Coogee has more ocean pools per metre of shoreline than anywhere else in Sydney. There are four of them inside about a kilometre, each with a different character and one with a story better than the rest.
The bay itself is unusually calm for this coast, and the reason is sitting in plain view. Wedding Cake Island is a low flat reef roughly a kilometre offshore, and it takes most of the punch out of the swell before it reaches the beach. You can be swimming at Coogee as though it were a lake on a morning when Maroubra, around the headland, is closing out.
McIver's Baths
Cut into the cliff at the southern end, McIver's is the only ocean bath left in New South Wales reserved for women and children. Women have swum on that spot since at least 1876, and the club that has run it since 1922 was started by Rose McIver and Mina Wylie.
The history goes further than that. Both Mina Wylie and Fanny Durack trained there before the 1912 Olympics, the first games at which women were permitted to swim at all, and they came home with the gold and the silver. There is a reasonable argument that this small pool on a Coogee cliff did more for Australian women's swimming than any facility built since.
Entry is a small donation. The pool sits low, sheltered and quiet, and it holds an evening sky better than anything else on the beach, which is the light in Pool Reflections.
Wylie's Baths
Further along the same headland, Wylie's was built in 1907 by Henry Wylie, Mina's father. It hangs off the rock on timber legs, so you swim looking straight out at Wedding Cake Island with nothing in the way, and the wooden decking above it has the feel of a building that has been patched and re-timbered for a hundred and twenty years.
It was also one of the first places in Australia where men and women swam together, which in 1907 was a genuinely radical proposition.
Ross Jones and Giles
Ross Jones Memorial Pool sits right beside the surf club at the centre of the beach, with concrete bollards along its seaward wall that turn the whole thing into a weir when the swell runs over. That is the arrangement in Haze, with water pouring between the bollards under an orange dawn, and again in Winter Spray on a mauve June morning.
Ross Jones is also where you go for reflections. On a still autumn morning the pool holds the sky far better than the open sea beside it, which is the whole trick of photographing these places, and Colours of Autumn came from one of those mornings.
At the northern end, Giles Baths is a hole worn straight into the rock with no real walls to speak of. It is the roughest and least formal of the four, and the one that feels most like swimming in the ocean itself.
The island swim
Once a year a crowd swims out around Wedding Cake Island and back. It is a serious distance in open water, and watching it from the headland with a coffee is a perfectly respectable way to participate.
Getting there
Coogee sits at the southern end of the Bondi to Coogee coast walk, about an hour on foot from Bondi past Tamarama, Bronte and Clovelly. Buses run from Central and Bondi Junction. Parking along Arden Street is difficult after nine on any sunny day.
The guide to Sydney's ocean pools covers the rest of the coast, Bronte Baths is twenty minutes north along the walk, and the Coogee print collection holds the photographs taken around these four pools.