Sink Or Swim – Ep 3 FINAL SCRIPT 

Scene: Sounds of public pool as Angelica does final swim class.  

Angelica: Yeah, I succeeded. I’m actually really happy.  

ANGELICA VO: It’s my final day of a learn to swim program for adult beginners, 

Angelica: and I went over the blue line, so that was a mini celebration. When I saw the flags, I was like, yes!  

ANGELICA VO: When I started the week I couldn’t swim at all. I was scared to even get in the water. But today I’ve made a breakthrough.  

Angelica: I’m feeling so many different emotions. I have like the biggest smile on my face.    

ANGELICA VO: This is episode three of Sink or Swim, a podcast about learning to swim over one super-hot Sydney summer. But this hasn’t been a perfect sun-kissed Aussie summer for many of us.   

SAM AUSTIN: I literally do nothing in the summer. I stay inside my house. It’s unbearable outside. 

Simone: We had to book a motel for a couple of nights and that’s a lot of money just to cool down.  

ANGELICA: It’s a picture of the Australian Summer that looks nothing like the tourism ads. 

Sebastian: What do you do? You can’t send 200, 000 people into a Big W? Or into a Westfield shopping centre. That’s just not going to work.  

ANGELICA: This podcast is set in my home, the Western Sydney local government area of Blacktown, over the 2023/24 summer. We’re on track to become one of the hottest places in the world. It’s a window into our climate-changing future. 

So what are we going to do? How are we going to survive? 

Angela Van Dyke: It’s not just a building with air con. It’s a model that’s about building community connection.  

ANGELICA: I’m Angelica Ojinnaka-Psillakis. This is the final episode in our three-part series.  

Just a few weeks ago, at the start of the summer, I couldn’t swim.  I set myself an ambitious goal of swimming 50 meters. 

Angelica: If I don’t achieve it, hey, that’s ok 

ANGELICA: I didn’t quite make it that far.  

And then I stopped breathing and got back up. 

ANGELICA: I did swim 10 meters though, in a slightly clumsy side breathing freestyle kind of stroke. It was the first time I’ve ever felt like I was swimming. It felt like a real triumph to me. And it gave me a taste of how much fun it is to be in the water. 

I actually feel more confident in swimming amongst people, probably the unexpected goal of this whole week. 

[Fade up Pool end of class with Alina.] 

Alina: I hope to see you guys in the future. I’m going to be a part of this project for the future. Um, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much … 

ANGELICA: Even though I’ve only known my classmates for a week, I feel so proud of them. All of us have made progress, no one is using the boards anymore. Some people still need help from Alina, and we’re only in waist deep water. But everyone is way more confident. 

Angelica: I should come tomorrow and just do it by myself. I think at the start of the week, I thought, Oh, this is enough. But no, I actually just want to keep doing this. 

ANGELICA: I can finally go swimming with my husband Daniel 

[Fade up pool tape with Daniel] 

Daniel: (splashing) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, six strokes…Angelica Thorpe! 

Angelica: Angelica Thorpe, wow! It’s probably a lot less complicated name than mine.  

ANGELICA: I’m not an Olympian or anything. My feet are still gripping to the bottom of the pool. But I do feel comfortable in the water now. And I actually like it in here.  

Daniel: In focus… 

Angelica: So it’s not giving an 8 out of 10.  

Daniel: Hey? 

Angelica: It’s not giving an 8 out of 10, It’s giving 

Daniel: You’re swimming now…  

Angelica: It’s giving 

Daniel: 6.5 

Angelica: Oh my god, ok fine, 

ANGELICA: The other thing I learnt from this, is that being an adult who can’t swim is actually really common. I don’t think I needed to be as embarrassed. I’ve also met someone who took their first steps in the pool as an adult. 

Maryam Zahid: My name is Maryam Zahid and I am the founder and director of Afghan Woman on the Move 

ANGELICA: It’s a community of Afghan and other newly arrived women learning skills to survive and thrive in Australia, like swimming.  

Maryam Zahid: In Afghanistan, women are not allowed to go swimming. We don’t have oceans, we don’t have those places for women to go 

ANGELICA: Like me, Maryam couldn’t swim for most of her adult life. 

Maryam Zahid: I missed on that. I never had it. My mom came when she was 45 and 20 years in Australia. Still can’t swim. So I said, if I’m learning, why not another women? So I said, I’m gonna teach them. 

I blame myself as well because I come from a very open-minded family. My husband will never say that, why you’re going swimming or, but it’s just the culture of how I brought up, oh, if I have time, I’ll go and check on my mom. I have time. I’ll go and cook. I clean. So it’s not that, oh, I have this time. How about I go to swimming? 

That’s not in our community, not, this is not. Women don’t get “me time”. It’s very westernised white culture — “me time”.  

