Following these lines of inquiry, Joan Patrick correctly challenged the reliability of three key sources widely cited in popular accounts of the events that led to the lifting of the bans on public bathing in daylight hours in Sydney.
These are an article in the Daily Telegraph (Sydney) published on 7 January 1907, an account by P. W. Gledhill, a member of the Manly Historical Society published in his Manly and Pittwater: Its Beauty and Progress (1948), and another article in the Manly Daily (Manly, Sydney) newspaper that appeared on 28 July 1966. None of these sources, said Patrick, provides direct testimony; all were written well after municipal ordinances promulgated unrestricted daylight surfbathing hours in the summer of 1903–4.