Winter, Day 1
Every person has a different methodology for how they enter cold water.
The physical and spiritual benefits of cold-water swimming have been espoused by many (Bürklein, 2016; Calidas, 2020; Kellermann, 1918) but the disparity in how each individual enters the water is stark.
Favouring getting the shock over quickly, I prefer to plunge straight in. My partner, on the other hand, will inch anxiously forward, step by uncomfortable step. Amy can’t help but cry out as the chill takes hold. Harnessing the will, she finally dives under, plunging her head and torso into the water. Nahla’s approach is somewhere in between. Labradors love the water, and she is no different – loping through belly deep swamp water is a favourite past-time – but her ocean swimming is sometimes more considered. The water is no deterrent, it’s the size of the waves that must be gauged, but once she decides to proceed, she commits wholeheartedly.
While the methodologies each of us use to connect with the sea differ greatly, all three of us leave the water invigorated and more attuned to our surrounds. The exhilarating experience of immersing our bodies and souls provides a tantalising glimpse of a clarity of thought that has been hitherto absent.
Winter, Day 5
A guide to skindiving.
COVID will cost me my job. The news doesn’t come as a surprise, measures taken to stem transmission of the virus have wrought chaos on the global economy, bringing disruption and job losses not seen since the Great Depression. The closure of Australia’s borders is disastrous for many sectors. That reality means my contract will not be renewed. I take to the beach to process the news. Easing into the sea the saltwater gently envelops me, a proxy balm. Immersed in the water I look west to the breeze that catches on the ocean’s surface, and ripples towards me. Indifferent cliffs return my stare as I ponder what my unemployed future holds.
A familiar face distracts me as I leave the water. Now in his mid-fifties, Gary has lived here most of his life. We stand in the shallows while the early winter sun warms our backs. COVID is the first topic of discussion, we speculate on likely timeframes, the fall-out, and vaccines, “We couldn’t pick a better place to see out something like this,” he says. Talk moves to mutual acquaintances, life in the country, and being out of work. The company that Gary had worked with for the majority of his professional life was restructured a couple of years back, forcing semi-retirement upon him earlier than he’d planned. He’s philosophical about it, looks to spend that extra time wisely. Today, that means a spot of snorkelling. Exchanging farewells, I walk up the beach feeling optimistic. Gary’s hopefulness is infectious. As I towel myself down, I watch him don his mask and snorkel then swim out into the bay, making his way over those reefs and crevices. I’ll soon be out of work, but as Gary pointed out, we are the fortunate few, we’re here, in this beautiful place.
Winter, Day 8
A vantage on gloomy skies and troubled waters.
Winter, Day 17
Unpatrolled and uninhabited.
The recently ruined Wonthaggi Lifesaving Club (WLSC) tower perches watchfully atop the dunes behind Cape Paterson’s main swimming beach. A little over a year ago an intense weather system parked itself on the town and dumped more than 100mm of rain and hail in an hour. The resultant torrents collapsed roofs and washed away entire dunes. That foot-deep hail left the beach looking like a snowfield. The lookout tower and community hall bore the brunt, collapsed roofs, and washed-out foundations demonstrate the indifference ancient watercourses have for the nuances of coastal construction. Our rapidly warming planet and drastically changed weather patterns seem to deliver these ‘once-in-a-generation’ events far more frequently.
Teenage summers spent at this beach – long hot days progressing through nippers onto a bronze medallion as well as nights spent camped out in the dunes – have created great fondness for this place. It’s sad to see the clubhouse in such disrepair. After the flood, a friend posted photos from the 1960s showing the former clubhouse equally devastated by flood but looking through the records reveals that place has flooded at least three times in the past decade.
Our memories are short when it comes to these things but those once vibrant buildings of the lifesaving tower – which have hosted generations of sunburnt kids, weddings, dances, birthday parties and hole-in-the-wall kiosks – now cut forlorn figures. The intimacy of the destruction wrought by COVID has dulled the immediacy of the longer-term threat posed by climate change. But these condemned buildings – vacant and unused – offer immediate and tangible evidence of the imminent climate emergency playing out before our eyes. I wonder what the next generation of life savers – our children’s children – will make of our role in it all.