ANGELICA: Maryam and her group of women have claimed that time for themselves – and for each other.   

Maryam Zahid: So now we have graduate 100 women with basic swimming skills from our swimming lessons. I have so many good stories about our swimming lessons that women become a different person when they’re in the water. As soon as they get in out of the water, they change.  

ANGELICA: I know what Maryam means. I’ve changed too. Sarah Malik, who gave me a pep talk in episode 1, had the same experience.  

[Music fade in] 

Sarah Malik: Oh, why can’t I just swim? In the beginning it’s just like, Like, why can’t I just, you know, dive in and just be like a fish. You’re learning to swim and then you get like that brusque white guy who is like sailing past you in the lane. And just tells you to like, go off to the slower lane, you know, because you’re getting in the way and there’s something that makes you feel like, Oh, maybe they’re just better at this or superior than me, maybe it’s something about me. 

And then when you start actually going through the drills and the practice and the training, you realize it’s just the structure. It’s just the, the culture around you that you didn’t have to support you, you know?  

And so, so much of that also made me realize in other parts of my life where I felt like Oh, maybe it’s like my lack of something. You realize, oh, that’s all the things that are required. Like it’s not a magic trick. It’s just hard work. 

ANGELICA: I’m not scared of hard work but I don’t like failing. But was it really me who failed by not learning how to swim until now? 

Sarah Malik:  Part of my journey in swimming was recognizing that, it wasn’t me or a failure in me. There were all these structural issues as well around my access to water. And so a lot of overcoming that for me, was how can I build a safe community and a safe space for myself within this. Because, it’s too easy to often put the burden on the individual. 

ANGELICA: And it wasn’t my mum’s fault that I couldn’t swim, either.  

Lucy: You can’t think of one issue in isolation with the other. You can’t think of this swimming, in isolation. Because if there’s one situation, there must be other situation, you know.  

What I thought was my personal failing, what my mum thought was hers, it’s actually bigger than us. I’m surprised it took a whole podcast series for us to make this realisation. In some communities, learning and teaching swimming is second nature. It’s valued and supported. Kids head to the local beach for nippers on the weekend. The public school is just down the road from the public pool.   

But for other communities, like mine, just finding one free learn to swim course feels like the chance of a lifetime.  

I’m also coming to understand that what I saw as a personal achievement – learning to swim those precious ten metres – was actually a shared one. My classmates and my teacher and I – we did it together.   

And learning to swim is even more important now that summers are getting hotter and hotter – the water offers us a perfect way to stay cool. 

This is especially true in Western Sydney. But why is it getting so much hotter here? 

Sebastian Pfautsch: The urban heat island effect was first discovered, uh, about 220 years ago in London, where a meteorologist measured air temperature inside London and then measured it outside London and found that Nearly all the time, and particularly during the night, outside London was much cooler than inside London. 

ANGELICA: That’s Sebastian Pfaustch, urban planning expert and heat researcher at Western Sydney University who we spoke to in episode two. 

Sebastain Pfaustch: The urban heat island effect itself is simply the consequence of having  higher thermal mass more human activity And less green infrastructure and open space in cities compared to nearby reference sites that are vegetated. 

ANGELICA: That’s exactly what I see around where I live. Housing estates are built really quickly. And half the time it feels like developers don’t even bother planting trees. I see way more grey than green.  

Emma Bacon: You can think of it like areas with lots of concrete that absorbs heat and radiates it back out. Dark surfaces or black roofs that attract the heat. Treeless streets, so there’s no shade and no evaporative cooling that comes with trees. And so those areas can be. 15 degrees hotter than cooler parts of the city. 

ANGELICA: This is Emma Bacon, the founder and executive director of Sweltering Cities, an organisation campaigning for better responses to heat. Emma says Western Sydney has taken the idea of an urban heat island to a whole new level. 

Emma Bacon: Western Sydney is actually an urban heat continent, which is what we call it when there’s lots of heat islands together and are connected.  

Sam Austin: I made a TikTok video that went viral overnight. I remember waking up and being like, wow, this is, this is crazy. People actually care about this. 

ANGELICA: This is Urban Planner, Sam Austin. 

Sam Austin: I grew up in Western Sydney. Things just seem to, just exponentially going faster and faster out west, and I, just seeing these patterns going on and just thinking, wow, we really need to get on top of this.  

ANGELICA: And this is his Tik Tok video. It shows a neighbourhood with a lot of houses with black roofs, a lot of asphalt, and not a lot of trees.  

[cue Tik Tok video] 

Sam Tik Tok: In six months time, this will be the hottest place on earth. This is Marsden Park, located in Western Sydney. No, that is not an exaggeration. Suburbs like Marsden Park have helped create urban heat islands that exceed 50 degrees.  

