Summers on the edge of the Victorian Mallee plains, were big, clear, blue-skied times. For days on end, the skies would be cloudless while the big, clumsy wheat harvesters did lazy laps of the paddocks. You tracked their progress by the trail of dust and chaff grit, which mixed with your sweat and itched and scratched all day.

In the heat haze, you gravitated towards the dams – most paddocks had them – unfenced, unsupervised. They were dark and murky places, isolated and lonely; offering a break from the baking sun.

Their isolation made them both dangerous and attractive. Away from parental eyes, you could experiment with basic physics, exploring the science of ricocheted bullets off the water, using corrugated iron as a surfboard tied behind the battered old ute, and a range of other non-parental approved activities.

Generally, swimming in the dam was like swimming in liquid mud. Afterward, you could feel the layer of mud drying, cracking as you moved.  Not only that but you had to share the experience with the sheep who watched with indifference, and leeches – which attached themselves with a fascinating ferocity. It was a sign of personal strength to set time records for leeches – trying to tolerate them until they grew fat with blood and fell off.

If you didn’t feel like swimming in the mud, there was always catching yabbies –  freshwater crayfish – with the simple method of chunks of meat tied with wool. You would set out six or eight lines – tied to a stick stuck in the mud and as the yabby tugged on the meat, slowly drag them within reach and flip them on to the bank. It was fun and consumed large slabs of your afternoon while you became absurdly sunburnt. You’d take your catch home, boil and clean them, and have them with fresh bread and vinegar. Restaurants charge exorbitant prices for the same. Occasionally teachers would take you swimming at the local pool. This was not a chlorine, shiny, pool. It was a huge concrete affair built on the site of the Lord Nelson Gold Mine’s tailings dam, with a shallow beach-like entry point stretching to diving platforms at the other end.

The water was dark green, salty, water, according to local legend, pumped from the mine shafts below, and it was here that teachers brought you to learn to swim. The depth was unknown, the water dark and cool.

St Arnaud was the product of the great days of the Victorian gold rush which gave the town its reason for being and the Crimean War which gave it its name.  As a gold mine, the Lord Nelson mine paid over £1 million in dividends and the town, at its height, boasted nearly 20 hotels and a dozen dance halls.  My grandfather died in 1911, working in the mine, crushed between the shaft and the miner’s cage.

The water may have been murky and salty, pumped from the old mine, but it was not at all like swimming in liquid mud. It was where many of us learned to swim. If you managed to thrash your way over 25 yards, in a vaguely straight line under the watchful eye of a teacher, you were awarded the equivalent of your learner’s certificate. That didn’t entitle you to anything other than to suggest to your parents that you were now capable of thrashing your way around water with some sense of safety.  For kids from farms, the old salty pool was luxury It was eventually closed around 1968 over concerns about the water quality. Like many things with age and character, it was replaced with a brand new, spark-a-larkaling, chlorinated swimming pool, the sign of progress.  It had sweet green grass, overhead lights, a kiosk, and girls in bikinis although I suspect the last had more to do with age other than the new pool. The old pool was relegated to breeding fish.

Somewhere, someone nominated me for a week at the Lord Mayor’s Children’s Camp at Portsea – it was a camp  set up in the late 1940’s so that kids from the bush – up to the age of about 12 – could get a break at a time when rural and regional areas were struggling with the death toll from the war and the cruelest of droughts.

It had continued on giving many children – mostly from small rural areas – their first taste of the sea. We traveled down by train and then, several hours in a bus. But it was another world, a range of experiences alien to many of us. Standing on the beach, I told the instructor that it was the biggest dam I had ever seen.

I think he was amused. The smell of the salt, the coolness of the winds were a lifetime away from the drab brown bush, the dust, flies, and heat of home.  And people. There were lots of people.  

You could hide in a crowd, be normal in a crowd. The transition from the country gave me the enthusiasm to get up around five am and watch the sunrise over the sea, marveling at the difference, the softness in the light, watching the sun dancing towards you across the sea. It was enormous and fascinating, and mysterious.

It brought to focus a longing to be away from the dust and heat, to be part of a world that seemed to be removed from Beazley’s Bridge. It would be four or five years before the bright lights of paradise came within reaching distance.