The deep end and the shallow bits

The first thing I remember is the smell.

Chlorine, yes, sharp and medicinal, like a promise that the water won’t kill you. But also, sunscreen warmed on skin, hot concrete, wet towels, the faint sweetness of icy poles melting in paper wrappers. If I close my eyes I can still feel the council pool on a January afternoon – the glare off the surface like broken glass, the slap of thongs on pavers, the chorus of kids shrieking with the pure joy of bodies allowed to be loud.

It’s funny what stays with you. I can’t recall the names of half the teachers who taught me things I was meant to remember. But I can recall, with embarrassing precision, the sting of chlorine in my nostrils as I stood on the edge of the shallow end, toes curled around the gritty lip of the pool, trying to decide whether I trusted the water.

I learned early that the pool has two moral zones – the shallow bits, where you can pretend you’re brave, and the deep end, where pretending stops working.

Every kid knows this. We all know the invisible border where your feet stop finding the floor. We all know the little panic that arrives when you realise you’re floating not due to you choosing to, but because gravity has taken a break and you are now at the mercy of physics. The deep end is where you discover whether you can do more than splash. It’s where you learn that survival is a skill.

My own childhood lessons were at a slightly daggy municipal pool, the kind with a brick kiosk selling hot chips and dim sims, a sun-faded sign listing “Rules” in stern capital letters, and change rooms that felt like they’d been designed by someone who thought comfort was a suspicious luxury. The tiles were always cold. The hooks were always missing. There was always a puddle that wasn’t quite water and wasn’t quite anything you wanted to think about.

And yet – it was paradise.

Not in the glamorous sense. In the democratic sense. It was a place where, for the price of entry, or, if you were lucky, for free on a school program, you could have an entire afternoon of relief from heat, boredom, family stress, the cramped architecture of whatever home you’d come from. The pool didn’t ask who your parents were. It didn’t care what suburb you lived in. It didn’t want your subscription details. It simply opened its gates and said – here is water, here is space, here is a version of summer that belongs to everyone.

My guardians took me there when I was little, before I could really swim. I remember her sitting on the edge with her feet in the water, hat pulled low, watching me with that particular parental tension that looks like relaxation to outsiders but is actually constant calculation – Is the kid safe? Where is the kid? Have they wandered into the deep end? Are they about to do something stupid because all children are always about to do something stupid?

Even now I can picture the lifeguard – tall, sun-browned, wearing a whistle like authority. She’d pace the edge with that mix of boredom and vigilance that is the lifeguard’s art. People think lifeguards are there to enforce rules. They are. But mostly they are there to prevent the sudden, silent kind of tragedy that doesn’t look like drama until it’s too late.

Drowning is not like the movies. It doesn’t announce itself with flailing and screaming. It often looks like nothing much, like a child quietly slipping under, like someone misjudging distance, like exhaustion arriving one stroke earlier than expected. It is terrifying precisely because it can be so ordinary.

Which is why the council pool matters more than we like to admit. Not as a nostalgic relic of suburban childhood, but as a public safety system we barely recognise as one.

My first swimming teacher was a woman with a voice that could cut through chaos. She had a kind of brisk kindness, no nonsense, but not cruel. She lined us up in our little caps and goggles and gave instructions like a drill sergeant for tiny, wet recruits.

“Bubbles,” she’d say. “BUBBLES. Put your face in and blow. Don’t just stare at the water like it’s going to solve your problems.”

I was a cautious child. I didn’t like putting my face under. I didn’t like the sense of losing control. The water, to me, was not a playground, it was a negotiation.

One day she took us to the rope that separated shallow from deep. The rope itself was comical, a floating boundary, plastic buoys bobbing. But to us it was a border between worlds. On one side – safety, floor, competence. On the other – the unknown.

“Alright,” she said. “Today you learn to tread.”

A groan ran through the class. Treading water is the first time you realise swimming isn’t just forward movement. It’s staying alive without going anywhere. It’s the skill that turns panic into time. It’s what you need when a rip pulls you out, when you fall off a boat, when your body is suddenly asked to do more than it thought it could.