ANGELICA: Sam’s TikTok got millions of views, shares and comments.  It made me realise how concerned and engaged the community already is. Most of us know it’s getting hotter out west. But not this hot, or why.  

TikTok Video: What makes this so hot? Houses. Specifically these brand-new identical houses. 

Sam Austin: There were so many people commenting, saying, ‘I had no idea this was a problem in my suburb.’ You know, so many people saying, ‘oh my God, I just moved here. I’ve, I’ve just bought a house. Wow, I didn’t realize this had such a measurable impact on my lifestyle. And it’s gonna have such a huge impact on my energy use and my energy bills and my costs.’  

People, trying to leave their house and trying to say that ‘I literally do nothing in the summer. I stay inside my house. It’s unbearable outside.’ There’s people talking about how they burnt their feet, stepping out on the tarmac during the day.  

[Music for Sebastian fade up] 

Sebastian: What are we doing this whole time where it’s only getting hotter? It’s really crazy.  

ANGELICA: This is Professor Sebastian Fautsch again.  

Sebastian: Who on earth will move into a place where you have 60 or 80 days above 35 degrees every summer? Who are the people buying these homes in the future when it’s even hotter in Western Sydney? 

I’m really afraid for the future when we do see heat waves that last for nine or ten days. Think about only one day blackout. in these extreme heat events where then the people sit in their hot boxes and they can’t even have mechanical or air-conditioned means because there’s just no electricity to power any of the coolings. You’re just making the problem worse and worse and worse. What do you do? You can’t send 200, 000 people into a big W or into a Westfield shopping centre. That’s just not going to work. 

ANGELICA: But that is what’s happening now for many people here in Blacktown. One of the only places to go on a really hot day is a shopping centre. 

[Fade in Music, then Kmart tape] 

Ian Epondulan: Fortunately the Kmart, here in Blacktown is 24 hours. Seven days a week. So you’d see people there at 2:00 AM in the morning, 3:00 AM in the morning, And people are just shopping around and just keeping cool because they can’t stay in their own homes at night because it’s too hot. It’s a bit chaotic.  

ANGELICA: This is Ian Epondulan. He’s part of Voices for Power. A Western Sydney Collective trying to help people deal with climate change. 

Ian Epondulan: I’ve gone to the local shopping centre or to, places where there are is air conditioning where, you know, the cost of using my air conditioning unit can be quite expensive and the bills each year continue to increase So it’s the same thing with a lot of families here in Western Sydney experiencing the same hardships of cost of living and, finding ways to keep cool in the summer  

[Fade up mall car park sounds] 

Angelica: The carpark is horrific at West Point. I’m gonna use the Kmart car park, but I do not want to go into West Point.     

Ian Epondulan: You think, oh, that’s the solution to go to the shopping centre and escape the heat, but then everyone else is thinking the same solution as well. So it’s a bit of a chaos at the same time where everyone’s now at the shopping centre and you see lots of families, it’s noisy. 

ANGELICA: It’s a mall. We shouldn’t have to go to a mall to keep cool.  

Ian Epondulan: We’ve spoken to council about creating spaces where the community feels safe to go to. They know these places already, and at the same time they can reprieve from the heat. 

ANGELICA: Ian has also volunteered his church space in Blacktown as a cool refuge for the summer. It’s one of a series of refuges organised by Blacktown City Council. A community space, not a commercial space.  

[cue tape in cool refuge] 

Simone: It was really hot at my place and we had to book a motel for a couple of nights and that’s a lot of money just to cool down.  

Farzana: it was predicted to be a hot day, so early in the morning we headed it to the library and then we, as I started to get hot I knew of this place, from my Facebook. So I came down here and it’s really cool. This is the first time we’ve come down here and it’s, it’s lovely and cool. 

ANGELICA: I’ve headed to one of the cool refuges in Blacktown. And I’m chatting with Farzana, Simone, and their kids. 

Farzana: It gets really hot. Like even if you’re in a house. That’s what I was telling to Simone, that even if I put my air con on, it just looks like I haven’t turned up air con on and it gets hot. Like a lot. It’s still hot. Like I go up to 18 is the high. It can go to 

Simone: Just sitting here. Meeting new people, having some lunch. Little ones are doing some puzzles. Yeah. And waiting for a movie and then have a little snack and then go home later on. 

Angela Van Dyke: Our approach to a cool centre, it’s not just a building with air con. 

ANGELICA: This is Angela Van Dyke, CEO of the Riverstone Neighbourhood Centre, another place that has volunteered to run a cool refuge this summer. 

Angela Van Dyke: And if we think about resilience with all the disasters that we’ve had, covid, floods, heat, bush fires, what makes a community resilient is its connection to each other. And knowing each other and knowing who you trust and where to turn for help. What we see as a community centre, over many decades in this work, we build community resilience by building the relationships with people outside of disaster, trust is key. It’s very hard to build trust when you’re in the midst of some major catastrophe. Our cool centre here in Blacktown City is actually a model that’s about building community connection. 

