Identity and Belonging

Ocean baths can be an important element of both personal and community identity  The significant personal and social rituals enacted at the baths include  learning to swim, graduating from the wading pool to the big pool, hanging out on the pool chains as the waves surge in, taking part in school and club swimming activities, skinnydipping in the moonlight, rituals relating to sex and romance, swimming regularly for fitness or health, attending special events including religious ceremonies, creating and honouring memorials to other pool patrons.

The sense of ocean baths as  'belonging to the people' rather than the Council is particularly strong in communities where public subscriptions helped fund work on the baths or working bees helped create or maintain the ocean baths. The ocean pools have long served as community centres, providing a mixing place for people who may not work, study, drink or worship together.

Ocean baths continue to be regarded as safe, happy, friendly, beautiful, healthy places that encourage social mixing and seem a universe away from the fears about the safety of suburban and urban streets. Wet hair and swimsuits make it more difficult to preserve or observe the standard socio-economic markers. Swimsuit-clad bodies and swimming style are their own social capital. While teenagers are less common at the baths than young children, family groups and seniors, all ages can be found at the ocean baths. Grandparents and grandchildren can both enjoy a visit to the ocean baths.

The pool and its surroundings are a complex mosaic of social spaces. Regular swimmers are often keenly aware of their relative seniority at the ocean pool, as seniority may even determine where one sits or stands as part of the group of regular swimmers. The bigger kids have a strong sense of who is worthy to mix with them at the deep end of the pool. Regular pool patrons often form strong social bonds and acquire affectionate nicknames like Collaroy's Lizards or South Curl Curl's Walruses named for their habit of basking in the best sunbaking location.

Membership of a swimming club adds another layer of identity and belonging as club members may have access to more pool facilities or the pool facilities for more extended hours than other pool patrons. The pool is the venue for their competitions and social events. Swimming clubs and even winter swimming clubs often include parents and children.

For these reasons, proposed temporary or extended closures of ocean baths often provoke extremely forceful protests from pool patrons and pool supporters. Closure of Wylie Baths and the Bondi Icebergs pool and the Collaroy pool left pool patrons feeling as if they had been 'kicked out of home'. Regular swimmers seem unwilling to contemplate life without ongoing access to these much- loved ritual and recreational spaces.

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