All about Annette Kellerman, daredevils and aquatic art!

August newsletter

Aug 04, 2025

This month I have taken a deep dive into the world of Annette Kellerman, an amazing Australian swimmer, diver and performer born in Sydney in 1886. Over the years I have read snippets about her life and been to a couple of exhibitions but I always felt I didn’t know the full story of this extraordinary woman. That is until author Grantlee Kieza wrote his new biography, Annette Kellerman, Australian Mermaid: Champion swimmer, trailblazer and film idol - the adventurous life of our first Hollywood superstar.

At a talk Kieza gave recently at Marrickville Library he said around World War I, Annette Kellerman was one of the most famous women in the world, but later on she fell into obscurity leading a quiet life in a fibro house on the Gold Coast. Kieza wrote the book to redress that obscurity and to dispel some of the myths associated with Annette’s life. And in doing so, he said he discovered that her life was better than the mythology. ‘She had an incredible sense of daring, chutzpah and lust for life,’ Kieza said.

Reading about daredevil Annette who loved to dive from great heights, led me back to a trip we took 10 years ago to Northern Territory’s Litchfield National Park or Kungarakan, its traditional Aboriginal name. I wrote about the experience when I returned and how it prompted a not-so-good leaping memory from my youth, which you can read below.

Also in this edition I feature Annette Kellerman-inspired art at two Sydney pools, one named in her honour, and connect to Annette’s French ancestry, her 1905 epic swim along the Seine and its reopening for swimming this year.

Leaping or not leaping at Litchfield

I watch a young tourist in a black bikini stand nervously on a rock ledge above a small, deep pool. She steps forward, looks down and then steps back again. In the water, about five metres below, a man urges her to jump. ‘Come on,' he says. ‘You can do it.’

We are 120 kilometres south-west of Darwin at Buley Rockhole where low waterfalls cascade over pink-brown sandstone into a series of deep pools. It is one of many stunning swimming spots surrounded by monsoonal rainforests, woodlands and sandstone formations in Kungarakan or Litchfield National Park. Signs at the waterholes warn against jumping and diving but they don't seem to deter some of the bathers at Buley Rockhole.

Except perhaps the 20-something woman I watch move towards the edge again. In the water her friend starts counting down: ‘10, 9, 8, 7, 6.’ She takes a deep breath and just before he reaches one, she leaps off and in mid-air does a flip.

Smack! Her body hits the water hard like a side bellyflop. ‘That hurt,’ she says, when she surfaces and gingerly climbs out. There's a red mark down her back where she's whacked the water and as I watch her recover, I am taken back 35 years when I made a similar leap, minus the flip but from a much greater height. I was also wearing a bikini and was egged on by a boy and wasn't sure I really wanted to jump.

The year was 1980 and I was on holidays with uni friends at Ballina on the NSW north coast. One day, we headed slightly inland to swim at a waterfall pool, a local boy in the group knew about. When we arrived the two other girls declined to climb through the bush to the top of the cliff and leap off. Egged on by one boy in particular, who was always teasing and tormenting me (Australian for he fancied me in the 1980s), and my desire to show that girls can do anything, I tentatively followed to the summit.

When we reached the top it didn’t take long for the boys to start throwing themselves off the edge, Tarzan-like, their bodies relaxed as they revelled in the thrill. I stood there nervously watching them and when I finally leapt off, I was the opposite of relaxed and when I landed I felt like I’d hit concrete.

I stayed in the water for ages trying to recover, all the time feeling like my life had just flashed before my eyes. Back then I promised myself I would never do that again; I would never let myself be dared into doing something I was unsure about. So, 35 years later on our holiday at Kungarakan I know I don't want to join the young woman and others catapulting off the edge.

I want a more tranquil experience, so we leave Buley Rockhole and walk back along the Florence Creek path and follow a sign to an unnamed swimming spot. Two minutes later we are standing beside blue-green water in dappled sunlight surrounded by spindly eucalypts. We are only about 500 metres from Buley Rockhole, but we feel like we've stumbled on our own exclusive spa as there's no one here but us.

