Food, shopping or culture clinch some people’s holiday picks. Me? Where I can swim
Mucking about in water seems tied to the best times of my life.
I knew I was a water baby by the time I was 10. It was late 1988, in the dog days of another school year. The air-conditioners were struggling, and our classroom filled slowly with one of those stultifying heat hazes that make tiny minds tired. Unable to focus, we took a trip to the nearby pools – an end-of-term reward – to wake up and cool off.
Credit: Illustration by Simon Letch
We changed into our togs and jumped into the soupy water. Then an instructor told us to fan out and walk clockwise around the inside edge of the rectangular pool, so we trudged around and around together, a bit confused and largely unamused. He then told us to run, and we leaned in hard – dozens of kids in a shrieking, spinning spiral, sprinting around the side in unison, like a school of skinny, screaming fish. “Now stop!” he yelled. “And float …”
I lifted my feet and lay on my back, and the slow whirlpool current we’d created grabbed me – grabbed all of us – and carried us through and around the light blue in a continuous circle. We’d fabricated our own flume ride, and it felt like magic.
I love this time of year because the beaches and rivers and lakes beckon, and the pools as well, as do experiences and experiments like that one, to make your own hydraulic fun out of something so elemental. Mucking about in water seems tied to the best times of my life.
We had a backyard pool in Murrumbeena, a sleepy south-eastern Melbourne suburb. I don’t remember it, but Mum always says the whole street came to watch as the fibro shell was lowered into place by crane. A weeping willow grew beside it, and my brothers and I would cling to the ropey branches and swing in like slippery monkeys, stripping the leaves as we dangled and leapt. Then we’d lay in its shade and lick plum icy poles, made from the fruit in the trees on the nature strips up and down the street.
Summer was made for such moments and settings. Like the public pool in nearby Carnegie, where we did flips off the springy diving boards and lay down on the spiky green grass, a damp film of heavily chlorinated water drying on our skin as the hot sun fell. We lined up for the water slides for what felt like hours, always wondering if that scary urban myth about someone planting a razor blade in the chute was actually true.
The slow whirlpool current grabbed all of us … We’d fabricated our own flume ride, and it felt like magic.
Or there was the Barwon River in the quiet country town of Winchelsea, where my extended family lived, and a grainy yellow sandbank formed near the old bluestone bridge. We sprinted through the shallows, chasing schools of minnows we never stood a chance of catching.
I also loved the murky brown expanse of the two dams at a property we once owned in Kyneton. When it was warm enough, we’d step gingerly in
the orange clay mud, hoping not to scratch our soles on a stick buried in the muck. We cast nets into the middle, too, and hauled them out later with scores of green yabbies intact.
I remember swimming at the beach with Dad, jumping on his back and wrapping my arms around his tanned, leathery neck. We were probably only 50 metres offshore, but it felt like hanging onto a whale and riding him out over the waves into Bass Strait.
The author leaping into his happy place - in this case the remote Star Lake in the Adirondack mountains of upstate New York.Credit: Courtesy of Konrad Marshall
In northern Victoria, somewhere near Wangaratta, I remember playing in a river up at this place with an almost mystical name: Eldorado. I don’t recall the name of the creek – only that the water zigzagged in gushes between big, flat, warm rocks, and I could jump from one to the next and the next. Crossing the river was a puzzle to be solved, plotting a path from stone to stone while disturbing sunbaking lizards.
I spent an afternoon alone in the high country up that way once, too, messing about in a river that was little more than a cool trickle in a deep valley, shaded by tall mountain ash and giant fern fronds. I cast out a single line of string with a piece of red meat tied to the end, and watched silently as a fat, spiky freshwater cray crept over the gold and white pebble floor, into full view, ready to be scooped up with a net and into a bucket.
As I grew, and grew more confident, water took on a different shape for me, including surfing at Wilsons Promontory as a teen, spending entire days in a wetsuit, lolling on the swells. I wasn’t very good at catching waves, but I could always sit and float, and look up at the bald, stony cap of Mount Oberon, before heading back to our tea-tree campsite in Tidal River, waterlogged and spent.
When travelling, water became the defining feature that attracted me to a place. What was Thailand without drifting down the River Kwai on a bamboo raft, watching water buffalo snorting in the shallows? Have you really been to South-East Asia if you haven’t paddled through a sea cave into a green island grotto, or kissed a girl under a jungle waterfall?
I met my wife when living in Cairns, and our first dates were a walk under the palms at Trinity Beach and wading in the rainforest torrents of Crystal Cascades. She’s an American, and I came later to find that the water on offer in her part of the world had its own special quality.
The author enjoying a dip with his family, in the pool below a waterfall in Bali.Credit: Courtesy of Konrad Marshall
She grew up near one of those idyllic, clean lakes you see in movies, with wooden docks and offshore pontoons, where you can swim all day and sit with a beer in an Adirondack chair all night. I loved those glacier-formed lakes even in winter, when the surface was frozen thick enough to drive a car across. Sometimes, on New Year’s Day, they’d break up the ice near the edge, and I’d jump into the paralysing cold for the annual polar bear plunge.
We moved around the States, too, and I always found more places to soak and swim. Making the most of the beaches in Jacksonville, Florida, we assembled a kit for the car boot, keeping an Esky, chairs, sunscreen and towel in there at all times, ever ready for an impromptu day of sunshine and saltwater.
When we lived in Indianapolis, the best times were spent bobbing along a river on a tyre tube through the forests of southern Indiana, or visiting the deep, abandoned quarries beyond far-flung cornfields, including one watery pit with a long flying fox and a terrifying 12-metre cliff jump. There’s nothing quite like taking that first step off the top, feeling the speed of the free fall, hoping to catch a deep breath of air before you’re plunged into the wet darkness with an almighty downward smash through the surface.
This past winter I was in Europe, which had a scorching summer, and I added to my list. There was the historic public pool in Paris, where all bathers must shower before entering, all people must don bathing caps before swimming and all men must wear budgie-smugglers. You can even buy them in a vending machine, which I did.
There was the tiny Italian fishing village on the Amalfi Coast as well, where the homes are built on cliffs that plunge directly into the Tyrrhenian Sea. And there was the town in Lake Como with the tiny harbour and the high stone footbridge that I could jump from again and again, doing bombs in the dark blue, while people in bright wooden boats drank bellinis and applauded.
Where will I swim this summer?
The holiday home of a friend in Gippsland, at a convergence of streams called “the meeting of the rivers”, where there are currents and deep pools and even a kind of natural spa. There’s a rope hanging from a tree that looks so likely to cause injury or death on the rocks below that only a fool would use it, which is why my mate calls it “the Darwin swing”.
I’ll swim at Half Moon Bay in Black Rock, Port Phillip Bay, rousing my teenage memories of swimming out to the sunken HMVS Cerberus, and I’ll tell my son he’s not allowed to make that freestyle trip just yet. Maybe one day soon.
I’ll swim in the backyard pools of lucky friends. I’ll swim in the new public pools near our house, the freshly poured concrete hopefully cured by the time the real heat of the season kicks in.
But the place I’m most looking forward to swimming is a little town in the Victorian high country I visited for the first time last year, where we’ll camp on the banks of bubbling, frigid water, crystalline and fresh. You can see right through it to the bottom, even in the spots it’s too deep to stand.
That’s where we’ll be in the days immediately before Christmas, chasing dragonflies and skipping stones, setting up camp chairs on the rocky bank. I’ll plant my two feet in the river, two hands on a book, and the water will wash past me, tickling my ankles as it trickles on to the next person and place.
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