A fun dip into Kiwi swims Review

by Annette Lees, Potton & Burton, $40. Reviewed by Fiona Barber.

The title of this book deceived me. I pounced on it, hoping to be saturated with details about the writer’s long- or mediumdistance journeys along coasts, across rivers and around lakes. I wanted to know about Annette Lees’ headspace after the first 200 metres, when frigid winter water makes your face want to jump off your head and your teeth ache. What stroking 2 kilometres into a ferocious tide felt like. How she kept her swimming cadence through soups of tiny jellyfish, forests of shoreline kelp or goggle failure. Details, details, details . . . That’s the problem with being an obsessed sea swimmer.

But Swim is not a technical account of her swims in the wild. Rather, it is part diary (Lees attempts to enter the water every day for a year), part history lesson, part science lesson, and part love letter to Aotearoa’s wild, aquatic places, with first-person accounts from other avid swimmers scattered throughout.

Cumulatively, it is a celebration of our connection with the water, and once I’d got my head around that, I could enjoy her tales, teachings and fluid writing.

My favourite sections – the book jumps between subjects and styles, so is excellent to dip in and out of – were guest writers’ accounts of their swims and their relationships with water.

Archaeologist and author David Veart recalled missing the Devonport ferry home about 2am and swimming across Auckland harbour.

‘‘I was drunk as a skunk. I’d swum about halfway before I sobered up. My only real worry was being run over by a big ship.’’

Night swimmer and marine biologist Dr Coral Grant wondered if some city kids had never seen their parents swim and, as a result, couldn’t swim themselves.

‘‘It is a learned thing, feeling comfortable in the water, and it comes through experiencing it, doing it a lot and being with people who encourage you, especially as you get older.’’

And from Deah Swift, who started swimming at 52, and went on to stroke up to 10km a day in summer, and for 20-30 minutes in winter.

‘‘It is my freedom and my release. It’s joyousness and delight. I’m a polar bear and this polar bear has to be wet,’’ she says.

There’s much more – a former combat swimmer in the German navy (who knew there was such a thing?), Hinepoupou’s epic swim across the Cook Strait in the 1700s and a salutary chapter in which Lees laments that Kiwis have been ‘‘making their favourite swimming places unswimmable for about 150 years . . . Sewage still overflows into [Auckland’s] Cox’s Creek and the beach there is permanently closed for swimming.’’

All in all, there’s plenty for the swimmers, splashers, bombers, and dippers, and inspiration for those whose relationship with the water is still restricted to ‘‘look, but don’t touch’’.

Had I not got the wrong idea about this book, I might not have dived in. And that would have been a shame.

Swim is a celebration of our connection with the water.