ANGELA MOLLARD
IS there anything so beautiful as the sea? Last night I walked along it, charmed by how the ocean continues to kiss the shoreline like the most steadfast of lovers. This morning I swam in it, dolphin diving, frolicking, floating.
Nowhere returns me to childhood as effortlessly as a dunk in the waves and nothing restores the soul so reliably as being submerged in what Pablo Neruda calls its “crystal completeness”.
Yet as surely as the days are long and the mangoes are sweet, the sea is under attack.
Despite half the nation currently reclining on a beach, the sea is yet again summer’s whipping boy, a brooding menace that steals lives with its sharks and rips.
“A malevolent mountain of hateful liquid,” is how actor Rhys Muldoon described the ocean in an ailing newspaper this week. To be fair he was trying to spruik a new documentary he narrates called Rip Current
Heroes after it was revealed only 30 per cent of Australians can correctly identify a rip.
But in the accompanying report the sea was called both “cruel” and “monstrous” while images showed a woman swimming in a black sea under a bruised sky.
To expect the sea to be safe is akin to describing Mt Everest as a hill or a lion as a cat.
Yet in our rush to demonise it and blame it for a “deadly summer” we not only sidestep our own ignorance but tarnish the reputation of the sea as the most democratic and healing force most of us will ever know.
But for a decade in London where the river Thames was a poor substitute, I’ve spent my life on a beach. As a child, lifeguard, reporter, jogger, ocean swimmer, snorkeller and unwilling crew member in my dad’s boat, the sea feels as familiar to me as my own bed.
Most of my favourite memories have a watery backdrop: sleeping on the beach as a student in Alicante; watching the sunrise with a lover on the cliff above Crescent Head; floating pregnant in the sea at Noosa; dipping my baby’s toes into the aquamarine softness of Jervis Bay. I don’t believe in rating beaches. Who can say which are the “10 best beaches in the world” when the sum of a beach is not its sand, setting and shoreline but the gorgeous alchemy of nature and circumstance. I have been as happy wandering between the ice cream-hued beach huts and the sludge of England’s North Sea as I have floating in the palm-fringed atolls of the Pacific. Is there anything else that offers everything but charges nothing? As I get older the sea soothes my psyche as much as my body.
“It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel,” writes Anthony Doerr in All The Light We Cannot See while Van Morrison notes how it feeds the “gypsy soul” in Into The Mystic. “Hark, now hear the sailors cry, smell the sea, and feel the sky.”
So it’s no surprise to learn that we have a “blue mind” — a scientifically proven state where being near, in, on or under water can make us feel happier, healthier and more connected. Wallace J Nichols, author of Blue
Mind, a hymn to the power of water, believes the blue mind combats the red (stressed, anxious, overactive) and grey (numb, lethargic, demotivated) minds that are the product of our modern lifestyles.
Water, he says, encourages a state of “drift” where instead of constantly reacting to digital images or manifold conversations, the sea offers a view where change is subtle and slow — boats drifting, seagulls, shifting tides.
Perhaps it’s because we came from the sea that we identify so strongly with it. As John F Kennedy remarked to the America’s Cup crews in 1962: “It is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean.”
It’s that elemental connection to the ocean that’s explored in Simon Baker’s soon to be released film of Tim Winton’s Breath. While
Rip Current Heroes rightly seeks to inform, revealing new research that finds rips are more difficult to escape and less predictable than previously thought, Breath is a love letter to the ocean.
As a surfer, Baker wanted to make the movie as soon as he read Winton’s novel.
I’m hoping the actor captures the author’s anthem to the ocean and surfing, a “dance” he describes as “completely pointless and beautiful”. Presumably fear or the desire for a good headline prompted Muldoon to dub the sea “hateful”. Rather, it is unknowable. Unknowable in so much as we will never know why it dumped the whale I stumbled upon on Angourie Beach on the NSW north coast a few weeks ago. And unknowable in the freak wave that ripped my daughter’s bikini bottoms from her while swimming in the ocean this morning. Notwithstanding the embarrassment of emerging from the sea pantless, she understands that the sea is not to be feared, but respected.