Dee Why

The pool at the southern end of Dee Why isn't called the Dee Why rock pool any more, and the reason's worth knowing. In 2019, the council renamed it after Isa Wye, who became honorary secretary of the Dee Why Ladies' Amateur Swimming Club at sixteen, served fifty years as president, was still on the committee when she died in 2013 aged ninety, and somewhere in there became the second Australian woman to officiate at an Olympic Games (Moscow, 1980). Eighty five years at one pool isn't a number I can get my head around, and I've never photographed the place without thinking about her.

The pool she gave all that to was started by the surf club in 1915, then pushed out twice, in 1919 and again in 1930, until it took fifty metre lanes, with a children's pool on the side. So it's a working pool, not a pretty one. I mean that fondly. At six on a weekday, people are swimming laps before there's light to see the bottom, and they aren't doing it for the view.

But walk to the other end, and you're somewhere else entirely. Dee Why Lagoon shut itself off from the sea seven thousand years ago, when sand built up across the creek mouth, and it's been a bird sanctuary since 1973, which is a long time for a suburb to leave anything alone. Keep going, and you're on Long Reef, the oldest aquatic reserve in New South Wales. This is Garigal country, and the whale is their clan totem, so if you're up there in June or July, you'll understand why.

I shoot from the rocks above the pool, into the sun rather than with it, which ruins about half the frames and makes the other half. But at low tide there's a long slow line of white water breaking off the reef that you can't see from the sand, and that's really why I climb up there, though I've come down with nothing often enough to feel silly about it.