Scene: Grab of swimming lesson in Mount Druitt pool, Angelica is in the water.

Angelica: I don’t know why my nervousness picked up again. This is like a totally new world and so it feels super uncomfortable to be here Sorry, I’m just a bit I didn’t expect to get sorry I you start to think about the things that you missed out on and Feel weird being an adult in an adult swimming class crying about swimming, you actually start to realize a lot of things about what you didn’t get access to. I sound silly. But just, I was not expecting to cry. Yeah.

ANGELICA VO: I’m at an indoor aquatic center in Mount Druitt, waiting for my first ever swimming lesson to start. The other students are starting to arrive. We are all adults who can’t swim. And now we’re taking the plunge. This is episode two of Sink or Swim, a podcast about learning to swim over one super-hot Sydney summer. If you haven’t listened to Episode 1, I recommend you start there.

Shane Gould: Half the population can’t swim 50 metres.

ANGELICA: It’s a real Australian story – not a tourism ad.

[cue News montage]

News Archive 1: It’s officially the worst ever summer for drownings

News Archive 2: Western Sydney this summer could be the hottest place on earth.

ANGELICA: This podcast is set in my home, the Western Sydney local government area of Blacktown over the summer of 2023/24. We’re on track to become one of the hottest places in the world.

Sebastian Pfautsch: People on other parts of the world will face the same problems. We are the test bed.

Kim Loo: The people who are most vulnerable are actually the most likely to die from heat. tape

ANGELICA: It’s a preview of the much hotter future that all of us are facing.

I’m Angelica Ojinnaka-Psillakis. In this episode, I get out of the heat and into the water.

[cue tape at Mount Druitt swim class]

Angelica: Hi, I’m just here for the SwimSense classes as well.

Pool attendant: What was your name?

Angelica: Angelica.

ANGELICA: It’s day one of a week-long swimming intensive course for adult beginners. I signed up at the beginning of summer, and I was lucky to get in because it booked out quickly. It’s one of the only free swimming courses I could find in my neighbourhood.

Alina: First and foremost, safe entry into the pool. Okay? So, how we’re going to enter the water today,

ANGELICA: This is our swimming instructor.

Alina: My name’s Alina Aquilina.

ANGELICA: What a name!

Alina: I’ve been a swimming instructor for five and a half years

ANGELICA: She’s explaining what we’ll be learning as beginner adults.

Alina: So the basic steps we want is safe entry into the water. Then the major one, blowing bubbles. And then once we’re comfortable putting our face in the water, we introduce kicking. So those three things would be your basics. 1, 2, 3, go…The longer you stand there and think about it, the longer you …

ANGELICA: There’s about 10 of us gathered around the edge of the pool, waiting to get in. Most of us are scared to even get in the water.

My goal for the week is to swim 50m. It’s the length of the race I attempted to swim at the school carnival back in year seven. Yeah, that’s the length of an Olympic swimming pool, so I know it’s pretty bold. I’m quietly keeping this goal to myself. I’m not telling Alina, my husband Daniel, my mum, Lucy, or anyone in my class.

ANGELICA: The first person I make friends with is Zamir.

Zamir: My name is Zamir.

ANGELICA: Zamir wasn’t sure he even wanted to come today.

Zamir: I was on the fence about it, because I’ve tried to learn swimming for decades. And because I have a trauma where I drowned as a kid when I visited a waterfall with my friends and I was stupid enough to go into the waterfall without knowing the depth

I have no recollection of what happened because I drowned and one of my friends was, you know, brave enough to pull me my hair and, get me out. so I was unconscious after that, I was always scared of water. It’s like I tried this so many times, but I cannot, you know.

ANGELICA: I totally understand Zamir. I’ve also tried plenty of times since that near-drowning experience at the swimming carnival. An experience like that just sticks with you.

The first thing Alina asks us to do is to put our faces into the water and blow bubbles, which isn’t as easy as it sounds.

[Cue pool sounds, blowing bubbles]

ANGELICA: My husband, Daniel is watching me from the side of the pool.

