Rhapsody in blue
The ritual return to swimming signals a wardrobe shift, but also a reawakening of another kind – and this year, more than ever, the first swim of the season may be the cure for what ails us.
The ritual return to swimming signals a wardrobe shift, but also a reawakening of another kind.
It’s my favourite time of year. Spring. When the first adventurous bathers join the rusted-on Dupain-like sunbakers on the sand. The rocky promontories of Sydney’s unique coves and bays are calling and first-in-season swimmers stud the outcrops like barnacles, albeit shivering with warm coffee in hand. Extracting the swimsuit from a knot of long packed-away bikinis and maillots, we barely think about which to wear in the heady hurry after someone makes that first suggestion in months: “Swim?”
Perhaps we’re in a rush because it signals a shedding – of our winter selves, and, hopefully this time, our stagnant life, indoorbound. It’s a circuit-breaker non pareil.
Historically, it’s also always been the wardrobe about-turn that marks a turn in weather. We don’t transition out of winter wardrobes so much as scatter them: ditching cloying cardigans, and stifling coats in a frustrated flurry on that first warm day. When fences and walls erupt in festoons of early-spring jasmine, our heavy puffers and lug-soled boots are forgotten.
For some Australians, it means something extra special. From when we were young, a glorious new swimsuit – the material pristine, with the surf-shop rubber sillage still lingering, not yet sagged from hours spent in chlorine, or snagged on rocks – meant beginnings and possibility. The moment we go for that first swim is a perfect potent combination of nostalgia and anticipation.
As this moment comes around again this spring, it feels more deeply rooted. Some days, confined to our homes, our only outside contact was with nature. The empty beaches, the eucalypts, silent sentinels to the days passing, always there. Our connection to nature, our dependency (“I need fresh air”), was already more intimate.
Slipping into our swim is a liberation – firstly corporeal, freeing up arms and limbs, then in other more powerful ways, which history shows. It’s no light matter – we’re pioneers in this area.
Our very own ‘Australian mermaid’, swimmer Annette Kellerman was rumoured to have been arrested in 1907 for wearing a leg-baring one-piece at Revere Beach, Boston. Not only was she an accomplished vaudeville star, actress, and endurance swimmer, but she would do her own stunts for her acting roles (even leaping into a pool of crocodiles) and she is credited with popularising the one-piece world over, letting loose our arms, legs and necks, when women were wading around in the incommodious confines of sodden, heavy cotton or, worse, wool.
That self-assuredness courses through the brash, bold Australian beachfront with the body proud, or the just-don’t-care, plunging into the blue depths day in, day out. Emancipation at the waterline.
It’s with this spirit, and those memories that the cravings come late winter for the pulse-raising effects of cold water. It’s welcoming, familiar to our bodies: it’s always been striking that ocean water is almost identical in salinity and mineral make-up to human blood. As Emma Jarman, one half of Australian resort label Commas, who swims year round, most mornings with husband and designer Richard, says: “Diving into the ocean is like taking a cold mineral bath … You could wake up on the wrong side of the bed, or be slightly hungover, or even just going through a tough season. Once you dive in, everything melts away.”
Seven hundred times denser than air, it anchors us. In a world reeling, that holds appeal. In the 1960s Swedish researcher Per Scholander, discovered that the human heart slows when submerged in water cooler than the outside air – a miracle of oxygen distribution, an amphibious quirk we all have. He named it the Master Switch of Life.
Slowing down, liberation, the feeling of possibility – swimming offers it all. So, if not a convert, embrace the alien feel of air between toes, on backs of knees. Dive in and the heart quietens. Float, and you’re suspended above the continental shelf, disconnected from the worries on land. A brush with the unknowable deep, reframes worries. Drying off, fingers and toes wake up again, along with the body. Re-emerging, reawakened – the feeling has come back.