We held onto kickboards. We practised sculling with our hands like awkward little dogs. She walked along the edge watching faces.

“Relax your shoulders,” she said to me, tapping my tense trapezius like she was diagnosing stress before I knew what stress was. “You’re fighting the water. The water always wins. Work with it.”

Work with it. I have thought about that sentence more times in adult life than I care to admit.

Because the council pool taught me something that turned out to be political – bodies can learn. Bodies can adapt. But bodies need access. They need instruction. They need a place where learning is safe enough to be possible.

The drowning season

If you grow up in Australia, you are told, explicitly and implicitly, that water is part of your identity. We are beach people. We are surf people. We are river people. We are the country that looks at the ocean and thinks not only of beauty, but of leisure. We run ads with bronzed kids diving under waves as if it’s the national birthright.

And yet, beneath that mythology, there is a quieter reality – swimming competency is unevenly distributed, and the consequences are brutal. Royal Life Saving and Surf Life Saving’s most recent National Drowning Report counted 357 drowning deaths in Australia between 1 July 2024 and 30 June 2025, the highest in decades, and noted that 32% of those who drowned were born overseas.

That statistic is not an argument for blaming migrants. It’s an argument for acknowledging what we pretend not to see – water safety is not automatic. It is taught. And if you don’t have access to lessons, because of cost, distance, culture, language, time, or simply the fact that nobody in your family knows how to teach you, then Australia’s watery identity becomes a kind of trap.

When I was a kid, I didn’t know any of this. I just knew the deep end felt like fear, and the shallow end felt like pride. I knew I wanted to be like the older kids who could dive cleanly and emerge laughing, confident, as if the water was a friend.

The council pool was where that confidence was made. Not through talent, but through repetition. Through patient correction. Through the slow rewiring of the body’s instinct to panic.

There’s a moment in learning to swim when you stop thinking of the water as an enemy. It doesn’t become harmless, you still respect it, but it becomes navigable. The panic that once arrived instantly begins to arrive later, giving you time to respond. You learn that breathing is not just breathing, but timing. You learn that survival has technique.

Years later, as an adult, I returned to the council pool in a different mood.

It wasn’t summer. It was one of those grey Melbourne mornings where the air feels like damp wool and your body wants to stay in bed. I’d been sitting too much, writing, thinking, living in my head, and my back was starting to complain in that middle-aged way – not as a scream, but as a persistent grumble. A physio had told me, with the dry authority of someone who knows the human spine is a fragile compromise, “You should swim. It’s the best thing. Low impact. Whole body.”

So, I went to the local leisure centre before work, expecting some kind of sleek, semi-private wellness vibe.

What I found instead was the council pool in its adult form – the same slightly institutional smell, the same fluorescent lighting, the same quiet heroism of infrastructure doing its job.

The change rooms were full of ordinary bodies.

That’s the first thing you notice when you grow up in a culture saturated with polished fitness imagery – real bodies are not the ones on posters. Real bodies are scarred, soft, ageing, uneven. They carry pregnancies and illnesses and injuries and work. They carry the history of labour and care.

There were older men with bellies like settled weather, shuffling to the showers with towels around their waists, talking about football and blood pressure medication. There were women in modest swimwear moving with the efficient confidence of people who have stopped apologising for existing. There was a teenage boy with acne and headphones, avoiding everyone’s eyes like adolescence requires. There was a woman in a burkini adjusting her goggles with meticulous focus, a small child clinging to her hand. There were people whose bodies clearly hurt, moving gently in the water like it was the only place their joints would forgive them.

I remember standing at the edge of the lap pool and feeling, unexpectedly, a kind of tenderness.

Because here was a place where all these lives intersected without needing to justify themselves. A place where the currency wasn’t status but breath. Where the only requirement was that you follow the lane etiquette and don’t drown.

Pools are rare in that way. They are one of the few public spaces where bodies of different ages, shapes, incomes, and backgrounds share the same element. Water is the great leveller. In water, the body’s usual hierarchy changes. Weight distributes differently. Strength shows itself in different ways. Age is less visible. Pain eases. Everyone becomes, briefly, a moving organism rather than a social symbol.