Simone: Me before I wasn’t so confident about coming here. I just stayed at home and did my own thing but now I’ve been coming for a couple of years. It’s really good. Doesn’t matter what nationality you they are – they all help you. 

Angela Van Dyke: Everyone is welcome and we try to set the cool centre up to meet the needs of different ages of people. 

Kid: My favorite part is making new friends and staying cool on a hot Summer day. 

Angela Van Dyke: So there’s activities for younger children, there’s space for adults. Sometimes there might be a bit of a movie running. And we try to put the resources in there to make sure that it’s like being at home.  

Emma Bacon: The number one thing is we have to ask people what they need.  

ANGELICA: This is Emma Bacon again from Sweltering Cities. They also run an annual Summer survey to gather data on health risks caused by rising temperatures. And to hear what communities want. 

Emma Bacon: When we surveyed thousands of people we found out that on hot days they couldn’t even leave the house. You know they’re walking down hot streets having to wait at unsheltered bus stops. We’ve measured temperatures on days over 30 degrees, over 60 degrees on the road in front of a bus stop. You’ve got the heat coming from above, the heat coming from below. It’s real dis-incentive for people who use public transport. And when we spoke to people we realised there’s such a simple solution: have great bus shelters.  

Like one of the big problems is that lots of the heat wave responses are devised by people who are well-intentioned. But don’t necessarily understand what it’s like for people who don’t have, the resources to keep cool. I’ve heard so many different ideas, things like, why don’t we have vouchers to go to the cinema for everyone with a concession card on a hot day? I was talking to some people who live in public housing the other day about what they need in a cool, safe space. 

And we were thinking cold water, showers, entertainment, things like that. And what they said to me is, we need like somewhere to have a cup of tea or coffee and we’d like to have friends to talk to.  

[Fade up Music] 

ANGELICA: I’m realizing we need to come together to survive the heat. We can’t do it alone. But what are the solutions? 

Emma Bacon: When you give people a positive vision of their community, they wanna be involved and they wanna be positive and excited about it. Instead of telling people they live in an area that’s gonna be unliveable. The solution is for people to come together to make sure that, we can be building those more sustainable cities with, policies that put people at the centre rather than, the profit of developers or others.  

ANGELICA: The summer is almost over now. Like every summer, this one was hotter than the last. It’s going to keep getting hotter each year. We are coming up with our own solutions to cope. But we can’t just pick up shovels and dig ourselves a new pool, or a new park. And we can’t always choose where we live. There are real barriers – structural, physical, economic – standing in the way of Western Sydney being a place where people can thrive in a heating world.   

Thinking back to the swimming festival at the Mount Druitt public pool, we were able to stay cool and connected. There was no cost barrier. The event was free. There were no fast lanes or slow lanes in the pool. Everyone was just in the water, wearing whatever they were comfortable in, and enjoying a shared space. There was a jumping castle and a slide for the kids who couldn’t swim, and a burst water pipe for them to splash in. And there was the familiar face of a snow cone man who has worked around Blacktown for 40 years. It was the image of an Australian summer that I’d like to see in the tourism ads. 

For now, I’m just relishing the last few weeks of warm weather to enjoy what I witnessed with envy from the sidelines that day at Mt Druitt: the freedom of floating confidently in the water, in the company of the people I love.  

If I imagine the classic Australian concrete and tile public pool, and I picture myself on the starting blocks back at that swimming carnival in year 7. In a way, it’s a false image. We are not all at the same jumping off point. And once in the water, some of us can’t even float, while others are buoyed up by things we can’t see. We either sink or swim. 

SCENE TAPE OF ANGELICA AND DANIEL SWIMMING TOGETHER –  

Natalie: now that you’ve embarked on it and like You’re going to continue?  I’m so so here for it because now it’s gonna like not just like change things for you, but also the people around you like but in your community or society Give me that motivation, please continue, continue.  

ANGELICA: Remember how I said I almost missed out on the free swimming class? Well, obviously we need more of them! It’s not just Natalie, or my sister Shania, I know there are many more people in my neighbourhood who want to learn how to swim. We don’t want to see any more headlines about people drowning! So I’m trying to convince the Blacktown City Council to put on more free adult swimming lessons. Want to help me? Go to our website, impactstudios.edu.au/sinkorswim, and join my campaign. 

Natalie: Before she even blows, let me just put this out there. She will blow. You’ll see Angelica, huh? She’s good at so many, so many things. You guys are not ready. So guess what? This is one of them. Stay tuned and follow her, but don’t follow too close. Otherwise you get blinded. Okay? Period.   

angelica: That’s a wrap. I’ll end it there. 

CREDITS