This is a love story and if the pool could speak, she might testify to all the loves she has witnessed – and inspired – over nearly a century: the love of ocean water, pure and simple. The love of stretching out, weightless in a trail of bubbles, of drinking in the sun, of braving the cold dark of winter, of competing – and gathering afterwards – with friends and family, of chance encounters with unforgettable strangers: all the connective threads that weave together to form a community here on the eastern rim of a continent. And the losses, too – the bereavements and sorrows that routinely spill unseen into the saltwater, only to be washed away by the next tide: a camino trail of tears emptying into the Pacific.
Bec Key, senior lifeguard here at Bondi Icebergs, will tell you, reluctantly, and only after gentle coaxing, that this pool literally rescued her soul when her beloved son James took his life three years ago. Key had always been a strong swimmer but never more urgently than since that shattering day in June 2021, shortly after Sydney’s second COVID lockdown began. Now she swims at dawn six mornings a week, lap after lap, sending her love, heartache and incomprehension into the ocean pool before her work day begins.
“The passing of my son was something I could never have imagined happening to me,” she tells Good Weekend , “but this place definitely steered me in the right path. I don’t know if I would be here if it weren’t for the pool.�.
