Payne Street backyard pool – Melbourne, Australia

“Vaughn and I went and hired a pump, he took me to the pool and we did a small amount of cleaning but mainly just sussed the place out, from there we kept coming back every weekend for a about three weeks pulling out plants from the roots, spending hours trying to fix the pump because it was always fucked in some way. We ended up using about six hoses to drain it at once at one point because the pump was too useless. Eventually we drained as much water as possible then we took to using buckets to manually remove the water, on the last day of cleaning the pool, a big crew came down and helped bucket the water out, used a massive rubbish bin to shovel mud out and any other trees, roots, rubbish that was remaining. The last bit was filthy. It was just pure stinking sludge, frogs and lizards everywhere. Finally we cleaned it completely then we gave it a quick wash down, waited for it to dry and skated it for about an hour before dark.”  – George Rowe

“Heard some rumors going round about some pool in an abandoned house in a rich area of Toorak, Melbourne. The rumors turned out to be true. So I called RJ (Barbaro) and we went down and checked it out.

RJ was shredding the tight transitions, body jars, madonna’s, and gnarly smith grinds on the rough lip, so I got the camera out. Then a big crew showed up – Vaughan Marks, Jake Duncombe and Tas Pappas.

They had brought a quarter to use as a roll in for more speed, then it started goin’ owf!!!

Jake was doing sick as ollies and smiths round the corner and going down the straight side walls – wall ride style. Tas was going bio with 4-5ft airs, then started landing frontside inverts, while RJ was doing “spark flying” Smiths.

The day ended and it seems that was the last day; the next day it was raining, the next we were going to go, but heard a mate Nick had been charged for vandalism and trespassing by the cops. It was ironic because we had cleaned the place up from being a swamp into a beautiful blue pool. The new owners just came and filled the pool up with water since it had already been fixed up so much, thanks to the “vandalism” of a few skaters.” – Brent Shipley