I slid into the water and felt the shock, cold at first, then enveloping. The sound of the world muffled. The ceiling lights became blurred rectangles. My ears filled. My breath became the only thing that mattered.

I swam slowly, rusty. The lane was shared with a woman in her sixties who moved like a metronome, steady, unhurried, unstoppable. She passed me cleanly at the wall and kept going as if she’d been doing this for decades because she had. Behind me was a man doing freestyle with a slightly wild energy, splashing, determined. In the next lane, someone was walking back and forth in the shallow end, doing rehab, face tight with concentration.

No one spoke. The pool had that early-morning hush of people doing quiet maintenance on their lives.

The longer I went, the more I saw the pool’s social role in small ways. An older man teaching his mate how to use the lockers. A lifeguard gently telling a group of kids not to bomb into the lane pool. Staff at the front desk patiently explaining membership discounts. A swim teacher kneeling to talk to a terrified five-year-old, coaxing them into the water one step at a time.

All of it was infrastructure. Not glamorous, but life-shaping.

And then, a few months later, I found myself at the same pool in the stands, watching a kids’ swim carnival.

If you have never been to a cheap suburban swim carnival, you have missed one of the most Australian forms of slightly daggy community joy. The stands are full of parents in thongs and caps, clutching coffees, shouting encouragement with voices already hoarse. There is always a sausage sizzle somewhere, always someone selling home-baked goods, always the scent of sunscreen thick enough to be tasted. Kids run around half-dressed, wrapped in towels like capes, cheeks red from cold and adrenaline.

The races themselves are chaotic. Not Olympic grace, but earnest thrashing. Some kids slice through water beautifully, trained, and confident. Others dog-paddle with furious determination. Some stop halfway and stand up. Some forget which way to go. The crowd cheers anyway. Because the point isn’t perfection. The point is participation. The point is that a child is learning, in public, to face the deep end.

I sat there, laughing, and then I noticed something that shifted my laughter into something heavier – which children looked comfortable in the water, and which didn’t.

The confident ones often came from families who could afford lessons for years. The cautious ones often came from families juggling costs and time. Not always, but often enough to be visible if you were looking.

This is one of the quiet injustices of contemporary Australia – we are a water country where water competence is becoming a class marker.

Australia has forgotten how to swim

Costs have risen. Time is tighter. School programs are inconsistent. And the result is predictable. A Guardian report about a Royal Life Saving survey noted that nearly half of Year 6 students can’t swim 50 metres or tread water for two minutes, basic survival benchmarks.

If you write that sentence on a page, it looks like a statistic. If you sit at a swim carnival and watch kids who are already ten or eleven looking scared in water, it becomes something else – a warning. A social fracture. A tragedy waiting for summer.

Because Australia will not stop being hot. It will not stop being coastal. It will not stop being filled with rivers, dams, creeks, backyard pools, beach holidays, fishing trips, boat days, floods. Water is not an optional part of the landscape.

So, the council pool is a community safety system, a place where kids who don’t have private access can learn skills that might save their lives.

This becomes even more urgent when you think about migration.

Australia is built on migration. We know that. We recite it, celebrate it, debate it. But we rarely think about the practical, bodily aspects of migrating into a water culture. If you come from a landlocked place, or a place where swimming isn’t common, or a place where public pools are rare, you arrive in Australia not only needing English and employment, but needing water literacy.

Royal Life Saving’s work on drowning among multicultural communities highlights the overrepresentation and the need for targeted approaches. And Surf Life Saving has been blunt that disadvantaged, multicultural, regional, and remote populations remain overrepresented in drowning, in part because they are more likely to miss out on learning to swim and on safe places to swim.

Again – this is not about blame, but about access.

I’ve watched migrant parents at council pools with a kind of fierce determination. Parents who didn’t learn to swim themselves, who may be frightened of water, sitting through lessons because they know something – in this country, swimming is a form of cultural adaptation as essential as learning the language.

