Curl Curl

Curl Curl is where I go when I want the sea to look like itself, and I mean that as a compliment. It's a kilometre of open beach, with a lagoon at the northern end, and nothing sheltering any of it, so whatever the swell's doing that day, you get it undiluted. Surfers love the southern corner for that reason, while swimmers get told firmly to stay out of it, because the rip down there is well enough known to have a name. Locals call it the Garbage Bowl, and I've never thought that unfair.

The pool at the south end started as a natural hole in the shelf, and was turned into proper baths in 1926. Then, when they extended it in the thirties, they left the old wall standing, so the wall you swim past in the middle today is the outer wall of the original. Which means a lap in there takes you over ninety years of somebody else's decisions.

But that inner wall is what I keep coming back for, and it took me an embarrassing number of goes to get right, because at certain tides it's completely under, and you only read it as a change of colour. The name probably comes from the Dharug words curial curial, usually translated as river of life, though I wouldn't stake a print on the etymology. What I do know is that the lagoon at the north end opens to the sea and shuts again through the year, and the sand rearranges every time.

I work the pool from the shelf on its seaward side, which means standing in water, watching the sets rather than the camera, and two hours of that earns you a handful of frames if you're lucky (and lucky is doing some work in that sentence). The rest of the time the light's lovely and the water's wrong, or, more often, the water's perfect and the sky's gone flat, and I go home and have breakfast. It isn't a difficult place to photograph badly.