Daniel: I think she’s doing good, at the moment. I saw lots of bubbles when she put her head under. She definitely is feeling nervous. She didn’t seem nervous, like, yesterday or the day before, but when we started coming here is when I realized, oh, she’s quite nervous. But now that she’s in there, she looks like she’s feels safe at least,

ANGELICA: I do feel safer now. I’ve gotten into the water. I’ve put my face in, and I’m blowing bubbles.

Angelica: I don’t know what I was nervous about. That seem, was a lot easier than what I thought it was…

ANGELICA: At the end of the first lesson, everyone is giggling and smiling at each other, it’s a relief. We took the first big step. We all faced our fears and it wasn’t that bad.

Angelica: Lesson one done. Lesson one done. Oh my goodness. Okay, I feel like, I feel really happy. Okay, actually I’m smiling quite a lot. I just feel really happy that I did that. I was just speaking to one of the guys in the pool and he was like, it’s just the, the getting into the water is the hardest bit.

Guy in pool: You did the breathing perfectly. You took 2 gasps and it came out really well. I was drinking water, but you were actually breathing so

Angelica: Yay, I thought I was doing it wrong. Because in your mind you think that you’re not doing it right. the start.

ANGELICA: Our class has such a mix of people, I didn’t expect that but I love it! There’s an older woman looks pretty tough but as we approach the water, she just looks terrified.

Swimmer with tattoo: I’m very nervous still. I laugh because I go, I’m covered in tattoos and I can sit there for eight hours and be tattooed, but I can’t be in a pool. My kids swim, my grandkids swim. And I just wait. And now it’s like, this is my time? I’m getting a lot older, I so I thought if I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it. Yeah. So, and I look at like kids and go, oh my god, how do you do that?

Angelica: Yeah, and that’s the same thing I have with when I take my siblings to the swim center or I go to the beach. I’m like, I can’t stand on the side waving and being like, yeah, you, you enjoy and

Swimmer with tattoo: Come in, come in. Yeah, and I’m like, no, I’m okay. I’ll mind the bags. I’ve got a three year old, um, granddaughter and she’s She’s obstinate and doesn’t do anything that she doesn’t want to do and if she can do it, I can do it.

ANGELICA: I don’t want to sit on the sidelines anymore either. That’s not even who I am.

Swimmer with tattoo: I think everyone should be doing it. We’ve had too many people die this year just from drowning.

Alina: I just said that to you yesterday. Drowning is too much paperwork. Hell no! Alrighty…

ANGELICA: It’s day two of the swimming program.

Alina: We want you guys where you’re comfortable, where you are safe. Alright? As we’ve seen a lot in the news just at the beginning of this year, we have had a lot of drownings, okay? This is why we create this program.

ANGELICA: This summer is one of the hottest on record in Australia, and already dozens of people have drowned.

News 1: Sixty-four people have drowned since December one

News 2: New figures say adults, not children, are now at most risk of drowning in the summer.

ANGELICA: One of those drownings happened here in Western Sydney. Just before Christmas, a brand new swimming spot that opened up in Penrith.

News 3: On Boxing Day, a thirty-five-year-old man went missing at Penrith Beach, sparking a full-scale search. Four hours later, his body was pulled from the water

News 4: Penrith Beach closed after thirty-five-year-old Seti Tuaopepe drowned while paddleboarding with children.

ANGELICA: Penrith Beach was meant to solve one of the big problems in Western Sydney. The lack of places to swim. It’s our first ever beach here. Opened for the first time this summer.  It’s an artificial lake in an old quarry, so it’s not a beach beach. It looks more like an enormous pond with sand. That might sound a little underwhelming, but it hasn’t stopped the crowds.

[cue tape Penrith Beach]

Angelica: What brought you to Penrith Beach?

Vox Pop 1: So we’ve been hearing about The beach in the west and we stay in Marsden Park. So We thought this is the closest option. Otherwise, it takes two hours to reach any beach.

Vox Pop 2: The cost of time, the cost in tolls.

Parking in the East whereas here like we literally came down for a quick dip and then we’re going to head home and get ready to go to the night markets tonight. So we’ve still got money in the pocket to go and do that.

Vox Pop 3: I’ve always been a big fan of like rivers and ponds. And stuff over beaches and shit. I mean, the eastern suburbs and the beaches and stuff are great, but I mean, I’m a confident swimmer, but the idea of getting caught in a rip and pulled out somewhere really freaks me out.

