Swimming with safety
ROB Brander, an associate professor at the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of NSW, made headlines recently when he was quoted as saying that the message, “swim between the red and yellow flags,” was “useless”.
While he admits he was quoted accurately, he says it was printed without proper context.
What is clear, when reading the opinion piece he wrote for
on January 4 is that he is very concerned about the number of drowning deaths on our beaches and believes greater education and more patrolled beaches with more lifeguards is the key to increasing safety and decreasing preventable surf deaths.
As a small child of about four, I had a very frightening experience in the surf in Queensland and because of that I have never since trusted the ocean.
Our children, however, do not have the same fear of the ocean that I do.
Having grown up 25 minutes from the beach, it is usually a weekly destination for them between September and April.
They run into the waves, are happy bobbing on surfboards out the back waiting for a wave, and think my rule that they can’t go in deeper than their belly buttons is ridiculous.
The realisation that the beach is a significant part of their life has been a constant source of worry and has caused me to try to work out how to keep them safer in the water.
It has been neither easy to find the education nor inexpensive to do so. Learning to swim is essential. This has been the easy part. Swimming lessons are available at multiple centres in Geelong, every day of the week within a short distance from home.
The cost of a lesson is about $12 and while it is not inconsequential to the family budget with multiple children, it is an easy bill to prioritise.
But swimming lessons do not teach our children what a rip is or why it is so important to swim between the flags.
Those lessons do not teach them that when they are 15 and catch the bus with friends to the coast that swimming at beaches that are not patrolled is dangerous.
They don’t teach them how to manage a rip.
They don’t teach them that before you step on to a beach you should use the elevated viewing platform not only for a selfie for the Insta page but also to evaluate where danger is and to read the beach signs about what danger is typically present at that beach.
Noting that my knowledge of surf and beach safety is minimal, to try to impart this knowledge our children have, over the years, been enrolled in nippers and surf groms.
A large component of both programs is water safety.
Many surf life saving clubs hold their nippers holiday program in January.
This year ours was held on six days over two weeks for three hours each day.
The cost is not inconsiderable but, when looked at over the 18 hours of the program, its cost is less than the cost of a weekly swimming lesson. Each day of the program the children learn about water safety.
Then they take the theory that they have been taught and try to put it into practice — in some of the roughest surf along the Victorian coast.
Surf groms is another excellent program, which teaches children to surf but has a large surf safety component built into the program.
The program has experienced teachers who have taught our children not only how to spot a wave and ride it to the beach but also how to identify a rip, avoid water that is churning with sand, and shark safety.
While our children’s desire to surf lasted about a year, the messages built into the water safety component have stayed and help to keep them safe.
To access programs like surf groms and nippers the reality is that you need to live near the beach or have ready and regular access to the beach — which for most Victorians and Australians is not their life’s reality.
Instead of bringing our children to the surf, maybe it is time to bring the surf to our children.
Brander’s message about education and greater patrols may be some of the answer, but what is clear is that as a community we need to take steps to work through what can be done to provide our children with at least basic information about identifying, avoiding and managing a rip, gully and all of the other dangerous water patterns that contribute to tragic deaths in our surf each year. Rachel Schutze is a principal lawyer at Gordon Legal, wife and mother of three. [Ed’s note: Ms Schutze is married to Corio MP Richard Marles.]