Winter, Day 24
Beach jocks... misplaced or discarded?
Beaches are a catch trap for misplaced and discarded objects – driftwood, shells, pebbles, plastic bags, cuttlefish husks, thongs, kelp, and clothing. The depression era weekender fishing huts that once lined the dunes of this place were fashioned from those beachcombed discards. Nowadays, forgotten clothing seems to be the most prolific castoff, an indication that carefree beach life must inspire forgetfulness. The repeated recent reappearance of a rogue pair of black jocks, sodden and sandy, has captured my attention. They move each day, kicked inadvertently by passers-by or washed on the tide. As a serial misplacer of clothes, I appreciate how easily underwear can fall by the wayside. Amy has even questioned whether this recalcitrant pair of undies are mine. They’re not, at least I don’t think so. Still, their persistence prompts me to question the cost of the care given to this place.
Place, seen through the lens of identity, contemplation and environmental attentiveness, is a site of meaning making but also one with ethical obligations. Advocating for the revival of storied and nuanced senses of land and place, the Australian philosopher and ecofeminist Val Plumwood (2008) highlights the problematic propensity to privilege certain places at the expense of others. Special places – such as this bay – capture our interest, demand attention, and are delineated from our ecological footprint. These places are maintained at the expense of ‘shadow places’, overlooked, unacknowledged and neglected spaces degraded in service of those privileged places. The council bins lining the beach carpark provide a clue to these spaces. Marshalling points for the waste consumed during the usage of this place, cast-offs to be whisked out of sight and dumped in landfill elsewhere. Those sandy jocks carelessly left lying behind will ultimately end up at another unknown and unacknowledged place. A shadow place forced to bear the ecological footprint of this beach and its activities.
Looking at those bins, I am struck by the introspective self-indulgence of my visitation and documentation process. Maintaining a routine of swimming, walking and reflection in this beautiful and safe place during a time of mass disruption and suffering suddenly seems a product of unearned privilege and accidental good fortune. I know I can’t change those things, but providence brings with it an obligation to tread lightly and to utilise this privilege for meaningful and useful ends. I try to bear that in mind when walking these sands and swimming in this sea.
Winter, Day 33
Rain swim.
The front arrived overnight, bringing steady rain and squally winds with it. The unseasonal mild weather of the past month might be the new normal in our warming world – recent Australian National University modelling indicates that by 2050 Tasmania will be the only region in Australia with a discernible winter (ANU, 2019). Just a week ago, reports noted the mercury in the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk tipped more than a hundred degrees Fahrenheit (38C) – the hottest temperature ever recorded north of the Arctic Circle (Freedman, 2020).
Those utterly terrifying revelations have been rendered insidiously distant by the immediacy of rising COVID infections and today’s chilly rain. Relishing the change, I wait for a proper deluge before venturing to the beach. I hurry over the soddened sand. A deserted beach cast in a blackish hue by the pall of cold droplets falling from the heavens. That rain stings my bare skin as I dawdle in waist deep water. I love swimming in the rain – it’s one of life’s great joys. As the familiar icy embrace envelopes me, I watch the rain meet the sea. Millions upon millions of tiny little collisions rippling on the surface around me. Beauty and brilliance in each collision. Lingering to bear witness I wonder how this pandemic is obscuring the urgency of global warming – the most significant threat to our long-term survival.
Winter, Day 35
Solitary but by no means alone.
Sighting a secluded hollow in the dunes, I take a seat to observe the coming and goings of this small part of the world. The beach is sparse for a weekend, rising COVID-19 infections continue to feed an overwhelming sense of foreboding. While people bunker down, I watch and wait. Movement at the eastern end of the bay grabs my attention. Topping the sand spit, a young boy makes his return from the adjoining bay. Walking with slow purpose, he looks to be alone, but his parents soon appear trailing a couple of hundred metres behind.
