You should know how to swim – with style | Peter Goers

It’s one of life’s great pleasure and comes with a lifetime’s worth of rewards, writes Peter Goers.

Teaching is the most noble and the most important profession. Nothing in life is possible without teachers.

I’m generally ignoble but I did teach swimming for 10 years and this remains a fond aquatic adventure. I was hopeless at all sports but I loved swimming.

I was too lazy and too slow for competitive swimming though I did win a silver medal swimming the “lobster” – a Royal Life Saving Society skill whereby I propelled myself backwards and on my back down the length of the Adelaide Aquatic Centre pool flicking my hands for propulsion.

I’ve always been good on my back.

I was the last of many generations who learned to swim in the Port River with crusty old sea-salt members of the Ethelton Swimming Club who put you in a harness (I’m not making this up) and dangled you into the water and pulled you along from the wharf.

We’d have to swim breaststroke with cupped hands to push the dead mullets (shit) out of the way.

I embraced the excellent Royal Life Saving Society at the then new, rather barren Ethelton Swimming Pool and perfected obscure strokes, learned to dive for rubber bricks whilst fully clothed, tread water for hours and master resuscitation techniques – mouth-to-mouth (on dummies – the first thing I ever pashed) and the long abandoned Sylvester Brosch method.

I swam up the hierarchy of Royal Life medals to Bronze Cross.

At 17 and a half I put my age up to 18 in order to teach swimming for the Education Department’s Learn To Swim campaign.

I don’t feel guilty about this considering the thousands of Diggers who put their age up to die in foreign wars.

I wanted to help kids swim and swim better. I still do.

At Grange Beach on my first day as a swimming teacher I nearly lost an entire class of beginners swept out to sea in a rip but mercifully the kids were all holding hands so I pulled them in like a human charm bracelet. Phew!

The next year I taught at Stansbury (among blue-ringed octopuses) and later became Instructor-In-Charge at Lockleys North Primary School – a great gig I kept for five years. I was in charge of only one other instructor – my sister Jenny.

One day, after a break, I returned to the pool area to see that my beach towel had caught on fire from a cigarette I’d too carelessly butted out. Parents and students jumped on it.

Ken Richter was in charge of the swimming program in the Education Department and was a god in SA and a marvellous leader.

I also taught swimming classes during the warmer months for school groups at the sylvan Burnside Swimming Centre at Hazelwood Park and the Norwood Pool.

At the latter, nuns from the adjacent St Joseph’s Convent would swim in mufti and teaching students from what became Mary MacKillop College gave me a lifelong love of that school.

As the only male teacher I became the pet of wonderful swimming teacher colleagues Di Simons, Mary Phin and Zena Martin.

We’d stream kids at the first class and one day a boy in the group which could swim 100m, jumped in and sank.

We hoicked him out and said, “you told us you could swim 100m” and through his tears he said he thought it was a class for those who wanted to swim 100m. A big difference.

He went into the beginners class.

I taught kids with disabilities all year round in the heated Norwood Indoor Pool.

I learned not to play piggy in the middle with the bipolar and once I was pulled into the water by my ankles.

I’d exhort my students to kick their legs and those with an amputated leg to “kick your leg”.

One student emerged from the water having lost his green and white glass eye which was very difficult to find on the green and white mosaic tiles on the bottom of the pool.

I also had to collect pernicious diarrhoea which had spread throughout the pool using the only available receptacle – a funnel.

As a kid, I’d join others every Saturday morning at the Adelaide Aquatic Centre to learn to dive from the diving platforms.

An old chap used to teach and coach us for free. He was brilliant.

One day we asked why he never dived or even went in the water and he confessed that he had never dived because he couldn’t swim.

Those who can – do, those who can’t – teach and those who can’t do anything become consultants.

We must all learn to swim and swim safely, confidently and with some style.

This is one of life’s great joys.

I learned so much by teaching swimming and perhaps I should do so again for the Education Department but I’ll have to put my age up by six moths so I’ll be 48 and a half. Ha!

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7 New Adelaide’s Rosanna Mangiarelli, Will Goodings and Amelia Mulcahy preparing to host Adelaide’s 80th Carols by Candlelight on December 14. Picture: Kelly Barnes

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Originally published as You should know how to swim – with style | Peter Goers