Swimming to the Moon Read online

  I’ve swum lengths in Glenelg and Hobart, in Brisbane, Port Moresby, Surfers Paradise, Port Fairy, Hamilton, Bunbury, Geraldton and Albany. This isn’t a boast; it’s just that when I visit a town for more than a day, I usually try out the local pool. I’ve swum all over England and in Hong Kong, Manila, Kuala Lumpur and San Francisco.

  These days my favourite pools are the Ballina, Byron Bay and Lennox Head pools in northern NSW and the Fremantle and Bicton pools in WA. All of them are semi-salt, and go gently on the chlorine. Quaintly, the Byron Bay pool shares quarters with a fish restaurant. The Ballina pool abuts the Richmond River and backstrokers have a magnificent vista of soaring pelicans and paragliders. Meanwhile, new swimmers at the Lennox Head pool require a map to get there. Unbeaten for winter swimming, it’s a quiet, heated oasis hidden from view in the middle of sugarcane fields.

  I was swimming at the Lennox Head pool one day when a man asked if he and the hulking male with him could share my lane. Grudgingly, I agreed. (Let’s face it, we all like a lane to ourselves.)

  He turned out to be a learn-to-swim coach. The second man, a hairy-stomached, biker-looking, 190-centimetre fellow in his mid-twenties, sporting macho tattoos, couldn’t swim. He wasn’t merely ill at ease, even in the one-metre-deep shallow end, he was like a timid toddler. He procrastinated about putting his head underwater. He fiddled nervously with the straps of his goggles. He left the pool to hurry to the toilet. Eventually he dashed his face in the water for a second, then leapt up, spluttering.

  It was odd to see. He wasn’t disabled or mentally deficient. He’d just somehow missed out on an important stage in being an Australian.

  However, his coach was patient, and over the next two weeks they were at the pool every day. It seemed that the large learner wanted badly to swim, and by the end of the fortnight he did – twenty-five metres freestyle across the pool. He looked proud and happy, his life was suddenly worth living, and for some strange reason I felt the same.

  Swimming in another favourite pool, Fremantle, with my old friend Jack, we were laughing wryly the other day at our being increasingly overtaken by younger swimmers. Nowadays we have a sort of running reverse-boast about our decreasing lap speed. ‘I was just passed by a girl about thirteen,’ I said. ‘That’s nothing,’ said Jack. ‘I was lapped by a woman about thirty – and she was nine months pregnant.’

  However, it’s the Bicton pool, purpose-built in 1981 for the Melville Water Polo Club, but open to the public, that’s my current No. 1 favourite. Overlooking a beautiful stretch of the Swan River, it’s heated by a natural geothermal spring and features a steaming hot therapy pool of artesian mineral water.

  On a cool spring morning, relaxing in the therapy pool after a kilometre’s worth of laps, watching your son tumble-turning his way to a second kilometre, nostalgia and envy easily give way to paternal pride.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Grateful thanks to Julie Hosking, editor of the West Weekend magazine in the West Australian, where most of these sketches first appeared.

  Thanks, too, to the friends of my west-coast youth and/or supporters of my early work: Marilyn Beech, the late Bruce Bennett, Delys Bird, Veronica Brady, Ian Brayshaw, Peter Dowding, the late Jim Dunbar, Tony Gibson, Jack and Nancy Harrison, Nicholas Hasluck, John Hay, Tony and Jill James, Bill and Vicki Mackey, Nelson and Julie Mews, Kim Newman, Robin Sheiner, Roger Simms, and Coral Wallace.

  Different bites of ‘The Doughnuts of Rottnest’ were first published in The Australian Magazine, The Shark Net and Gourmet Traveller. ‘Idiots’ first appeared in other forms in The Age, Grace, and The Local Wildlife, and ‘Windy Harbour’ first saw light of day in The Age and Montebello.

  And not forgetting Google and Wikipedia, seldom acknowledged but constantly used by newspaper writers. Let’s face it, as a first reference to discovering butchers’ periodicals or the history of the doublegee, they’re quite handy.

  ALSO BY ROBERT DREWE

  BOOKS

  The Savage Crows

  A Cry in the Jungle Bar

  The Bodysurfers

  Fortune

  The Bay of Contented Men

  Our Sunshine

  The Drowner

  Walking Ella

  The Shark Net

  Grace

  The Rip

  Montebello

  The Local Wildlife

  PLAYS

  The Bodysurfers – the Play

  South American Barbecue

  MISCELLANY

  Sand (with John Kinsella)

  Perth (with Frances Andrijich)

  AS EDITOR

  The Penguin Book of the Beach

  The Penguin Book of the City

  The Best Australian Stories 2006

  The Best Australian Stories 2007

  The Best Australian Essays 2010

  ALSO FROM FREMANTLE PRESS

  Sand is quintessentially Australian. It is a property from which many of our stories, assumptions and geographical reckonings are drawn. For Robert Drewe and John Kinsella, it evokes memories, both personal and cultural. Digging into its shifting foundations, the authors use their own lives to explore the importance of sand in the Australian psyche.

  ISBN 9781921361883

  First published 2014 by

  FREMANTLE PRESS

  25 Quarry Street, Fremantle 6160

  (PO Box 158, North Fremantle 6159)

  Western Australia

  www.fremantlepress.com.au

  Copyright © Robert Drewe, 2014

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Consultant editor Georgia Richter

  Cover design Ally Crimp

  Cover photograph Tait Schmaal

  Printed by Everbest Printing Company, China

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Drewe, Robert, author

  Swimming to the moon / Robert Drewe

  9781921696107 (hardback)

  Suburban life—Australia

  Australia—Social life and customs.

  306.994

  Fremantle Press is supported by the State Government through the Department of Culture and the Arts.