The response to the Bondi Icebergs documentary proves it’s not about swimming

Ian Darling is a noted businessman and philanthropist, former chair of the Sydney Theatre Company, playwright and noted documentary maker. His latest doco, The Pool, on the Bondi Icebergs swimming club, is released this week.

Fitz: Ian, let’s take a Dennis Lillee run-up and start with your own interesting journey to making these iconic documentaries. What were your own first steps towards shouting “roll tape”?

ID: When I was seven, growing up in Victoria, I remember this fabulous friend of my grandfather’s saying to me, “What do you want to do with your life?” And I said, “I want to make films.” And only a short time later, at school in the early ’70s, I made a film called Hooray, Hooray, A Holiday Starts Today.

Ian Darling’s new documentary The Pool is about Bondi Icebergs. “So we thought, let’s make the pool itself the central character.”Credit: Illustration by Monique Westerman

Fitz: In the play The Twins, you and the comedian Greg Fleet wrote about your lifelong friendship. The school you both went to was Geelong Grammar, the launching pad of many a corporate titan … like you.

ID: Yes, I guess I assumed that I would always go into the world of business and, despite years of loving acting at school and university, I felt that that was my calling – and, dare I say, my familial responsibility. And so I did that.

John Darling Senior, Australia’s self-made “Grain King”.

Fitz: I do love the story you once told me of your forebear, who established the first part of the family fortune and the tradition of doing business, in a very interesting way.

ID: Yes, family lore has it that my great-great-grandfather, John Darling, arrived in the colony of South Australia penniless and could only find work on the Adelaide wharves carrying sacks of flour. So the story goes, there was a ship that sank in the port that was carrying just such sacks and it was written off. But he realised that the seawater would form a protective crust around the bulk of it. So he dived down, retrieved the flour and started trading it – and was so good at it that within 30 years he was known as “the Grain King” in Australia. By the late 1800s he had set up the main trading operation for flour and wheat between Australia and the UK.

Fitz: RAH! So you’ve got flour on your snout, business in your bones and you do wonderfully well yourself through the 1980s and ’90s in the investment management community – but still the doco stuff won’t leave you?

ID: Yes. And over many years I had got to know the world’s most famously successful investor, Warren Buffett, and I thought it would make a fabulous film to try and capture the mood and the spirit of the famous shareholders’ meeting that he conducts every year in his home town of Omaha, which he calls “Woodstock for capitalists”. It was perfect for me as a beginning because it was about a topic I knew intimately. I’d been going there for the previous 10 years, had worked for a long time on Wall Street and knew all the people. I suddenly felt, well, I have an edge here, and if I could capture the man’s wisdom when it comes to being the world’s best investor, it would really be something. He is so folksy and easy to understand – when you hear him or read him, everything makes sense – that I need to get it on film.

Fitz: Ian, I promise you, we will get to The Pool, but I can’t resist. What was the distilled essence of his advice in what became your first doco, Woodstock for Capitalists? I warn you: everything you say can and will be used by me and all my readers when we contemplate the incomprehensible maze of the sharemarket and the endless gibberish analysing it. We are leaning in.

IF: OK, quickly: 1. Invest in businesses you can personally understand. 2. When it comes to the people who run those businesses, back the ones of proven good character who you admire and trust. 3. Invest in a business that has some sort of protective “moat” around it or dominance in it. You don’t want to be with the fourth or fifth player in a sector; you want to be with the best. 4. Don’t bet your farm on anything, particularly not a business that is in itself betting the farm. You want one with relatively predictable earnings, not cyclical ones. 5. Buy stock or a business that you can hold forever because, if you keep trading and buying and selling, you might have a great track record, but tax is just going to keep eating away.

Fitz: CUT! That’s a wrap on Buffett. Great, we have that in the can. That film was a big hit.

ID: Yes, and suddenly I was hooked. I thought, wow, this is incredible and this is what I really want to do. I was set on a new path.

Fitz: Now let’s go to the doco of yours that hit me hardest, The Final Quarter, all about the outrageous and racist vilification of Adam Goodes. How did that come about?

A glorious career that ended sadly: Adam Goodes at the end of the 2012 grand final.Credit: Wayne Taylor

ID: As a Swans supporter I already knew all about the vilification of Adam and had been appalled by it. And after he suddenly retired I felt there was so much unfinished and unanswered business, and it would make a good documentary to examine it. I approached Adam via Sam Mostyn [now the governor-general], the first woman AFL commissioner, and it went from there.

Fitz: How did Adam react when he saw that extraordinary bit of work for the first time?

