Swimming is in Kay Burton’s DNA.
The 84-year-old learned to swim as a child in the Richmond River near Kyogle and has taught, coached and competed in swimming most of her life.
But in 2023 the Springwood resident set herself a new swimming goal that was purely recreational – to swim in every ocean pool in Australia. With 54 pools already ticked off her list, she hopes to complete her mission by the end of this summer.
“I’ve been around swimming for a long time. It means everything to me,” she said. “[I love] that beautiful feeling of weightlessness that people who don’t swim will never experience.”
The grandmother-of-12 and great-grandmother of six isn’t doing it for a cause and she hasn’t set herself a deadline. She is simply doing it for joy.
Along the way she has discovered just how much ocean pools mean to their local communities.
“As I go around the pools, I meet people and they come and talk to me… They all want to know what you think of their pool,” she said.
In NSW alone, Mrs Burton has been everywhere from Eden to Ballina to the Blue Pool at Bermagui (“everyone asks if I’ve been to that one”) as well as Newcastle, Wollongong and Sydney’s Northern Beaches.
She has made many human connections on her journey, including giving an impromptu swimming lesson to a woman at Forster on the NSW Mid-North Coast and having a heart-to-heart conversation with another woman who was dealing with the death of her parents at Sawtell.
Special connection
Some of the pools she has visited have had special meaning for Mrs Burton – like Shellharbour’s Beverley Whitfield Pool which is named after the 1972 Munich Olympic gold medalist. Mrs Burton still has vivid memories of listening to Norman May’s radio call of Whitfield’s 200m breaststroke final after she had put her then young children to bed. The 18-year-old won in dramatic fashion after finding herself in last place at the final turn.
“Norman May was screaming ‘Here she comes, the girl from Shellharbour!’. I’ve never forgotten it,” she said.
Mrs Burton has been joined by her daughters Cathy and Josephine at many of the pools as well as friends. For the pools she has visited on her own, she usually makes friends with the locals.
Australia’s ocean pools tell a story about the country itself, she said.
“Most of these pools were built in times when we didn’t have the council pools we have now.”
Australia’s oldest ocean pool is the Bogey Hole in Newcastle, which was built by convicts in 1819, while the city’s Merewether Ocean Baths are the largest in the Southern Hemisphere. Wollongong’s ocean pools exist thanks to the region’s mining industry while Pearl Beach pool on the NSW Central Coast was built in the 1920s by a real estate developer who thought it would help with land sales.
And what is Mrs Burton’s favourite ocean pool?
She has no hesitation in naming Greens Pool at William Bay in Western Australia as the most beautiful in the country.
“I swam that with my daughter Josephine and I would describe it as a spiritual experience not to be missed by anyone,” she said.
The ocean pool odyssey is a long way from Mrs Burton’s competitive swimming career where she been placed as high as number two in FINA rankings for her age division.
A member of the Blue Mountains Phoenix Adult Swimming Club, she won five medals at the Sydney World Masters Games in 2009 and will compete at the National Masters Championships in Darwin this May and the Pan Pacific Masters Games on the Gold Coast in November.
But she jokes that she owes it all to growing up “near a waterhole” at Kyogle where there wasn’t much else to do in the stifling hot summers but swim.