The seacoast of my childhood

I taught myself to swim when I was 6, sliding on my belly in warm, shallow pools left behind 

a sandbank when the tide went out. I realized I was floating and that if I kicked my legs and

used my hands to paddle, I could swim. It was clumsy but it worked and I improved with 

practice. By the end of that summer in the early 1930s, I could swim from the jetty to boats 

moored a hundred yards away, using an uncoordinated small boy’s version of the overarm 

crawl.

The sea was crystal clear in those days. More than swimming I enjoyed observing the 

creatures below the surface, shrimps, cockles, little black and white striped ‘zebra fish’ and

 translucent ‘whitebait’ that were destined to grow into whiting my mother sometimes got for 

our meals. A facemask with a large glass front brought everything below the surface into

 sharp focus and transformed my vision of the marvellous underwater world.

A mile south the hills came down to the coast and the clean white sand gave way to rocks that were no bother to my almost prehensile toes. This part of the coast was more interesting because the rock pools were home to a profusion of tiny crabs, starfish and sea anenomes. Many rock pools were large enough for me to immerse with my facemask and study this magical marine world close-up at leisure. There was more beside the rock pools. Little tunnels in the sand between the rocks above high tide level held fairy penguins’ roosts.  If you put your ear close to the mouth of one of these tunnels you could hear fledgling penguins calling for their parents to come home from the sea and feed them.

 

John Last and Fairy Penguin, South Australia, 1938

Rebecca and our dachshund Helen, West Beach,
Adelaide, 1958

Throughout my childhood the sea was five minutes walk from home. Two minutes on my bike and I was on the beach and striding into a calm clear sea on a sheltered coast. After swimming and lazily sunbathing all day I’d come home sated, body caked with sand and sea salt that made my sunburnt skin feel stiff but satisfied. Late in my teens I sat in my lonely room studying anatomy, biochemistry, pathology, with the distant sound of multitudes enjoying themselves on the beach as the days got longer and hotter in October, November, while I prepared for exams in the heat of early December. All the time I studied I longed for the sea to cool me. To be a medical student in such a climate and setting, one had to be a masochist.  What joy it was in the week before Christmas to plunge into the sea's healing embrace and wash away the worry of study!

Those sunny summers were spent mostly in and on the sea. We could swim from October until April. Hardier folk swam all year long. In August after the winter storms the beaches were clogged with seaweed, great heaps of it washed ashore from the undersea forest of kelp and seagrass that made the sea a few hundred yards from the beach appear to be a deeper blue than closer inshore. It was safe to swim in the shallow sea with a sandy bottom but grown-ups warned us that it was dangerous beyond the "blue line" where the undersea forest began, because one couldn't see sharks against the darker background. Sharks were our deadliest enemy. On the foreshore of my seaside village a granite drinking fountain commemorated a girl who had been taken by a shark. But sharks do come into very shallow water with a sandy bottom, so that childhood rule would not have worked if put to the test. Years later when I was married with small children of my own a young woman was savagely mauled by a shark while she was paddling in water up to her knees; she died of shock and blood loss before help could reach her. This was at the sandy beach where we sometimes took our children.

There were many other creatures in the sea in my childhood. We could cast a line over the side of a boat and haul in unlimited numbers of tasty whiting, snapper, flatheads, as well as dogfish, small sharks, stingrays and skates that we regarded as inedible. The fishing was especially good in bays on the north coast of Kangaroo Island which shelters Adelaide’s beaches from the Southern Ocean. Occasionally we saw huge schools of yellowtail tuna, often accompanied by dolphins that leapt and frolicked among them in an underwater and aerial game that all seemed to enjoy.

During one summer holiday the sea almost swallowed me when I was body surfing off a beach near Perth, Western Australia. The surf there has powerful currents and tide rips where the Indian and Southern Oceans meet, but from the shore it looked innocuous that day. I was seized, tumbled over and over, and sucked into deeper water where my feet flailed vainly for a grasp on the reassuring sand. The ocean there is warmer than anywhere on the south coast but it almost did for me that morning, before it spat me out and allowed me to crawl from it like one of those prehistoric beasts that came out of the sea to the land hundreds of millions of years ago. I gasped painfully at the edge of the ocean for half an hour, too exhausted after my struggle to move away from the wavelets that lapped at my legs, thanking the sea for giving me back my life.

            After I left Australia I swam at Corfu in the Mediterranean, in the Atlantic off Cape Cod, in the Persian Gulf off Kuwait, in the Bay of Bengal, and several places in the Caribbean including Varadero in Cuba and Cartagena, Colombia. Most were very pleasant but all are polluted and the sea off Cape Cod is not only polluted but ice-cold because of the Labrador Current. No other sea is as clear, clean and welcoming as the sea of my childhood.