Avalon

I've turned around on the road for Avalon more times than I can defend, usually when I'm meant to be somewhere else, and the light's started doing something over the headland. The pool sits down the southern end in two pieces, a little square for wading and a bigger trapezoid for laps, and if the shape looks like nobody planned it, that's because nobody did. Locals raised the money, the council built the first version in 1917, and then they lengthened it in 1922, blew rock out of the bottom late in the twenties, enlarged the whole thing again in 1937, and added the children's pool a couple of years after that. So what you're swimming in is a hundred years of arguing with the rock.

The man who helped pay for that pool, A.J. Small, got the surf club going here in March 1925 too, which is why people still call him the father of Avalon Beach, and mean it.

Then there's the bit nobody believes: Avalon nearly became a television set. Baywatch filmed here in 1998, liked it enough to talk seriously about moving the whole production out from California, and about seventeen hundred residents turned up to a public meeting to say no. The council barred filming outright afterwards, and the show went off to Hawaii. If you've ever had that headland to yourself before dawn (I get it most weeks), you'll be grateful to that room full of people.

I work the rocks just south of the pool, low down, in the first forty minutes after sunrise, because from there the wall reads as one line drawn across the swell, and you can watch the water come up and over it. On a big morning the pool vanishes for a second, then comes back flat, as though nothing had happened. That's the frame. It'll turn up maybe one morning in five, which is a polite way of saying I've ended up with an unreasonable number of photographs of Avalon.