I wait patiently. A beat follows the beat before. The boy walks into shot, one framed by the bay. Depressing the button, the Polaroid mechanism whirs to life. A dark silhouette is captured mid stride, head slightly bowed, alone in that bordered view with only the calm grey ocean at his back for company. Solitary but by no means alone seems an appropriate summation of the situation, reflective of the one in which we all find ourselves.
Winter, Day 37
On a rising tide.
It was impulse that heralded me toward this routine of cold weather meaning making. The idea took seed months ago, late one autumn evening. Walking the soft and quiet sands while musing on childhood swimming and rockpooling – a ramble I’ve completed hundreds of times – I was confronted by the stark contrast between the optimism of my wistful contemplation and the hopelessness of humanity’s plight. Looking to the dark expansive ocean I observed an unpredictable presence, sensed an intangible but undeniable sentience. Drawn to the fickle and unwaveringly elemental magnetism I felt compelled to swim. After carefully stripping down, I leapt in. Swam the rising tide until I found a comfortable recess. And there, in the shelter of the bay, a place of my childhood, I lingered in the neck deep water, planted my feet on the sea floor. The ocean was sombre, predisposed towards the heavy bank of grey cloud that loomed overhead. Facing the open sea, eyes on the waterline, I looked to the barely distinguishable horizon where the steely grey ocean lapped indifferently at the threshold of the coming storm.
I found myself reflecting. I thought and pondered, speculated on ontological things – life after death, climate change, corruption, inaction, my inability to concentrate for any extended period of time. Winter would soon be upon us. My thoughts turned to the people that have tread this land before me. The Indigenous custodians of these unceded lands and seas, the Yallock-Bulluk of the Bunurong. I thought of generation upon generation who have swum this ocean, of the people who might tread its sands after me. I thought of waters that surround me and all of the actors, living and inanimate, that call it home. A forgotten titbit came to mind, that just like birds, fish sing to the skies above (Keenan, 2016). When I finally emerged shivering from that cold uncaring sea, I looked the clifftops, where the earth assembles with the heavens, and beheld a world full of possibilities.
Winter, Day 44
My eternal heart.
Cold water swimming brings the enormity of the world into sharp focus. Emerging into the immense unknown, I propel my body through the murky darkness with long strokes. This is my favourite part of each swim, affronted by the cold my mind brims with sensation, every inch of my body alive to perception in an attempt to attune itself to the water that envelopes me. Resurfacing, an acute awareness of our collective insignificance comes to the fore.
Today I’ll photograph a beguiling formation that occupies part of the nearby rock platforms. Carved by the waves, the rain, and the wind, it bears a striking similarity to a human heart. A minute fragment of Nature presenting as Art. I’ve tried to photograph it previously, but each polaroid returns blurry as if resistant to being pinned down. Today is no different but that seems apt – reflective of ephemeral thoughts.
Staring out to sea, I always look to the horizon, where the ocean meets the heavens. The enormity of the world and my infinitely small role in it never fails to overwhelm. Never fails to bring humility. This feeling is especially acute beneath overcast skies when great walls of clouds bleed into the reflective ocean. There I am privy to the briefest glimpse of something that eludes the day-to-day banality of our always limited understanding. Something akin to a line I recently read in a short story, “the something before the everything, its boiling fronts forcing life and space and time into nothingness. True no-thingness” (Gildfind, 2018, pp. 15-16).
Winter, Day 50
South westerly.
A howling westerly arrived overnight, stimulating the more sinister aspects of this place. The bitter wind whips white foam off the waves that roll into the bay. Walking into the taciturn cold, I dive into its unsympathetic embrace. The remedial but glacial properties of the saltwater surround my entire being. The cold seeps into the core of my body and I exit the water shivering. Still, I find comfort in the routine and ritual. Daily visits provide a structure to the day. A magnetic pole. A way to reset the mechanism of my being, orientating my existence with some certainty of intention. Diving into the chilling depths provides a fleeting but elemental connection to place through which I can position myself.
