Pools as performance spaces, beach towels and birthday swims

October newsletter

Hello again friends!

The arrival of September and early October brought the reopening of two local pools closed over the winter months. It’s been wonderful to swim again at Fanny Durack Aquatic Centre aka Petersham Pool, which opened a month earlier this year (thanks Inner West Council) and to dive into the saltwater at Balmain’s Dawn Fraser Baths, the grand old dame of Sydney’s harbour pools.

At the very end of September we also travelled north to the Newcastle Ocean Baths, a gigantic, epic, grungy, gorgeous, 115-year-old heritage-listed space where a photography exhibition, a sunset music session and a poolside play were staged as part of the New Annual art, music and ideas festival. For a week, the baths became a gallery, a nightclub and a theatre, although in many ways the magnificent aquatic playground is always a performance space.

My visit to Newcastle Ocean Baths left a big impression on me, which you can read about below, as well as a story on an artist drawn to paint the baths, my annual ocean pool birthday swim and my current fascination with beach towels as works of art.

Happy reading and swimming,

Therese

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The theatre of life at Newcastle Ocean Baths

When we arrived at Newcastle Beach two Sundays ago, everything seemed brighter, louder, livelier – like we’d walked into an outdoor nightclub. All of humanity was out and about along that strip of coast – at the beach, the Canoe Pool and the ocean baths.

I found myself singing, ‘Be what you want to be, do what you want to do, say what you want to say …,’ a song from the Muriel’s Wedding musical that is actually about Sydney but seemed the right lyrics for right here, right now in egalitarian Newy!

We had come to Newcastle for the New Annual art, music and ideas festival specifically to see performances and events at the ocean baths. It had been a while since I’d visited, and as I walked towards the baths, I remembered the first time I caught sight of the pool’s art deco pavilion nearly 15 years ago.

It was like coming across a magnificent work of art perched on the edge of the coast, decorated with diamond shapes, coloured in cream and lines in pink, purple, yellow and turquoise. When I finally walked through the entrance, I was blown away by the size of the baths, the immense areas of water, divided in two by a timber walkway.

Two Sundays ago, I had a similar feeling of arriving at a significant place despite its ageing façade and structures, waiting to be renovated as part of a second stage restoration. Along the top level near the original 1920’s change rooms, The Bathers photography exhibition was on display featuring striking portraits by Lee Illfield and Edwina Richards of people connected to the pool. There were members of the Pirates winter swimming club, 98-year-old Alma who taught swimming voluntarily for more than 60 years, Ennia Jones, who started A Splash of Colour Swimming after noticing she was the only person of colour in the pool, Penny, the snapper, who photographs the baths, mermaids, and Macedonian priests who each year celebrate the Epiphany or the Blessing of the Waters by throwing a crucifix in the pool. Whoever retrieves the crucifix is said to have good luck and special blessings for the year.

Swimmers weaved in and out of the portraits as they moved around the baths that had an atmosphere of an old-style amusement park. I circumnavigated the huge space observing all the activity along the way – teenage boys with mullets, undercuts, rats-tails, pacing around the promenade in packs, throwing footballs and basketballs, leaping and backflipping, girls in bikinis jumping off the circular pontoon, little kids paddling in the shallows and swinging on the chrome bars, muscle men with total body tattoos parading around the edge, wiry blokes and burly ones congregating on curved corners, sun-bakers lying in lines against the teal-coloured wall.

A few hours later as the sun set, I returned for Soak, the festival’s live music at the baths that evening featuring Beatboxer Thom Thum with Filipino and Murrawarra artis DOBBY and leading jazz artist Freyja Garbett. The place was packed with spectators, paddlers and swimmers dancing in the water and diving off the pontoon to the groovy hip-hop beat.

The next morning when I returned for a swim the vibe was less party, more chill but still the same enormous playground welcoming everyone in – to exercise, refresh, socialise, gaze out to sea, be still. In the big pool people swam in all directions, across, diagonal, up and down or just hung in the same spot chatting about the footy finals’ results on the weekend or the temperature of the water. A woman in a bright red cap told me it was ‘usetable’, a term she said her children invented when they were little to say the water was at a temperature that you quickly got used to.

