On a recent Sunday a group of swimmers completed the reverse swim from the pub to the pier. Despite Scomo passing an edict that no National Living Treasures risk the country’s cultural heritage by swimming out past the point I did this swim as well. ASIO operatives tut-tutted from the rocks. The sea was choppy with a hefty swell and only the promise of beer at The Anglers kept me going to the pier. The next day a young bloke filmed a large great white swimming along the pier. I was in the beer garden a hundred metres away. Watching the footage when he brought it to us, it occurred to me another good thing about beer gardens is the absence of sharks.
These last two sharks were in a place of overlapping recreations; a place where kids jump off a pier while fishermen rain burley into the water alongside them. This will be seen as strange some day. Imagine the first cop on the scene: “So, let me get this straight. Aldo jumped off the pier here where this bloke … What’s your name, mate?” “Socrates.” “Right where Socrates is emptying buckets of cubed liver into the water.”
A great white swam a metre behind them, like a half-nauseated couch potato eyeing off the last two Tim Tams. Which one? Both?
As a poor swimmer I don’t have to worry much about sharks, because out in the water I’m assailed by so many self-generated dangers they’re at the back of a long queue. It’s the good swimmers who aren’t going to drown themselves that have to worry about sharks.
Mostly, I keep pace with octogenarians, folk recovering from ladder falls, vicars composing sermons while afloat, and women in their third trimester … swimmers burdened by embryos, age and ideas. We stop to rest, hanging in the water, a flotilla of brightly capped heads in the chop. Life seems precarious when you’re lip-deep in brine a long way from land, you get the feeling you’re sharing precious moments, even end times. An unspoken intimacy forms, as it does between passengers on a jet with one engine out. Experience is heightened, the sun develops an ineffable hue and you share repartee freely with anyone – even a vice-chancellor. Danger, memento mori, the near miss, the glimpse of the abyss, the whiff of mortality … these make us more empathetic.
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On rough days, when the easterly is blowing, my smidgen of innate goodness is so magnified by anxiety I have gone close to declaring my love to strangers out there. It’s the lost boy’s promise to God that he’ll never be mean to his sister again if only God will let him get back home. But back on the beach my need for divine favour lessens. There are no sharks here. As I emerge from the chrysalis of my wetsuit I also shuck off the fear that has made me generous and I am again invincible and unlovely. What a cordial, empathetic people we would be if lions roamed the streets of our cities.