One of the Seven Sages of Greece, Thales of Miletus, hypothesised water to be the originating principle of nature, a classical element, the essential substance of matter. Water, within this understanding, is the element from which all else is derived (Aristotle, 2018, pp. 8-9). While modern science no longer maintains classical elements as the material basis of the physical world, there is no denying that the sea in which I swim is millions of years old. Ancient water that seeps through your skin. A tangible reminder of the multifaceted permeability of people, place and history. Deborah Bird Rose discusses this permeability in relation to notions of belonging here in Australia. Citing the much-used pastoralist trope of the land literally seeping into the blood – an ambit claim that intrinsically ties one’s blood, sweat and tears to the fertility of the land – she highlights the paradox:
that the country that gets into people’s blood invariably contains the blood and sweat of Aboriginal people as well as settlers. It may contain convict blood, and the remains of the dead. It will contain the blood of childbirth, and the blood and bones of massacres. It will contain the remains of animals, of extinct species, perhaps.
(Bird Rose, 2002, p. 321)
I find comfort in the knowledge that the water constituting our oceans – the water I swim in daily – is an enduring fusion of time, people and place.
Winter, Day 53
Bleak outlook.
An undulating trail winds through the coastal scrub along the entirety of Cape Paterson’s foreshore clifftop. The deceptive familiarity of the vegetation on those tracks is interspersed with moments of jaw-dropping splendour. Walking those trails, I often think of Stephen Muecke’s musing that “To know the tracks and the sites they connect remains special local knowledge” (Muecke, 2008, p. 84). Muecke was writing on the relationship between walking tracks and the traditional movement of people over the breadth of this country, but his statement is true of Cape Paterson’s hidden lookouts; the quaint wooden lookouts peeking through the shoreline scrub offer spectacular views of this rugged coastline to those who know where to look. That is where I find myself today, sitting on a weathered wooden bench staring over the sober ocean. It broods beneath a cast iron sky – firmament rendered more leaden and foreboding by the proximity of COVID. With this virus running rampant, people are locked in their homes. Suffering, sorrow and death consume the news while our waking thoughts are addled by the boredom that comes with being trapped at home.
The low infection numbers here in regional Victoria mean we currently enjoy relative freedom – of movement and from fear. However, the bewildering intimacy of the calamity engulfing the city can’t be ignored. Everyone is acutely aware of the misfortunes befalling friends, family and colleagues. Those living just fifty kilometres up the road are in hard lockdown. In his poetic mediation On Listening, Martin Flanagan reflects on the damage caused by retributive banishment:
If you find your sense of self, your
meaning, through other people
and those other people banish you,
there is a pain I can only describe as
existential.
(Flanagan, 2016, p. 13)
The Victorian lockdown is frustrating and unpleasant and although I know that the limitation on people’s movement is not analogous with banishment, my exemption from the more punitive measures rouses feelings of guilt. I appreciate our privileged position in enjoying high living standards, universal health care and education as well as a free press and a robust democratic process. I also understand that the severity of the COVID outbreak is far less acute here than in most other places. Nevertheless, as I watch ever lengthening shadows, I can’t shake an unpleasant inkling that we have turned our backs to our friends in the city.
Winter, Day 56
Father and son.
The beach is vacant save for a father and his son. Rods aloft, they fish from the shoreline. From the shelter of tussocked dunes, I watch beauty reflected in the everyday normalcy of wiling away a winter afternoon dropping a line. A rod is cast. A squalling shower passes. Lines are retrieved. Bait is reset. The clearing sky allows a brief appearance by the sun. Lines are recast. No hint of a bite. Just the peaceful solemnity of two generations, standing side by side, lines in the water, looking out on a big enigmatic ocean.
As this scene repeats, I join cast in the role of swimmer. The etymology of swimming and fishing can be traced to a convergence. The old English word ‘swimman’ – to move in or on the water, to float – comes from older Germanic and Welsh words meaning to be in motion. While cognates in Old Irish ‘do-sennaim’ and Lithuanian ‘sundyti’ signify the hunt and the chase. Solitude and peace can be found in fishing just as in swimming.
Winter, Day 68
Like it never happened.