Stories of us: the performer Paul Kelly provided rich fodder for another Ian Darling documentary.Credit: Justin McManus

ID: We let him watch it alone. We came in when it was done and we just sat in silence. I think the silence was more powerful than anything he or we could have said. But when we talked he was so dignified and gracious, grateful and very humbled and emotional by also seeing the incredible support he had had – some of which he had not known about at the time. He was particularly moved by seeing an interview with his mother, and he said, “I didn’t realise that Mum was even having to be out there and supporting me and telling people to ‘stop the booing’.”

Fitz: And on the very day your film came out the AFL apologised to him for its own inaction!

ID: That was very pleasing.

Fitz: All right. One more question before we dive into the pool. Let’s go to my other favourite doco of yours, Paul Kelly – Stories of Me. What’s the man himself like?

ID: Different to how I imagined. Having seen him so often on stage in Melbourne in the 1980s, I always thought he was a pretty wild guy who may have been brought up on the wrong side of the tracks. But in person he was quiet, an incredible listener and very reserved. And, as I discovered over the course of making the film, he was an incredible sport at school, a scholar, and incredibly well-read. I think I must have taken it for granted that his songs just came out of thin air. But when you look at how much literature and poetry has affected his songwriting, you realise just how much learning has gone into it.

Fitz: Which – you knew we’d get there! – brings us to your latest, The Pool, about the famous Bondi Icebergs club, which premieres this week. Congratulations. I loved it. As one of your first viewers, can I humbly give you my take on it?

ID: Go on …

Fitz: I love the line from Bob Dylan’s song I Shall Be Released where he sings, “down here next to me in this lonely crowd”, which speaks to modern urban alienation – and this film was, for me, taking a real look at how a single structure can bring people together and be the beating heart of an extraordinary community across generations, for generations. Was that your north star?

ID: Yes! Absolutely. Exactly that. Coming out of COVID, it was obvious to me how we are completely lost without connection and community. So I was looking at making a positive, uplifting, happy film with community as the theme. And I just happened to be down at Icebergs, swimming, having a coffee with a friend of mine and talking about it and she said, “Well, what about this as a community?” And I thought: that’s exactly it. It was right there, under my nose. So we thought, let’s make the pool itself the central character. And through all its beauty and in all its guises, through rain and storm and sunshine and rainbows, we would see how the users of this pool come together into one fabulous community of people of huge diversity, across all age groups, all looking after each other while the pool looks after them, and they look after the pool.

Fitz: So you have no narrator, and the pool as your central character, with a couple of dozen supporting characters throughout. How did you work out which Icebergs swimmers to choose to tell the story?

ID: We settled on themes. We wanted someone who would represent friendship, someone to represent mental health, someone else on physical health, and some who would represent routine like the two blokes who meet there every morning at 13 minutes to seven – which reflects so much about sport and community because neither wants to let the other down, so they both turn up, at exactly that time, even on down days. For old age we chose an 85-year-old bloke who was swimming every day while most of his contemporaries were in a nursing home.

Fitz: And instead of being down there in this lonely crowd, they are all connected to each other.

ID: Precisely. We wanted to reflect the reality of Icebergs by highlighting the importance of this community. Because whether it’s a swimming club or a church or a book club or whatever it is, people need that sense of connection. And we’ve shown how when some of the swimmers hit the water at 9.30 every morning and someone hasn’t appeared for about three or four days, a phone call comes, with someone checking, “Is everything OK? You, OK?” And I think that’s what we’re missing in the wider community. What’s inspiring is these close-knit communities where people are looking out for each other and keeping an eye out. And that is what is resonating with audiences, even those who don’t have any interest in swimming.

The Twins, starring Ian Darling and Greg Fleet.Credit:

Fitz: It’s not about swimming! What specific feedback have you been getting, from early screenings?

ID: Wonderfully positive. And one of the really interesting comments was, when we screened it over at the Cremorne Orpheum, a couple of ladies came up who were very emotional and they said, “We don’t swim but we’re members of a book club and we feel you’ve made a beautiful film that honours our book club, too, all the groups like us.” And when we took it to the film festivals in Adelaide, Byron, Sunshine Coast and Western Australia, we received a much greater emotional response than even I imagined, all with that theme of people being glad that the central theme of community has been honoured in this way. I also have a very clear sense there’s a lot of loneliness and pain and hurt out there, and this film might help show the way for those who are yearning to once again become part of the kind of community they might once have known. A lot of people have said, “Oh, I feel so envious of the people in this community,” and we chat and they talk about ways they can join or build their own communities.

Fitz: Thank you, Ian. CUT! That’s a wrap. Lunch, everyone.