ANGELICA: It freaks me out too. And it should.  The hotter it gets, the more people are drawn to the water, but many of us are just not safe there.

Shane Gould: There’s more drownings and poor swimming skills. About half the population can’t swim 50 metres.

ANGELICA: This is Olympian Shane Gould.  In episode one, she told us that swimming is part of our national identity, that it’s in our cultural DNA. But she found in her recent PhD research that many of us can’t swim very well. And that kind of shocks me.

Shane Gould: In order to be safe in the water, you have to feel safe. And so perhaps that side-breathing freestyle that you see in swimming races is not the goal that should be put in front of people. Maybe just the safety of being able to manage the water calmly. And to remain confident and understanding of your situation if you do get into trouble should be the goal. The current measurements are distance. How Far can you swim? So can you swim 50 meters doing freestyle?

ANGELICA: That’s actually the goal set by the Royal Life Saving Society Australia for primary school students in Australia: to be able to swim 50 metres and float for two minutes. Kids are also meant to have ten swimming lessons in year 3 to achieve that. I can’t remember ever getting those lessons and even if I did, it doesn’t feel like they would be enough to be able to swim an Olympic lap.

You might remember that this 50 metres was my ambitious goal for the week, but what Shane’s saying makes me wonder if I should rethink that. On that day at the swimming carnival in year seven, the most useful skill I could have had, even more useful than being able to swim the 50m, would’ve just been knowing how to stay calm.

Shane Gould: If you fell off your stand up paddle board, or your leg rope broke and you had to make non-emotional decisions to get yourself back to land, you know, it might take you half an hour. Can you manage your emotions and your physical capacities for that much time?

ANGELICA: You might be able to manage them on land, but Shane says it’s a different story in the water.

Shane Gould: If you’ve got water covering your mouth or inside your mouth, you don’t want to inhale that. So that can be really scary for a lot of people. So you need to learn how to manage that. Being able to pause, pause, pause before you take another breath.

[cue tape from pool]

Vipul: I was not aware that you can breathe inside the water, which I learned today.

ANGELICA: This is Vipul.

Vipul: And, of course, you have to lift your head a little bit, uh, while you do the freestyle or whatever swimming you do so that you can inhale and exhale properly.

Angelica: It’s like when they break down the steps, like, step by step and you realize, oh, that’s why you have to breathe like this.

ANGELICA: Vipul is the most determined person I’ve met here. His whole family are learning to swim. And he and his wife are both in my class. They struggle with each new skill we learn, but neither of them gives up.

Vipul: The moment I go in the water, I dip myself inside and I’m not able to hold my breath for one second as well. So I said, nah, I’m going to take the money back. I’m going out. Then I said to myself, no, no, I have to learn. I have to learn. So, that’s how, and now I’m enjoying. Heard one sentence of her don’t think. If you think, you drink the water.

ANGELICA: Sometimes I look over at Vipul and I see him thrashing in the water with every bit of his strength, not really understanding how his body works in this unfamiliar environment. A terrified look on his face, but determination in his eyes. And as soon as the class ends, while I’m catching my breath and reflecting on everything, he and his wife stay in the water for an hour or so, practicing what we’ve just learned. They just keep going.

The next couple of days of the swimming program go by quickly. We practice kicking, freestyle strokes and floating – all with the board.

****

ANGELICA: I show my sister Shania videos of my progress that Daniel has been recording from the side of the pool.

[cue tape with Angelica’s sister]

Angelica (2): Okay. Ready?

Sister: See this one I like because you’re actually swimming, even though you’ve got like the board in front of you to like assist you, so that one gives me more hope that you can actually swim once you’re done with this program.

Angelica: How does it make you feel?

Sister: It encourages me. I mean like, from the first few videos and how Like, you gradually got better at it. It really is encouraging me to actually want to pursue swimming lessons.

ANGELICA: That’s what I like to hear! One of my motivations for learning to swim was to encourage my family and friends to overcome THEIR fears, too. Can you tell I’m an older sister!

I show my mum some videos too.

[cue tape with mom, Lucy]

Lucy: Wow. How cool is that? That’s like magic. So you can go out now and swim. Really end it. No. Why not? But you can do that. But I’m holding a board. Yeah, do it. Do it. And keep holding a board and then keep losing it, you know? As you go now, you can actually do the rest by yourself. I think you should.