Bruce pulls on his goggles and explores the underneath inhabited by schools of black-banded rainbow fish. I sit under a small waterfall and enjoy a firm massage as the water tumbles over my shoulders and back and then turn on my front and let it work its magic on my feet.

I don't want to leave this lovely waterhole we name the 'massage pool' but eventually we walk a further 200 metres along the Florence Creek path where we discover another nameless bathing hole in the shape of an elongated pear. I breaststroke upstream towards the waterfall but the current keeps me swimming on the spot and then I lie on my back and let the flow glide me down the spring-fed creek. When Bruce finds multiple little waterfalls spilling into tiny pools on the rock platform above, we decide to call this waterhole the 'champagne pool'.

That night when we order our dinner at the Litchfield Tourist Park cafe, our waitress asks me if we swam at Buley Rockhole? ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘but it was a bit crowded with people flipping and bombing so we went to the side pools, which we had all to ourselves.’

‘They're the best,’ she says. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘and having a waterfall massage was complete bliss, much more enjoyable than leaping off the edge.’

Amazing Annette Kellerman!

Back in 1980 when I leapt off the top of what I now know as Dalwood Falls (where I recently discovered a number of people have died!) I mistook my sportiness for an ability to jump when really I needed to be a risk-taker, a dare-devil like Annette Kellerman, something I never was.

In Grantlee Kieza’s biography, Annette Kellerman, Australian Mermaid, he recreates Annette’s first high dive, a dare from ‘a brash, blond, 15-year-old named Snowy Baker’ at Farmer’s Baths near where the Sydney Opera House is today.

While Annette vividly remembered being scared and landing awkwardly in the water, after taking time to recover she was back up the ladder and executing a perfect dive. From then on there was no stopping her fearlessness including diving from a height with her little brother Freddie upside down in her arms at Melbourne’s Brighton Baths, and later in one of her Hollywood movies, diving out of a tower window and clearing sharp rocks to land in the swirling Caribbean Sea.

She was also fearless in her swimming pursuits, racing long distances in dirty rivers like the Yarra in Melbourne, the Thames in London and the Seine in Paris. And that’s just to name a few of her extraordinary exploits and extravaganza performances.

The first few chapters of the book also reveal much about Sydney’s early swimming baths in various spots around Sydney Harbour, as well Redfern Baths, a place I had never heard of but wondered if my grandmother Katie swam there as she spent her childhood in the suburb at Great Buckingham Street. Highly recommend the book!

Annette-inspired art

Mosaics, murals, musicals.

Apart from the ‘no diving’ signs at Annette Kellerman Aquatic Centre in Sydney’s Marrickville, I often think that Annette Kellerman would be impressed with the place named in her honour in 2010 as she was a resident of the suburb from aged around one till seven.

The centre is full of colour, creativity and art including a glass sculpture in the foyer called Silver Screen Mermaid by Mark Wotherspoon, a mosaic of her in the change rooms, and words and pictures telling her story alongside the edge of the appropriately named Kellerman’s Cafe. Just around the corner from the pool there’s also a mural of her painted by artist Kelly Wallwork.

In 2022, the pool was a very atmospheric venue for a musical about AK written by playwright Hilary Bell and performed by Christa Hughes, another artistic initiative that performer Annette would have loved. I was lucky enough to be poolside that night to watch the aquatic icon theatrically brought to life.

Along one side of the 50-metre pool at Cook & Phillip Park Aquatic Centre there used to be eight murals by Sydney artist Wendy Sharpe depicting scenes from Annette Kellerman’s life. Due to damage they have been removed but it seems the City of Sydney has plans to restore them and hopefully they will return soon.

Swimming in the Seine!

In 1905 when Annette Kellerman took part in a 12-kilometre swim of the Seine from the Pont National in the east of Paris to the Viaduct at Auteuil in the west she had to ‘push her way through the dirty water’. At the Paris Olympics in 2024, the conditions in the river were far from perfect for the competitors in the 10 kilometre swim, but sounds like significant work has been done to clean up the river and this European summer it reopened for swimming. Would you dive in?