Adult Swimmer

For migrants to Australia, the beach can feel like an unsafe or unwelcoming place. But learning to swim later in life teaches lessons in capability, survival and community. 

I was twenty-nine when I learnt to swim. This was the year I also quit smoking. I was a one-before-breakfast, one-after-breakfast, one-before-lunch, one-after-lunch, one-before-dinner and one-after-dinner smoker, and however many more in between. I could finish a packet of cigarettes in one day, or half a pouch of tobacco. Eventually, after nearly ten years of smoking, I felt my body unravel. Ulcers appeared mysteriously in my mouth. When I looked in the mirror, I looked grey, my skin deprived of oxygen; I couldn’t recognise myself. 

The turning point came when I’d forgotten my smokes as I walked to my local train station. I looked up at the clear night sky and saw a full moon, just beyond the gum leaves above the train station roof. I’d spent many nights smoking alone, looking up at the moon, enjoying the quiet, with a deep longing for something better, even though I didn’t know what that was. In a moment of clarity, I realised that if I didn’t stop, I would die. This blunt revelation cured my addiction even though I lived with smokers in a share house. Not long after, I cycled to the local pool and signed up for an aquatics membership. 

At my first adult swim class, I wore a one-piece bather that my mum had bought for me when we lived in Kuala Lumpur. It was charcoal with pink and blue blobs. My smoke-stained orange fingers gripped the pool wall tightly as I furiously kicked, trying to stay afloat. When I paused to catch my breath, a small child, maybe nine or ten years old, confidently launched off the pool wall in a perfect glide before commencing freestyle. I wondered how many lessons I would need before I could fly in water like her. 

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My mum can’t swim even though she grew up in Terengganu on the longest coastline in Peninsular Malaysia, the blue infinity of the South China Sea hugging its shore. On weekends, their family beach outings would consist of her father cycling his Raleigh while her mother and three siblings followed behind in a trishaw pedalling the 15 minutes to their nearest beach. My grandmother would pack a family picnic—drinks, desserts and a tiffin carrier of chicken curry and rice. At the beach, they dug for shellfish and played in the shallows, the ocean too rough to swim in. For our family holidays, my father would drive 90 minutes from Kuala Lumpur, where we lived, to Port Dickson in the neighbouring state of Negeri Sembilan for a seaside holiday along the Strait of Malacca. The trips weren’t often, but they were memorable, as we caught up with our extended family with the sea a scenic panoramic background to our fun. 

When we migrated, adjusting to life in Naarm/Melbourne meant that my parents worked any job to get by, and we didn’t go away for holidays. As my parents’ social circles shrank, their wellbeing took second place to that of us children. My parents encouraged the extracurricular activities we were familiar with from Malaysia—like chess and badminton—and my father drove us around dutifully without complaint. Living in the suburbs with the sea far away, going to the beach was never part of my teenage life. Swimming was one of many skills we’d have to learn, and it wasn’t seen as important. 

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In Personal Score, Munanjali Yugambeh author and poet Ellen van Neerven explores the question of what it means to play sport on First Nations land. ‘Do we need to know the truth of land before we can play on it?’ they ask. ‘Indeed, should we do anything on Country without knowing the truth?’ 

Williamstown, an 11-kilometre car ride from my house in Footscray, was the closest beach to me. On hot days, I found myself checking out wind, weather and the EPA beach reports. Mornings were preferable to afternoons and evenings when the beach would be packed with families and groups of friends. 

The suburb was renamed ‘William’s Town’ after the English monarch, King William IV. According to Biik Bundjil, a cultural organisation focused on embedding Boonwurrung culture into modern society, the ancient name for Williamstown is Koort Boork Boork, meaning ‘clump of She-Oaks’: 

Prior to colonisation, Koort Boork Boork was home to many She-Oak trees. Here, Benbow would conduct many ceremonies and counsels under a sacred She-Oak tree that sat near Nelson’s Place. As She-Oaks were removed by Ngamadji [white men], the health of the Boonwurrung deplenished. 

In the essay ‘Bodies That Matter on the Beach’, Goenpul academic Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson writes that since British colonisation in 1788, beaches are the ‘common ground upon which collective national ownership, memory and identity are on public display: a place of pleasure, leisure and pride’. Williamstown Beach, like any other Melbourne beach, is dominated by white people confidently sunbaking, swimming and playing sporting activities. When I approach the coastline, I survey for other queers and people of colour. It makes me feel more at ease, an unconscious comfort that beaches aren’t only the domain of white cis-hetero families and couples. According to Moreton-Robinson, despite the promise of open access and use, ‘the beach was and remains a heteronormative white masculine space entailing performances of sexuality, wealth, voyeurism, class, and possession’. 

With the backdrop of wealthy mansions and beachside apartments, there are alternative narratives at play: Muslim community members openly pray in the nearby botanical garden, diverse groups of people gather for picnics and barbecues. Importantly, on 26 January, independently run Williamstown Open Water Swim Coaching hosts an Invasion Day Swim from Williamstown Beach to Jawbone Marine Sanctuary. Van Neerven’s provocation of ‘knowing the truth’ of First Nations sovereignty is manifested in this public intervention where swimmers experience Williamstown outside patriarchal white national identity discourses. 

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When I could swim confidently, I participated in summer snorkelling activities with Marine Care Ricketts Point and Jawbone Marine Sanctuary. I learnt how important it was to buddy up with another person while snorkelling. The safety rules for partners were simple and effective: don’t leave your buddy’s side; if one leaves the water, the other goes too. The snorkel trips were portals to an underwater world filled with sublime beauty—shy stingrays buried in the seabed, bright orange biscuit sea stars on rocks, a school of snapper with silver luminescent along their sleek scales. It was also a site of risk—currents that pulled you out into deeper water, icy cold temperatures, sharp rocks and the threat of fatigue. I safely gained knowledge in open water outside the controlled conditions of the swimming pool; it was information only gained from experience. It also highlighted the importance of having a community that could impart water safety skills. 

In the meditative Why We Swim, US author and former competitive swimmer Bonnie Tsui explores our innate relationship with water. On its vital links to our survival, she notes its dangers, writing that swimming is ‘a constant state of not drowning’. Swimming is the liminal space between life and death when we are not vigilant or adept. 

In January 2021, a twenty-year-old Asian Australian woman drowned in Altona while snorkelling off the pier. According to Surf Life Saving’s BeachSafe app, Altona Beach has a general hazard rating of ‘Least Hazardous’. On a scale of ten, it rated one. In the Victorian Drowning Report 2020/21 sixty-one people fatally drowned from 1 July 2020 to 30 June 2021, the highest in twenty years. 

In March 2022, Do Hung Vu, a sixty-five-year-old Vietnamese man, drowned while diving alone for abalone approximately fifty metres off Altona Beach. 

This is an excerpt from ‘Adult Swimmer’, which you can read in full here.