Go every weekend, go with Daniel and take a board and keep doing it. That’s, like learning in everything else. I think practice is what makes it, once you get the hang of it. Yeah. Then do it yourself. Keep doing it yourself.

My reaction to all of this is just a happy one. You know that you are brave enough to do it and that you’ll be able to swim, you know, before you know it. What I feel is a little bit emotional. ’cause I, I’m thinking you, this is something you should have known already, you know?

ANGELICA: It kills me that my mum still feels bad about this. It’s not her fault at all. Maybe if  I can learn to swim now, that guilt will start to disappear.

And I am getting there. Slowly.

[cue new day at the pool]

ANGELICA: The day Alina asks us to leave our boards on the side of the pool is a scary day. There is nothing to hold on to now.

Angelica: I panicked a little bit only because I, I mean, the board wasn’t there, but I just had a memory when I’ve gone into the pool with you, Dan, and like, it’ll be like that first little bit where I don’t want to go. Like that was what that was. We’ll give it a go now.

Daniel: Do a big push off. Push off,

ANGELICA: This is the part where I have trouble staying calm. I remember what Shane Gould said about not panicking when things don’t go the way you expect. So I try to practice not panicking. But yeah, it’s not that easy. It makes it easier though, having Daniel on the sidelines, giving me encouragement.

Daniel: It’s always the starting bit, like, push off, like, 1, 2, 3, once she gets going, she’s alright, but it’s the I think the first bit, just like, making the effort to get going. But she looks like she’s doing alright.

ANGELICA: It’s all about survival. Learning to navigate an unfamiliar environment where some of the risks are invisible. The cool, blue water just looks so inviting. Especially when it is really hot.

Sebastian Pfautsch: I think it’s one of the best ways to keep cool.

ANGELICA: This is Professor Sebastian Pfautsch.

Sebastian Pfautsch: Even if you don’t swim, but you just float. Just being in that cool  calming environment that water can be takes heat stress off your mind. Um, you dip in, you already start cooling off just by having your toes in the water because it helps cooling your blood down.

ANGELICA: Sebastian is an urban planning expert and heat researcher at Western Sydney University.

Sebastian Pfautsch: I wish there would be more facilities in Western Sydney that help people cooling down because when you look at population density and availability of public pools, Western Sydney is definitely disadvantaged

ANGELICA: It’s not fair that there are fewer places in Western Sydney to cool off.

[cue Dr Kim Loo tape]

Kim Loo: There’s no space in the death certificate to write down a heat wave. I just wrote down this is one of the factors that probably caused death.

ANGELICA: This is Dr Kim Loo. A local GP who’s been treating patients in Western Sydney and raising awareness about heat and health for more than 30 years. She’s talking about one of her patients, Chuck McLeod, who died from heat exposure a few years ago.

Kim Loo: Chuck was a patient of mine for about 14 years. He was a long-time smoker and he had heart disease and the lung disease associated with smoking. I spent a long time talking to Chuck not to go out on his scooter on hot days cuz he was at risk of just being really sick or, um, dying.

And so it was a Saturday and I was rung by his daughter and he’d died at home and it looks as though that he went down his scooter probably to the local Bunnings. And then came home and collapsed on the floor. Uh, so his daughter, his daughter, um, and son-in-law and uh, grandchild was there. Yeah, it was very sad. So what, what happened? Yeah. It’s very upsetting.

Kim Loo: In Western Sydney we know that only 15% of people are metabolically well. There’s a higher incidence of type 2 diabetes. There’s a higher risk of anything inflammatory. So you have 85% of people who actually have all sorts of metabolic risk. So we actually have an at-risk population who actually have few choices the people who are actually uh, most vulnerable because of the way society is structured, um, are the most likely people to die from heat.

There are people who living, who are living without the strength of community around them. And you really can’t have a healthy community if you don’t have a healthy person.

Sebastian Pfautsch: In Western Sydney, you have millions of people, and we’re putting more and more people into the space. Most are new arrivals. They’ve never experienced these extreme climates of Western Sydney.

ANGELICA: This is Professor Sebastian Pfautsch again.

