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F irst Nations people identify as being “freshwater”, “saltwater” or “desert” people. I lived inland all my young life and didn’t visit a beach until I was in my teens. Didn’t care for it much. I’m from the freshwater mob – those of us who prefer the rivers, creeks and lakes, and find our deep affection within.
My father was a public school teacher. He also coached swimming until he was in his late 70s but always in a municipal pool. For him, the beach meant sand in the car, sand in the sandwiches, glass in the sand, and sharks in the water. Dad positively loathed the beach.
While other families enjoyed hot sand between the toes, we were at home in the cool, oozing mud on the grassy banks of a waterhole. Holidays were spent camping in tents by a river and I came to love many beautiful waterways in the Victorian inland.
Freshwater fervour: I’ve always thought there’s a certain etiquette observed by us “freshies” that’s not understood by the “salties”. Credit: Photo: Jason South
Thanks to dad, I’m a tidy swimmer and take my regular exercise … in a pool.
Funny how life turns out. It’s said you marry a man like your father, but in one aspect at least, the saying couldn’t be more wrong.
Wendy Harmer at the Eureka Stockade swimming pool in Ballarat circa 1961.Credit:
For the past 30 years, I’ve been married to a dedicated “waxhead” who lives to surf and surfs to live. Goes out in all (surfable) weather, comes home after dark. I swear, he’s a merman. An activist with Surfrider Foundation Australia all this time, I share my home with (I just counted) 15 surfboards.
I’m not even going to try to number the wetsuits, rash vests and lumps of board wax. I’ve learned to know the difference between “offshore”, “blown out” or “glassy”.
As I write this, I’m at the back of our house, where I chose to have my desk and a calming glimpse of Narrabeen Lake. Not out the front, where there’s a view of the restless, mighty Pacific Ocean rolling in.
We live on Sydney’s northern beaches, where there are some 20 or so glorious, world-renowned stretches of sand between Manly and Palm Beach. (Although at the northernmost end they like it to be referred to as the “peninsula, daahling”, which I learned the hard way when I first moved here from Melbourne in the ’90s.)
Wendy Harmer’s daughter Maeve at Collaroy-Narrabeen beach circa 2004.Credit:
Last summer I took two dips in the ocean. Yes, just the two. This does my husband’s head in. He’s appalled. I was dragged to the shore by my daughter. Blue-eyed, fair and a tidy surfer, she’s a “saltwater” girl, like her father. My son – dark haired, brown-eyed – takes after me. “Freshwater” all the way. It’s in the genes, I reckon.
You’ll think I’m an awful snob but I’ve always thought there’s a certain etiquette observed by us “freshies” that’s not understood by the “salties”. The difference between dining at a good restaurant versus a cafeteria.
On a riverbank, you always ensure there’s a big tree or a bend between you and the next mob and, if you intrude, scurry by like a small marsupial lest you disrupt their peaceful idyll. At the beach, the other lot plonk themselves next to you, erect their sunshades, set up the volleyball net, turn up the music and flash their bare bits in your face. Rude.
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Perhaps the defining moment of my antipathy for the waves came when I was pregnant. I was round like a beach ball and got caught in a shore break – tumbling, unable to get to my feet. My dear husband laughed so hard he collapsed in the sand. At home, in the shower, I stripped off my bathing suit to find I’d caught a fish in my cleavage. An actual, live fish. This, people, is not the way you’re meant to go fishing.
At the beach, I’m the one with a towel over her head – like the dormouse in the A. A. Milne poem, covering its eyes with its paws to shut out the sight of chrysanthemums, yellow and white, and dreaming of geraniums, red, and delphiniums, blue.
Wendy Harmer is a broadcaster, a comedian, an author and a stage performer.
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