The wind makes for a bitter day. I swim at midday; eleven degrees, a forty-knot easterly. Unsurprisingly, the beach is deserted. A lonely stretch of sand, not a soul in sight. Even on miserable days it’s rare for the boat ramp lookout and carpark to be deserted, as it is today. The solitude is eerily comforting. I change in a vacant carpark, walk the path over the dunes down to the beach. Slipping into the water I take note of the biting cold, of the big sky, the howling wind, and the white caps. Wave after wave smashing against the rocks. Seagulls pick at the hightide line. An immense sky frames the moody sea.
Leaving the water, I jog up the sand. The nipping wind bites my wet skin. Drying off, I glance both east and west, look to the carpark. Still not a soul to be seen. This is my moment, my experience. Just the gulls, the wind, and a bitter cold sea for company. A moment and experience never to be repeated. Never to be shared with another human. I put on my COVID facemask, walk over the sand dune back to the car. I start the engine, reverse out and leave the beach. The place remains oblivious to my visit, like it never happened.
Winter, Day 70
It's hard to continue as if everything is normal when the world is far from it.
A group of young adults parade the beach mask-less, careless, like it’s mid-January. Interacting with gay abandon, they hug, touch, swim and bask in the sun. There is no thought of social distancing. The young suitors practice cartwheels and backflips, parading like horny roosters. The women pose, cuddle, toss their hair and laugh. The beach has seen this a million times before but in the midst of a pandemic it seems different. I wonder whether they’ve run the roadside lockdown checkpoint gauntlet for a day trip from the city. The isolationist parochialism of that thought forces me to check my attitude, they’re just as likely local kids.
I strip off and dive in the water. Encircled by the bracing cold I look to the expansive sky and wonder what my 17-year-old self would have made of this shitshow. Today’s newspaper carries a collection of vignettes from children and teenagers reflecting on the impact of COVID. The poignancy of one in particular stands out:
Mourning VCE year
I’m upset and disappointed. I’m mourning the loss of what should have been one of the best years of my life. Year 12 is traditionally full of learning, celebration, connection – a rite of passage taken away from us. There are people much worse off than I am, and I know this is for the best, yet I can’t help but feel the loss of what this year should have been. It’s hard to stay motivated and continue our studies on The Crucible and matrices as if everything is normal, when the
world is far from it.
Emma Christina, 17, Lysterfield
(cited in Prytz, 2020)
‘It’s hard to continue as if everything is normal, when the world is far from it,’ a sentiment one can’t help but wholeheartedly agree with.
Winter, Day 78
Beach literacy.
The ocean is beautiful today, wondrously so. Clear, so clear that the lines delineating rock and reed from the sand are crisply visible along the sea floor. Along the shoreline, I notice a young woman on the beach. She sketches in the sand with driftwood while her dog sits patiently. Completing her work, she discards the stick, fishes the phone from her pocket, and photographs the message before wandering off. I wait a while before making my way over to read her inscription – the single word ‘LITERACY” etched in the sand.
The soon-to-be-washed-away poignancy of this sketch resonates. My connection to this beach and the local area is longstanding – I was born and raised here like my father before me – but have lived away for more than twenty years. A quintessentially country upbringing had afforded outdoor freedoms and close-knit community connections, but the approach of adulthood brought with it a compulsion to escape. At seventeen I looked to the city, to university, to travel, and to work for counterpoints to the steady parochialism of country life. Away from family, childhood friends, and the familiar I found my feet. In doing so, I think I managed to graft some semblance of worldliness that I wouldn’t have found otherwise. But now, twenty years on, my partner (who was also born here) and I find ourselves buying a house back where we grew up. Our recent return is one of mixed emotions. On one hand, the abundance of intergenerational associations– intimate connections to things, places, and people – prompt memories and fond nostalgia. Counter to that is the awareness of the underlying conservativism (and on occasion isolationism) that infuses many casual exchanges. I am yet to find my people and place back here – a sense of displacement lingers.
