Sydney Rock Pools and Ocean Baths

Fifty six pictures of Sydney's rock pools and ocean baths, holes in the rock full of sea water, which tells you I'm not sensible about them. Sydney's got more ocean pools than any city on earth, thirty odd strung between Palm Beach and Cronulla, most cut into the shelf between the 1880s and 1930s. And nearly all exist for the same grim reason, which is that the surf kept drowning people, so somebody walled the water in.

So the history's better than you'd think. Bronte went in during 1887, over a natural bogey hole people had swum in long before anyone poured concrete. Wylie's opened at Coogee in 1907, one of the first places here where men and women swam together. Mahon, up at Maroubra, was built through the Depression to keep local men in work (there are worse reasons for a pool). And McIver's, at the southern end of Coogee, has been women and children only since 1876.

What I love, though, is that the sea's still running the place. They fill on the high tide, go glassy on the low, and if there's a decent southerly, the swell comes over the wall at Mahon and shoves you down the lane whether you meant to or not. Bronte sits so low that a solid set buries the whole pool, then hands it back seconds later. Which is either terrifying or wonderful, depending on how awake you are.

The regulars are the real point, and they'll talk for an hour if you let them. The club at Bondi's been going since 1929, and to keep your membership you swim three Sundays in four, for five years, which I admire from the rocks, dry, with a camera. Down at Clovelly the blue gropers come in to the swimmers, and since they're the state fish of New South Wales, and unbothered by people, one will park half a metre off your mask. I shoot from the shelf or the headland behind, at first light, because a pool doesn't make sense until you see the rock it came out of. And I've stood on one wet metre of Bronte for two hours and driven home with nothing.

If you're after a particular one, they're nearly all in here. Bronte Baths and the Bondi Icebergs pool on the eastern side, Wylie's and McIver's and Giles at Coogee, Mahon at Maroubra, and up north the rock pool at North Narrabeen with its boardwalk, along with Dee Why, Collaroy, Curl Curl, Mona Vale and Bilgola. Thirty five years of getting up early for holes full of seawater, and I'd do it again tomorrow.

More on these pools: a guide to Sydney's ocean pools and rock baths, from Palm Beach to Cronulla.

The pools sit inside the wider coastal wall art collection, and the whole catalogue is in Australian wall art.