Sebastian Pfautsch: The first thing you need to understand when it comes to heat, the first response of your body is, it wants to keep its core temperature at 37.6 degrees celsius.

Sebastian Pfautsch: And to do that, when you are in a hot environment, you start to sweat. And that means your heart has to pump harder just to get all that hot blood to the surface of your skin, where then evaporative cooling helps cool down the blood, which helps keep the core temperature of the body where we’re not in danger.

Now, you can imagine when around you, you have, let’s say, 39 degrees.

ANGELICA: Celsius – that’s 102 degrees Fahrenheit!

Sebastian Pfautsch: So that’s already constantly hotter than your body’s core temperature. The heart has to work really hard just to keep that blood coming to your surface, where hopefully you’re well enough hydrated so that you still sweat. And that can give you a cardiac arrest.

ANGELICA: This is why heat is sometimes called Australia’s silent killer. And it’s a big killer too.  More people are killed by heatwaves than all other natural disasters combined. Between 2006 and 2017, there were 36,000 heat-related deaths¹.

Sebastian Pfautsch: So we see people dying from extreme heat it was just too hot and the heart had to pump all this blood around the body where simply that was too much for this organ to handle.

ANGELICA: Swimming means your body doesn’t have to do any of that. It doesn’t need to sweat, because it’s already covered in water.

But for some people this isn’t an option. It costs money to keep your house cool, not everyone has a backyard pool, and transport to the beach can be expensive. So if you can’t afford these things, you’re at greater risk during heatwaves.

Sebastian Pfautsch: Look at the very young. They don’t have yet the physical capacity to sweat. When you look at older people, they lose the impulse of feeling thirsty. That’s just something that comes with age. So, without even realizing, because they don’t feel thirsty, they dehydrate. And that pushes you into that area where you don’t sweat enough, or you stop sweating completely.

Sebastian Pfautsch: We’ve got a project this summer where we look at those populations living in social housing and what do they do?

We’ve got one person, Mary. She helps herself by running three mechanical fans, and they all have little plastic bottles in front of them that she strings onto the fan and fills them with ice cubes. So that the ice cubes release coolth and the wind from the mechanical fan blows that at her, but she’s not moving She’s not doing anything else than just sitting there and trying to get through those extreme heat events. Because she cannot afford to put air conditioning on.

[Cue music, tape of second last lesson at pool].

ANGELICA: Back at the swimming centre, we’ve wrapped up our second last class.

Alina: Nice. Alright. I’m looking forward to our last day tomorrow. Hate to say it, but it’s our last day. I enjoyed today too much. I know. Enjoyed too much. But I shall see you guys tomorrow night, and we’ll finish off off at a high, yeah? Awesome. See you guys tomorrow.

ANGELICA: I pull our instructor, Alina, aside. I want to hear what she thinks of my progress. I didn’t realise she had noticed how exposed I’ve been feeling.

Alina: The first couple of times that we did things, Yeah, very tense and shoulders and I was surprised. And you didn’t back down from the challenge that I gave you. And especially when it comes to doing it on your own, a lot of the adults are just like, ‘No. No, no, no.’

For yourself, I’ve seen a major confidence boost because when you got into the pool, I think the first shock was The depth of the water and you’re just like, okay, all right.

ANGELICA: As I prepare myself for our last class, I’m thinking about whether I will reach my goal of swimming 50m and if this is even the right goal. Would it actually mean that I could survive in the water? Can I keep calm now if something goes wrong?

I’m wondering if we should all be learning more survival skills, both in the heat and in the water, especially here in Blacktown.

[cue music]

ANGELICA: In the next and final episode: my last swimming lesson. But that’s not the end of the story. Getting to this point, has got me wondering what other people are doing when it gets really hot.

Ian Epondulan: 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.

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

ANGELICA: I find out why it’s so hot in Blacktown. And what the rest of the world can learn from what we’re doing to cope.

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

Emma Bacon: The solution is for people to come together and build community power. And it’s just such a simple solution.

Kim Loo: Acting local is so, so important. Because that’s where you’re most effective cause you are with people who trust you.

ANGELICA: This is Sink or Swim. An Impact Studios production. This podcast was made on Dharug and Gadigal lands.

ENDS

CREDITS