Sydney has more ocean pools than any other city on earth. Somewhere around thirty five of them are strung along the coast between Palm Beach and Cronulla, most cut into the rock shelf between the 1880s and the 1930s, and nearly all of them exist for the same grim reason: the surf kept drowning people, so somebody walled the water in.
They are not swimming pools in any ordinary sense. The sea fills them on the high tide, drains them on the low, and on a decent southerly swell it comes straight over the wall and pushes you down the lane whether you meant to go or not. That is the appeal. You are swimming in the ocean with just enough concrete between you and it to make the whole thing survivable.
Why Sydney built so many
The building boom ran from the late Victorian era through the Depression, and the reasons shifted as it went. The earliest pools were straightforward safety infrastructure, often built over natural rock holes that people had been bathing in for generations. Bronte's baths went in during 1887 on top of exactly such a hole. The word many locals still use for those natural pools, bogey, comes from an Aboriginal word meaning to bathe, which tells you how long before the concrete the swimming had been going on.
Later, the pools became civic projects. Mahon at Maroubra was built through the Depression partly to keep local men in work, which is a better reason for a swimming pool than most. Others came from decades of residents arguing with their councils. The fifty metre pool at North Narrabeen was finished in the mid thirties after roughly ten years of locals disagreeing about where to put it.
The northern beaches
Start at the top and work down. Avalon has a pool tucked below the headland that goes glassy and dark green on a still morning, with the rocks around it turning purple in the half light. Newport, Mona Vale and Warriewood each have their own, all quieter than the eastern suburbs equivalents.
The best known on this stretch is North Narrabeen, and it is the timber boardwalk running down the middle that makes it. The walk splits the lap lanes from everybody else, and on a windless dawn the whole structure doubles itself in the water so precisely that photographs of it look manipulated. They are not. Pastels and Boardwalk both come from mornings when the pool simply refused to move.
Further south, Collaroy sits right against the sand, Dee Why has a rock shelf beside it that looks lunar at low tide, and Curl Curl holds pale green water while the sea churns white around three of its sides.
The eastern beaches
This is where the famous ones are. Bondi Icebergs is the photograph everyone has seen, though far fewer people know it began in 1929 as a winter fitness club for surf lifesavers with a membership rule that remains gloriously unreasonable.
Bronte Baths, fifteen minutes around the cliffs, sits so low against the waterline that a solid set buries the entire pool and hands it back a few seconds later. Clovelly is protected by its narrow bay and stays flat when everything around it is working.
Then Coogee, which has more pools per metre of shoreline than anywhere else on the coast: Ross Jones by the surf club, Wylie's hanging off the rock on timber legs, Giles worn straight into the stone, and McIver's, the only ocean bath left in New South Wales reserved for women and children.
South again to Mahon at Maroubra, which is the wildest of the lot, and the one where the swell comes over the wall with real intent.
When to go
Tide matters more than weather. Most pools fill on the high and go glassy on the low, so a rising tide with a small swell gives you clean water and calm lanes. A big swell turns the low pools into washing machines, which some swimmers actively seek out and others sensibly avoid.
For photographs, the hour before sunrise is worth every alarm. The water is at its stillest, the light arrives sideways, and the regulars have not yet churned the surface. The regulars, incidentally, are the real point of these places. Arrive at any pool at half past five and you will find the same dozen people in the same order, and most of them will talk to you for an hour if you let them.
Richard Hirst has photographed these pools for thirty five years. The full collection of Sydney rock pool and ocean bath prints runs to fifty six works and covers most of the coast.