Cockatoo Island Swimming Enclosure

I don't think that this swimming enclosure existed in April 2009 when I began this swimming endeavour. I could be wrong about that, but the plan of management for Cockatoo Island only came out in 2010. I found out about the enclosure a year or so ago, and have been meaning to swim it ever since. I picked a bad day to take the ferry over to the island as Sydney Harbour (and Sydney itself) were shrouded in smoke from hazard reduction burning in the eucalypt forests of the Blue Mountains. Visibility was very poor indeed. Not a great time of day to swim either as it was low tide. High tide will be a better idea in this enclosure as we will see.

Cockatoo Island is listed as a World-Heritage Site for its importance as an example of extensive convict transportation, incarceration and labour. Its national heritage also includes 137 years of shipbuilding and related maritime history. The docks and works shut down in 1991, and since then the island has become a venue for festivals and events, including the Sydney Biennale which was on when I was there. It is also a venue for tourism, with bars, restaurants, heritage building accommodation and camping. Part of the attraction of visiting the island is that there are so many old industrial buildings, cranes, gantries, docks and slipways remaining. 

The swimming enclosure is in one of the old slipways, and it has been made by netting off the entrance. Presumably this is to avoid any encounters with the Bull Sharks which are known to inhabit this part of the Parramatta River. 

I actually enjoyed swimming back and forth across the enclosure. Not so much for the swimming itself, but it was a very different type of swim looking at the old industrial landscape from the water.

Another thing I liked was, that in these days of councils fearing litigation for injuries and closing many of the old tidal baths, here is a new swimming enclosure. Not only that, but it is an area where there are a minimum of warning signs (often a blight on an attractive rock pool). There's just a couple of unobtrusive No Diving signs and a small sign (that I completely missed at first) advising that you Swim At Own Risk. That particular sign also warns about wearing footwear at all times. That's probably not a bad idea as there are rough surfaces under the water (including a section or two of protruding metal pipe), and there seem to be oyster shells too. Another thing to be wary of at low tide is how slippery the exposed concrete surfaces can become. I think high tide would be a much better swim.

For the past seven summers, I have been swimming in Balmain at Dawn Fraser Baths most weekends. After my swim I spend time relaxing on the decking gazing across the waters of the Parramatta River to Cockatoo Island. Today, after my swim, I spent a bit of time gazing across those waters to the 

Roger Deakin

I can no longer remember exactly when it was. Probably sometime late in 2007. I was browsing new titles at the local library, in the Sydney suburb where I live, when I saw the book. Waterlog by Roger Deakin. I knew nothing about him, but the first pages of the book fascinated me. Starting with quotations by such unlikely companions as Loudon Wainwright III and John Donne, then going on to recount breaststroking in his very own moat and linking that with T. H. White's The Sword In The Stone. I was struck by his description of swimming as a "crossing of boundaries". I'd just returned to winter swimming in the ocean baths at Coogee after a long absence, and I was re-experiencing that feeling of "freedom and wildness". So I took the book home to read in full. I couldn't put it down. I felt energised by reading it. I couldn't get over his idea of swimming his way around England using lakes, streams, rivers and other bodies of water. I began to imagine doing something similar in Sydney. What if, I thought, you were to swim the entire Sydney coastline, beaches, bays, tidal rivers, by using the rock pools and sea baths.

The idea got shelved for a couple of years, but in 2009, after reading Wildwood and Notes From Walnut Tree Farm, I found and reread a copy of Waterlog. That was it. Shortly afterwards, I set off on a my own swimming journey from Port Hacking to Broken Bay, using the ocean pools and tidal baths like (as Roger Deakin quotes from John Cheever's The Swimmer) a "quasi-subterranean stream". I wrote about the experience on this blog, Lazy Swimmer. The journey, through about eighty pools, was pretty much over after two years, although I've since added some pools that I missed. It was a journey when, galvanised by reading Waterlog, I found a lot of energy to go and discover and enjoy unfamiliar swimming holes. A pity that delight didn't show up in my writing. I find Lazy Swimmer hard to read now. Pool after pool after pool. It reads like a checklist, almost like I've been ticking off train engine numbers or rare birds. 

Roger Deakin never wrote like that. He was filled with wonder during his swimming. His eyes and mind were open to the moments that passed in that aquatic world. I wish now that I'd been able to take the time to write about those sort of moments. I wish I'd tried harder to describe a "frog's eye" view of the world. I could have written about Pied Cormorants sitting along the ropes of shark nets lazily drying their wings in the morning sun, or Crested Terns diving into waves that are breaking over rocks covered in cunjevoi. I could have written about a submarine world seen through swim goggles. About gliding above squid pulsating with changing colours, or about stingrays hovering over the sandy bottoms of estuarine swimming enclosures. I'd liked to have written about the time I shared an ocean rock pool with a Little Black Cormorant. For a matter of seconds we were synchronised in our movements. As I put my head under the water I could see the cormorant diving down to chase a cloud of tiny fry, as I raised my head it was surfacing with its catch, and as I emerged to take a breath it put back its head to swallow the fry. Just for those moments. But they were like a type of magic.