Getting in the swim is harder but just as vital
How did you learn to swim? If you’re a babyboomer like me, most likely it was a combination of a few sessions at school in the spring and summer terms plus plenty of time with friends and family at beaches, rivers and lakes.
In those innocent days, free of the fear of melanoma, dodgy people hanging about with cameras, or overly risk-averse parents, many of us enjoyed free and pretty much unfettered access to swimmable bodies of water. Our friends and older siblings taught us how to duck-dive, swim under water and make it out to the pontoon. They dared us to leap off wharfs, boats, bridges and ledges above swimming holes, and we took the challenge, developing aquatic competence and physical confidence. Parents stayed in the background – and as for swimming lessons, they were unheard of.
At home on the Waikawa Bay farm, my parents cunningly incentivised fast mastery of basic swimming skills: unless we could swim 100 yards without putting our feet on the bottom, we couldn’t bathe unsupervised or use the dinghy.
As quite small children, my brothers and I had already clambered around the rocky coastline, attempting to lever big flat crabs out of crevasses, and shrimping in rock pools. But with a dinghy, we could carry home those useful planks washed up in Garden Bay, along with glass net floats and bird skeletons, and we could reach the black-backed gull colony on the point between Waikawa Bay and Camp Bay. We’d be able to fish for cod, too, all by ourselves.
So we learned to dog-paddle and otherwise flounder about buoyantly as quickly as we could, pestering Dad to assess our performance and grant us the precious dinghy licence.
At French Pass School, during the summer and spring terms the always cold Elmslie Bay water glittered enticingly just across the road. Hot and sweaty from lunchtime games of rounders and tag, we’d beg to go swimming. Teacher Peter Shea, dressed in his summer walk shorts, would stand on the gravel beach next to an untidy pile of towels, monitoring the smaller children closely.
We bigger kids were supposed to swim up and down parallel to the beach, practising our strokes, but mostly we tried to duck each other, waiting impatiently until Mr Shea let us swim across to the wharf. We’d climb up on to the deck and jump off the big wooden bollard near the crane. We egged each other on to bigger and bolder deeds of daring: bombing, trying to touch the seabed, swimming under the wharf through the mussel-encrusted piles, diving over the rail after a runup across the widest part of the wharf.
We scorned anyone nervous of the purplish-blue man o’ war jellyfish that often floated into the bay or the ominous shadow of the big stingrays that cruised between the wharf’s piles. It was a matter of pride to stay in the water until we were blue with cold.
Well, times change. While the kind of informal swimming education my generation got served us well for the most part, for many reasons it won’t serve today.
New Zealand has a sad history of fatal drownings. In colonial days, drowning was common enough to be called ‘‘the New Zealand death’’. Given our watery geography, we’ve always known that basic competence in the water is an essential skill for all New Zealanders.
But right now the number of children with even basic water skills is low. In 2017, Newshub reported that up to two-thirds of New Zealand kids couldn’t swim 100 metres. The study involved eight Dunedin primary schools, and the southern climate might be a factor, but that’s still a scary statistic.
The reasons behind this worrying lack of skill around water are not hard to find. In 2016, NZCER research on behalf of Water Safety NZ revealed that only 27 per cent of primary schools offered ‘‘minimal or acceptable’’ levels of ‘‘aquatic education’’. And ‘‘minimal’’ is defined as eight 25-minute lessons a year.
Private lessons are one solution for those who can afford them. Most children will need more than one set of lessons, and most families have more than one child. Tuition costs can mount up quickly. Add time-poor working parents and income inequality to the mix and, for a significant number of children, the chances of learning even basic water skills are poor.
Last year, 92 people drowned in New Zealand waters and 148 were hospitalised, according to Water Safety NZ. With improved aquatic education in schools, we can do much better than this. And the bonus? Many more youngsters will be able to have fun bombing off wharfs, swimming under water and diving off high places competently, confidently and safely.
For a significant number of children, the chances of learning even basic water skills are poor.