Melbourne sits on a bay, not the open sea. Port Phillip is a wide, sheltered basin, so our relationship with water has always been calmer and more domestic than a coastal city built for surf. That's shaped how Melburnians swim. The local pool has become a kind of stand-in coastline, a place for laps, community and the daily ritual of getting into water close to home.
More than that, the pool is where community happens. Families don't just duck in for a swim, they set up for the whole day, towels staked out on the grass, eskies unpacked, kids cycling between the water and the kiosk while parents catch up with people they only really see poolside. Fitzroy Pool, Harold Holt, the Brunswick Baths, these are our reefs and rockpools, but they're also our town squares. It's telling that when Fitzroy Pool faced closure in the 1990s, locals fought to save it, a campaign still remembered in Melbourne's swimming culture today, proof of how much these places mean beyond just the pool itself.
That civic attachment to pools shows up often in Melbourne fiction. Helen Garner's Monkey Grip, set around inner Melbourne share houses and the pool at the Fitzroy Baths, treats the pool as a place of drift and longing woven right through the narrator's life. Joanna Murray-Smith's Sunnyside places a fictional beachside, suburb's pools and dinner parties at the centre of its satire of respectability cracking open, the niceness of it all coming undone once an affair with the pool boy surfaces. And in Christos Tsiolkas's Barracuda, the pool is a different kind of arena altogether, the site of a working class boy's brutal, ritualised ascent through competitive swimming and everything that ambition costs him.
The most striking recent addition is Katherine Brabon's Body Friend. A 28-year-old woman leaves hospital after major surgery and begins swimming in a hydrotherapy pool in Melbourne's inner suburbs. There she meets Frida, a woman uncannily similar in her experience of chronic illness, who treats the pool as a place of discipline and recovery. Soon after, in a nearby park, she meets Sylvia, who instead counsels rest and stillness. The narrator moves between the two women like a pendulum, unsure which philosophy of the body she should trust.
What makes Body Friend so quietly powerful is its refusal of the neat recovery arc. There is no miracle cure, no tidy ending, just the cyclical, repetitive texture of living with chronic pain, rendered in prose that critics have called rhythmic and hypnotic. The pool here is not just a Melbourne setting detail. It becomes the place where the book's real question plays out: whether healing means pushing through pain or making peace with it. Shortlisted for the 2024 Stella Prize, Body Friend turns something as ordinary as the local lap pool into a site of real reckoning with what our bodies ask of us.
MONKEY GRIP | Helen Garner | NOVEL W&N Essentials | 2024 | S. 352 | Paperback AUD 12.99
SUNNYSIDE | Joanna Murray-Smith | NOVEL Penguin | 2007 | S. 408 | Paperback AUD 15.99
BARRACUDA | Christos Tsiolkas | NOVEL Allen & Unwin | 2015 | S. 528 | Paperback AUD 24.99
BODY FRIEND | Katherine Brabon | NOVEL Bloomsbury Publishing | 2024 | S. 272 | Hardback AUD 34.99
David Ryding
is the founding Director of the Melbourne UNESCO City of Literature Office, a role that works in partnership with the City of Melbourne and Creative Victoria in elevating Melbourne's status as a UNESCO City of Literature, through a combination of international relations and local capacity building initiatives. Melbourne has been a UNESCO Creative City since 2008.
