Coogee Ocean Baths

Coogee is calm because of something that's sitting in plain view, and nobody thinks about it. Wedding Cake Island is a low flat reef, about a kilometre out, and it's taking most of the punch out of the swell before it ever reaches the bay. So you can be swimming here as though it's a lake, on a morning when Maroubra around the headland is closing out. Which still surprises me, and I've known about it for years. Once a year a crowd swims out around the island and back, which I'd recommend watching from dry land (with a coffee). I've never done it, before you ask.

There are more pools per metre of shoreline here than anywhere else I work, and the best of them has the best story. McIver's, cut into the cliff at the southern end, 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's run it since 1922 was started by Rose McIver and Mina Wylie. Both Wylie and Fanny Durack trained there before the 1912 Olympics, the first games at which women were allowed to swim at all, and they came home with the gold and the silver.

Further along the same headland is Wylie's Baths, built in 1907 by Mina's father Henry, and it hangs off the rock on timber legs, so you're swimming looking straight out at the island. Then down the northern end, Giles Baths is a hole worn into the rock, with no proper edges to speak of. And in the middle sits Ross Jones, with those turrets that every kid here has climbed on and been told to get down from.

I've made nine pictures so far, most of them early, most from the southern headland, looking north. The regulars are older than the Bondi crowd, and they keep to a timetable you could set your watch by, and if I'm honest it's them I'm photographing more than the water.

More on this beach: Coogee's four ocean baths, from Wylie's to McIver's.