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Kids in Water - Aqua Profunda

There's something about seeing children leaping around in the water that transcends race, culture and time. The water of the sea or pool washes away the man-made stains of difference.

I love watching the slippery little bodies cavort around in open water; children with the cares of this world so obviously in their far distance future. Out of harm's way so to speak.

I love the way the children's hair clings to their wet little heads, and how their swim suits which have become too big in the water (stretched perhaps by the water's weight) hang innocently around their bodies.

I love watching the children shiver in their now over-sized swimming gear, as they stand gingerly, shifting their weight from one foot to the other, on the hot concrete that surrounds the pool. It's funny how they all shiver in the same way - shoulders hunched, hands clasped in front at chest-height, over a straggled-held towel. Wherever they are, and wherever they are from.

Far from Australia, I watched such a scene from a hotel dining room window. Perhaps it wasn't just the children in the hotel pool, but also the clear blue sky of Arizona, that took me back to a time when my own children were very young.

"Aqua Profunda" read the sign on the inside wall at the deep end of the pool at the Fitzroy Baths in Melbourne. My friends and I would spend many a long summer afternoon on the pool's lawns, watching our offspring, gossiping, post-morteming the dinner party of the night before ... We liked that sign. It reflected the now multi-cultural nature of our city. Our own childhood memories were in black and white, pre the Italian immigration of the late fifties that saved our city from the blandness that seemed to stretch on forever when we were nine and ten.

Although we were now used to the availability of cuisines from all over the world, and had friends called Mario, Nyguen and Paniotta, somehow that sign "Aqua Profunda" stood as a reminder that the black and white fifties were not so very far off, and that Whitlam's political catch-cry of over a decade earlier, "It's Time", had been made good. And in reminding us, the sign imbued us with an optimism that so perfectly set off those summer days in Fitzroy.

I remember when we felt proud to see "our sign" in a movie. Local writer Helen Garner's novel "Monkey Grip" made into the movie of the same name.

Children of the sixties, we'd come of age. Our more famous peers were becoming household words as they made names for themselves in the arts and politics. "Who'd have thunk it!" we'd laugh as we'd read about yet another university mate making a movie, writing a play, or getting into parliament.

And now suddenly we were launching our own children.

I remembered these days of innocence on the lawns of the Fitzroy Baths as I watched children in the hotel pool in Phoenix Arizona. I remembered them fondly but also with sadness. Not just as a time of lost youth, but also as a time of optimism that was to prove short-lived.

For these carefree days were not to last. Within ten years of these days of wine and summer and Fitzroy Baths and laughing little girls, a dark cloud passed over our children's sky.

"Monkey Grip" - the grip I assume of heroin. I'm not familiar with the terms of this drug's 'culture', but I remember the story line of Helen Garner's novel. Helen Garner, Aqua Profunda, Monkey Grip, heroin.

I remember five little girls laughing in the shallow end of that Aqua Profunda pool. Yelling at us to watch them as they played together. Shiny faces dripping with chlorinated water. "Come in mum!" they'd yell as we lay in the dappled shade of the gums and talked our way through the afternoon. "Later!" we'd yell back.

Yeah, later! It's later now, but there are no longer five little girls. Heroin, virtually unknown to those of us who partied through the sixties when we were coming of age, was there waiting for our children in the last decades of the twentieth century.

Yes, later. It's later for four of the five little girls. Heroin took one of them in 1996. It took the sight of another in 2003. It scarred emotionally the third little girl to an extent most of us cannot be imagine. I've lost track of the fourth little girl. But the fifth at least is doing well. Time passes.

I believe the Aqua Profunda sign has gone as well, and most likely the publicly-funded baths. But the memories remain.

I'll never forget those five shiny faces yelling at us to come into the water mum! Did we go in later? I hope so. I can't remember.

We thought we had all the time in the world ...

Kate Juliff
Phoenix Arizona
March 2005