kid, I’ve long understood that the human body can be an extraordinarily powerful vehicle if nurtured and respected. The rewards of hard work and discipline, balanced with rest, have shaped the way I move through the world. As an adult, these ideas were further realised during my first overseas trip to Japan where I visited the Onsen. I found that this practice helped me refresh and recover from the exhaustion of the bustle of city life and I was immediately hooked. Years later, whilst studying in Amsterdam, I signed up for the local health centre with access to a 24-hour sauna. Everyone was nude, no one was segregated, and it was buzzing at all hours of the day. It was awesome. I then moved to London to pursue a career in fashion, which proved the perfect basecamp for me to escape on weekends and explore Europe and of course, many bathing and wellness centres. These weekend jaunts soon grew into a passionate research mission and a stabilising ritual in my life. This journey led me through global wellness centres beyond Europe, crystallising my understanding of community as a crucial function of being well. My travels taught me that city life is both enthralling and challenging no matter what the time zone. For all its rewards, atomised urban living is defined by contradiction: filled with time-saving conveniences, rarely do we feel the minutes we’ve saved add up to hours we can truly enjoy. Population density rarely translates to personal connection 70 | SPA+CLINIC
and the rich swathe of opportunities and sensory experiences that are said to unwind us do little to quiet our busy minds. When I returned to Australia, I found that the wellness industry wasn’t serving us very well: failing to fulfil consumer desire for communal experiences and neglecting to look towards an increasingly urbanised future. The Australian wellness movement has so far targeted the individual, but scientific research and my global experience have shown me that long-lasting wellness lies in collective wellbeing. To achieve this, I believe we must reimagine health as a community practice. I haven’t looked back.
Why is bathing not as common in Australia as in, for example, Europe, and why do we need to change this? That is a big question and one that deserves some academic attention. I think that bathing culture is not as common in Australia for two reasons. The first is that the colonisers of Australia were not interested in understanding the bathing culture of the First Nations people and in the process, decimated thousands of years of bathing history in Australia. Aboriginal peoples have for thousands of years spent time on rivers and billabongs, which is central to intergenerational knowledge, cultural transfer, and family time. I have been lucky enough to visit Witjira-Dalhousie Springs (Dalhousie Springs) in central Australia, which are mineral-rich thermal waters containing water that is possibly millions of years old. This has been a fundamental part of Aboriginal tradition, proven by the large campsites and stone artefacts found throughout the location.