In the 50-metre pool, there was more order with swimmers lapping up and down as a young man stretched and balanced like a ballerina on the curved wall, tiptoeing across the top like a tightrope walker, his body outlined in silhouette.

After a second swim at the beach and a delicious brunch at local café Estabar, we were back at the pool for ‘Meet Me At The Baths’, a fictional work of outdoor theatre inspired by locals’ memories. As we took our place on the concrete seating, headphones on, seagulls swooped and dived like planes in an airshow and a woman announced that the show was about to begin.

With a watery soundtrack playing in our ears, characters were introduced including a Macedonian mother and her daughter, a local paramedic, a lifeguard whose family had worked at the pool for generations, who offered to teach a Chilean woman who couldn’t swim, and a recently divorced man who wanted to become a mermaid. As we listened, the cast appeared in different parts of the pool, speaking about their lives and their love for this site of ‘never-ending blue’, a place where everything was cyclical with water coming in and going out and people doing the same.

It was a relaxing, almost meditative experience with swimmers lapping in front of us like they formed the undercurrent, the rhythm of the play. Handing over our headphones, I said to one of the crew, the swimmers and sunbakers seemed part of the play. She nodded: ‘That’s the beautiful happenstance of this show, all these unknown extras.’

Before we left we had one more performance to see – teenagers on school holidays climbing to the top of the stepped wall and leaping off. We followed them to the summit and watched them land in a narrow area of water called Cowrie Hole next to the old igloo-shaped pumphouse. There was a sign saying, ‘no jumping’ but no one intervened, no one came to stop these daredevils at this pool of old-style freedom and endless blue.

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A particular painter’s preferred pool

Artist James Willebrant first came across the Newcastle Ocean Baths back in the late 1960s when he and his band members swam there after playing gigs in the city the night before.

‘That’s when I discovered it,’ says James, ‘this beautiful old place of faded glory and art deco beauty.’

Since the mid-1970s, it’s been a favourite subject, portrayed in his distinctive surrealist mixed with pop art style, something he says he doesn’t push; it just happens to be the way it comes out.

A particular painter’s preferred pool by James Willebrant.

He loves the structures in and around the around the pool – the sweeping perspectives, the angles, the whitewashed concrete starting blocks, the round concrete buoys (only one left), and the wonderful stepped turquoise wall that’s so distinctive to the baths with its curve at one end.

‘That wall features in many of my paintings, and I keep coming back to it all the time,’ says James. ‘It’s pretty much the first line that I’ll draw. I’ll put the horizon in and then the wall goes in and then something else will come in from there.

‘The Newcastle Ocean Baths are very nostalgic for me. I have a real affection for them because I’ve known them for such a long time. They were one of my first and most favourite and enduring subjects that I’ve used physically to swim in and imaginatively in my paintings. I think they will always be with me in my work.’

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Diving into my annual ocean pool birthday swim

About 10 years ago I went for an ocean pool swim on my birthday, and since then it’s become a tradition that I try and keep up each 8 October. In 2020, I wrote a story for The Guardian on marking special days with an ocean pool swim.

This year, I went to Mahon Pool at Maroubra where my mother and her sister used to swim as kids. Mahon Pool can get wild and as we were arriving not long after the peak of high tide, I was a bit concerned it was going to be awash with white water. But when we got there, the swell had subsided.

When I dived in, I had a feeling of immediate relief like I’d returned to my natural state in the crystal-clear saltwater. It was gorgeous in and great to be joined by husband Bruce and brother Mark with my sister-in-law Ann-Marie on the sidelines among the sunbakers and sandstone. And to top off my birthday swim, we spotted a whale out to sea, surfacing momentarily on its journey south.

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Celebrating the everyday beauty of the beach towel

With the weather warming up over the past few weeks, more and more people are going to the pool and that means more beach towels adorning the concrete, timber and grass. I have become a little obsessed with capturing the stripes, patterns and colours that add a sense of vibrancy and decoration to the surfaces around our pools like spontaneous works of art! Here’s a few shots taken at Dawn Fraser Baths, Wylie’s Baths and Newcastle Ocean Baths.