How learning to swim as an adult changed my life

While those first lessons didn’t get me very far, I eventually learnt to swim in my 20s at the Auburn Swim Centre in women-only after-hours sessions. Situated in western Sydney, the Auburn pool is a home for immigrant swimmers. The squad lanes are easygoing and the leisure lanes and shallow pools are packed with kids supervised by South Asian, African and Arab parents.

It was here I performed the feat of swimming and floating in deep water by myself for the first time. “I did it,” I exclaimed, high-fiving the hijabi lawyer friend who had taken me there. Some of the girls in the sessions were hijabis, and there were older women, too, all of whom stripped off to bikinis, one-pieces or bodysuits with the exhalation of a community used to suspicion and surveillance. I no longer observed modesty, but I found those sessions a psychologically safe space. I didn’t have to fear racial incidents, or faster swimmers knocking their elbows into my flailing feet.

I could ace every exam and outwit the Anglos at tests, but swimming required body memory that I imagined was passed down invisibly in infant-acclimatising ocean and pool holidays.

Growing up, I chafed against the insularity of women-only spaces, desperate to hit the clubs and wider world where I thought true adventure and freedom lay. Looking back at the emotional costs of some of my glass-ceiling-breaking, I release how precious those gatherings were, a buffer against the slings and arrows of a new and not-always-welcoming society. The idea of “safe spaces” is often derided, but in a country where friends have been spat at, yelled at and even physically assaulted in public, the question is not why we have these spaces but why we don’t have more. There is comfort and freedom in a place where you can literally let your hair down and recharge.

“Keep it on the down low, though. We don’t want another Alan Jones drama,” one swimmer told me as she floated in the 50-metre outdoor pool.

Years earlier, in 2002, a caller had rung incendiary radio broadcaster Alan Jones to complain of a “Muslim women-only session” at Auburn pool. The irate caller claimed the pool was closed off so Muslim women could swim in their “robes”.

Jones replied caustically, “What? The pool is closed – it’s a public pool – it’s closed to everybody else except Muslim women? And they go in there and dive in, in all their clobber?” The response was swift. Complaints to the centre followed, and the sessions, swimming lessons booked by a local girls’ school, were cancelled.

In actual fact, the pool had been booked, not closed off. Isn’t that the free-market capitalism these right-wing types laud? My blood boiled. They had all of Sydney’s water to call their own, and this small corner of western Sydney, this one hour, they wanted to take away from us.

Racism around the water was a historical part of Australian culture, with segregation aimed at Indigenous swimmers enforced in pools until the early 1970s. After that, non-whites weren’t officially locked out, but we were impeded in more subtle ways.

This is where the new racism came in. It was like the unpopular kids being sidelined by the queen bees, who invoked their financial and cultural dominance to keep the best of the lunch room. Water has often been an elite space – for boating, yachting, beach holidays. It was what annoyed me about so many breathless accounts by Australian journalists of their water love: they were unaware that what they deemed a universal Australian experience was in fact a deeply contested space.

In 2016, I achieved my dream of becoming an official beach girl. I liked conquering places I wasn’t supposed to be in and moving to the beachside suburb of Coogee was in line with what I fancied to be a kind of reverse colonialism: my foray into a world where the NIMBY brigade didn’t want me. I rented a run-down one-bedroom-and-study flat.

It was a middle-class area. Every morning I’d watch the beach come alive with runners, swimmers and walkers, all gravitating to the spiritual call of the water with the ruddy industry of a water-loving culture.

Priests of Varanasi use holy rivers to sanctify believers. In Australia, the beach is our secular religion. Watching the sun rising over the water and sinking behind the horizon felt like being close to God in a way that was as spiritual as walking into a mosque. I removed my shoes in respect and entered the water as my most bare self. I was anointed and baptised anew.

Nestled in the federal Labor electorate of Kingsford Smith, Coogee had a main street that, at the time, was not as self-consciously faddish as Bondi’s. In Coogee you couldn’t get a chai or turmeric tea; it was reassuringly daggy. The food was not great; nothing but smoothies and battered fish. The only other brown folks were the Domino’s delivery guy and the Subway cashier.

But a benefit of Sydney’s cultural and class divide was that I could disappear into this side of Sydney where no one knew me. White areas were the perfect place for young Muslims to date on the down low, away from prying eyes. The distance was in some ways freeing. I could wear sleeveless dresses, allowing the sea air to caress my skin.

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Swimming saved me. I’d wake up at dawn and head like a sleepwalker to McIver’s Ladies Baths. McIver’s is a heritage-listed ocean pool that has been a women-only space since 1922. Hidden by cliff faces, the pool became a haven for outsiders, gloriously showcasing bare breasts, rolls of fat, wrinkles, hairy legs and a wear-what-you-like ethos. Unlike Bondi’s perfect blondes, society’s outsiders congregated here: Muslim women, older swimmers and the queer community.

I’d wake up at dawn and dump myself in the icy water with the older McIver’s swimmers. Once submerged, I felt alive. It arrested my chaotic mind, my spiralling depression, my erratic heartbeat and the continuous ideation of melting into the sea. The iciness on my nerves was an instant salve, and watching the sun rise as my body moved through the water, I felt my heart rate slow down. I later learnt in therapy that I had unknowingly gravitated to somatic healing and the nervous system recovery cure of cold-water submersion and exercise.

When I’m in the ocean, absorbed in its rhythms, I feel I’m in the embrace of something wild and natural and free. Life, like a wave, is rarely perfect and often far more tumultuous.

Edited extract from Desi Girl (UQP) by Sarah Malik, out August 30.

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