Manly Beach Photography Prints

At seven every morning, in whatever weather's going, several hundred people in hot pink caps wade in at Manly Life Saving Club and swim the seven hundred and fifty metres round to Shelly Beach, then swim back. They're the Bold and the Beautiful, and the whole thing started informally and stubbornly stayed that way, with no entry fee, no water safety and no starter's gun (it isn't a race). If it's your first time, you turn up at twenty to seven and somebody hands you a cap.

The water they're swimming through is protected like nothing else in Sydney. Cabbage Tree Bay was declared a no take aquatic reserve in 2002, after residents pushed hard for it, and it's still the only one in the city, so a bay ten minutes from a ferry wharf holds more than a hundred and fifty species of fish, along with giant cuttlefish, wobbegongs, weedy seadragons and blue gropers who'll swim over to look at you. And Shelly faces west, which almost nothing on this coastline does, so it stays calm while everything either side of it isn't.

Manly was invented as somewhere to go on a Sunday, and I don't think it ever stopped. Henry Gilbert Smith cut The Corso through in 1855, named it after the street in Rome, and planted the Norfolk Island pines that still set the skyline, and the ferry company sold the place with a line about being seven miles from Sydney and a thousand miles from care. That was marketing, and it was also true.

I photograph the walk round to Shelly far more than the ocean beach, because it's a narrow strip of path caught between rock and water, and at the right tide the swell comes over the edge and soaks everybody, including me and, on one occasion, a camera I was fond of. But from the Fairy Bower end you can look back down the whole beach with the pines standing behind it, and that's the frame I keep going back for.