My mind brims with these thoughts as I plunge into the cold blue water. A longing for greater connectedness and knowledge permeates my bare skin to query the salutary depths and I feel the urge to find a precise language to express these feelings. It is these notions that motivate my repeated visits to this beach, where elusive moments of literacy can be found in place. My imagination is stimulated by locative thinking about, and with, the past, the present and the future. This is a place where acts of walking, swimming and observation allow for a form of exchange between self and the landscape (Mills, 2020, p. 128).
Winter, Day 81
Landscape, seascape.
A brace of polaroids spit out of the camera signalling another photo failure. Neither image exposes properly. The misfire that does develop however, is utterly beautiful. A surrealist affect that seems to perform as an aerial illustration, a bird’s eye view, apprehending the place just as indigenous artwork does. The colours are distinctive – earthy sunburnt browns give way to a purple, textured like sand, then finally the deep oceanic blue arrives. Shapes mimicking the contours of the coastline, echoing songlines and thresholds between land and sea. Today is a hopeful day, the number of new COVID infections here in Victoria have dropped below 200 for the first time in a long time.
Winter, Day 87
Vestiages of a life long-gone.
The COVID pandemic has prompted an enormous upsurge in diarying and I guess this project forms part of that movement. A ritual of journaling is said to prompt reflection and attentiveness whereby the act of actively attending to this day offers an alternative, and potentially therapeutic, means to mark time (Murray, Munro, & Taylor, 2020). The form of record-keeping I have chosen is a rendezvous of written prose and photographic texts – one which (I hope) entails both remembrance and poetic speculation. The Polaroids capture a specific moment in time, fix the grain in the picture so to speak. The handwritten annotations, on the other hand, are lyric musings about perceived connections and associations – both real and imagined.
Given the inherently subjective and introspective nature of this collection, the motivation underpinning its compilation needs to be unpicked. I see it as an attempt to bear witness on a particular place at a particular time. It is an act of documentation, one capturing my experience of returning to the place of my childhood after many years away, one capturing the turning of a season and the urgency of our time. Returning to the same place each and every day, I have aimed to capture a different aspect – from jagged shores to vestiges of beach life long gone – in the hope that someone else, somewhere else, some other time, might glean some insight, pleasure or appreciation from these records.
Winter, Day 92
Our Cape Paterson coda.
For my final swim of this winter, I am accompanied by Amy and Nahla. It provides an opportunity to reflect upon the winter just past. A season of intense disruption blighted by widespread suffering, death and despair. One dominated by howling partisan voices spewing vitriol and hate throughout social media, analysis, and commentary. In the face of this dislocation, wrought by fire and plague, I have found myself – after more than two decades away – back at the place of my birth, the place of my childhood and adolescence. This coincidental and privileged return, in the midst of a global pandemic, has raised stark personal questions about connection to place, home and belonging. The upending of fundamental understandings which once seemed so solid has stimulated an acute sense of existential peril. Looking to process the chaos and trauma engulfing the world heralded me toward the bitter chill of the unpredictable ocean and to walk isolated tracts of sand. In that ritual I had hoped to find some sense of certainty. Now today, 92 days or three months on, the shock of the cold water elicits squeals from Amy and makes me realise how accustomed I have become to the cold. The trick, I tell her afterwards, is to plunge straight in. Don’t think about it, just wade out into that big blue expanse, and dive into its unforgiving fold—an approach that has become my coda.
The act of reacquainting myself with Cape Paterson’s Bay Beach has provided a way to reconnect, prompted a grounding through which to see my relationship to place, and the world, in a different light.
Winter, Day 16
White caps and vacant sands.
Exposure to cold water triggers what is known as a ‘cold shock response’ – an initial gasp followed by rapid breathing and increased heart rate and blood pressure. Clinical research has shown that regular cold-water swimming can habituate this response quite quickly. A dozen short immersions can significantly dull the shock response (H. Massey & Scully, 2020).
Just three weeks into my swimming routine, I already notice the change – entering the ocean is far less bracing. In fact, I increasingly look forward to the icy embrace of solitary winter walks and cold-water baptisms. The routine seems to be stimulating some innate assuredness.