I’ve seen mothers in modest swimwear standing in the shallow end, holding toddlers, speaking softly in languages that bend differently around the mouth. I’ve seen fathers in the stands filming their kid’s first independent float like it’s a graduation ceremony, because in some way it is – a child crossing into safety.

The council pool makes these scenes possible because it is public, local, relatively affordable, staffed by people who know how to teach a room full of terrified beginners without humiliation.

And then, layered over everything now, is the brutal new normal – a heating climate.

There is a sentence I never heard in my childhood that now feels entirely ordinary – “Find somewhere cool.”

Councils and health authorities increasingly list pools alongside libraries and community centres as places people can go when their homes are too hot. The City of Melbourne, for example, explicitly suggests visiting a pool at a recreation centre as a way to cool down during hot weather.

That is what a pool becomes in heatwaves – not a luxury, but cooling infrastructure.

If you are wealthy, a heatwave is uncomfortable. You turn on air conditioning. You close blinds. You drink cold water. You complain.

If you are poor, a heatwave can be dangerous. Your rental may be poorly insulated. You may not have air conditioning. You may ration power because bills are already crushing. You may be older. You may have health conditions. You may be living in a cramped space with children and nowhere to escape.

In that context, the council pool is heat relief that doesn’t require buying anything.

And it is one of the few forms of relief that includes joy.

But this experiment is under pressure, because council pools are expensive to maintain and easy for politicians to dismiss.

They are often ageing. They require staff. They require compliance, upgrades, heating, accessibility improvements, filtration systems, maintenance you can’t postpone forever. And as budgets tighten, the temptation returns – close the pool, outsource it, privatise management, let the market handle leisure.

Royal Life Saving’s report on aquatic facility infrastructure warned that many public aquatic facilities owned by local governments will need replacement, estimating significant costs, and emphasised the social, health and economic impacts if facilities aren’t renewed.

It’s at this juncture where our national conversation goes wrong. We treat pools as leisure expenditure rather than social infrastructure. We forget what they do beyond providing water.

They teach survival.
They reduce drowning risk.
They build community cohesion.
They offer low-cost exercise for older adults.
They provide rehab spaces for injured bodies.
They give teenagers somewhere to be that isn’t a shopping centre or a street corner.
They cool people down in heatwaves.
They become, in subtle ways, a public commons.

And the public commons matters because without it, every joy becomes something you have to buy.

A society is not just a collection of private households, but rather a web of shared supports that prevent small disadvantages from becoming catastrophic ones.

If you want to see this clearly, go to a council pool on a blistering day. Watch the families arrive with eskies and towels. Watch the kids run toward the water as if it’s salvation. Watch parents who cannot afford a “holiday” create one for their children with a few dollars and a patch of shade. Watch teenagers daring each other into courage. Watch the lifeguard’s eyes scanning constantly, quietly holding the line between play and disaster.

Then tell me it’s just leisure.

The council pool gives me the shallow bits and the deep end. The place where we learn. The place where we test ourselves. The place where we watch kids cross that invisible border and discover they can keep themselves afloat.

And maybe that’s the final metaphor – a society is like a pool. It has shallow bits where people can stand easily, and deep ends where the floor drops away. The difference between a decent society and a cruel one is whether there are lifeguards, lessons, ladders, and places to practise before you are thrown in.

Council pools are one of those places.

They are where we teach people, especially those who didn’t start with private access, that the deep end is survivable. That panic can be replaced with skill. That summer can be joy rather than danger. That water, in this country, can belong to everyone, not just those who can pay for the nicest version of it.

And when I think about the future, hotter summers, more migration, more inequality if we let it grow, I find myself wanting to defend something as simple as a slightly daggy pool.

Because in the end, a council pool is a public promise, shimmering in the sun – you, too, get to be safe here. You, too, get to cool down. You, too, get to learn. You, too, get to belong.

That’s worth maintaining.

That’s worth funding.

That’s worth fighting for, right down to the last chipped tile and the last whiff of chlorine on a kid’s hair as they climb out of the deep end, shivering, triumphant, alive.