Penrith Regional Gallery Explores Australian Pool Culture

​​For Penrith Regional Gallery director Toby Chapman, who grew up on the NSW South Coast, swimming was a part of everyday life. "I've had this personal love and affection for swimming pools since I was a child," he tells ABC Arts. As an adult, he began to appreciate the municipal pool's valuable role as a civic space serving a cross-section of society. "You've got young people and children having swimming lessons, you might have seniors coming in," he says. "People of all ages and all corners of life come to the same swimming pool." But moving to Western Sydney challenged his understanding of the pool as a democratic space. "It must have been January or February, one of those stinking hot Penrith days, 40-plus degrees, and I thought I'd go to a local pool for a swim after work," he says. A quick online search revealed that, much to his surprise, Penrith — with a population of 225,000 — had just two public swimming pools. The realisation that the pool wasn't accessible for all sparked Chapman's interest as a curator. "I thought the idea of an exhibition about Australia's preoccupation with swimming could be a way for us to look at our social history," he says. "Curating and developing the show in Penrith was also a chance to shine a light on what the reality is for communities … living in Western Sydney, where, spoiler alert, it turns out that access to swimmable water isn't equal for all people." The result is The Pool Show, Penrith Regional Gallery's summer blockbuster examining Australian life through the lens of our preoccupation with the swimming pool. The liberation of learning to swim As a starting point, Penrith Regional Gallery sought loans of a series of major works from its exhibition partner, the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), including David Hockney's Water pouring into swimming pool, Santa Monica (1964) and Ian Fairweather's The Pool (1959). But the AGNSW's collection, although a rich visual archive of Australia's history of swimming, had its limitations. "[As] we looked at their collection, we realised that not all bodies and not all people were represented in that story," Chapman says. "The representation of people swimming was largely monocultural. It was very much representative of White Australia." To address this imbalance, Chapman commissioned new works from five artists — Marian Abboud & the Seed of Hope Collective from Think + Do Tank, Katerina Asistin, Dennis Golding, Mike Hewson and JD Reforma — to "challenge or problematise that historical representation". One of those works is Watch the Water, a multimedia work by Abboud, an artist from Western Sydney, documenting the experiences of migrant and refugee women around water. Abboud says growing up as a first-generation Australian with migrant parents who had no connection with the water, learning to swim as a child was a priority. Her parents realised that for the beach to be a place of safety rather than danger, their children had to be competent swimmers. "We all went to swimming lessons until we were well into adulthood and now we're really confident in the water," she says. Watch the Water has its origins in Abboud's work with girls at a local high school 20 years ago. "A lot of them had never been to the beach because it was too far away, they didn't have access to it," Abboud says. "[On] one of our excursions, we took them to the women's baths in Coogee [McIver Ladies' Baths] and it pretty much changed their lives. It was this big eye-opener to the world around them that wasn't only a five-kilometre radius [from Western Sydney]." It started Abboud thinking about her community's access to waterways and how to build people's confidence in the water. She says the many barriers that prevent some communities from accessing swimming spots, whether the ocean or the public pool — such as geography, transport and cost, which can be prohibitive — are often overlooked. Access is improving, with Lake Parramatta and Penrith Beach — known as Pondi — proving a popular alternative to public pools among swimmers. For the women Abboud worked with on Watch the Water, learning to swim and becoming more confident in the water has been liberating. "To be able to float in water is the closest to freedom that a lot of the women have felt," she says. Revisiting a pivotal moment in history When Chapman first conceived of the exhibition, he had one artwork in mind: Barred from the baths, Robert Campbell Jnr's 1987 painting commemorating the 1965 Freedom Ride protesting discrimination against Aboriginal people in regional NSW. The protests, led by Arrernte and Kalkadoon man and activist Charles Perkins, famously led to the overturning of a ban excluding Aboriginal kids from the Moree swimming pool. "[It's an] important social history painting … looking at a pivotal moment in relatively recent social history," Chapman says. Kamilaroi artist Dennis Golding re-examines this history in one of the exhibition's newly commissioned works, Echoing Pathways. Golding worked with a group of students from Collarenebri, a small town 140 kilometres west of Moree, to create a series of drypoint prints meditating on their experiences of exclusion, 60 years on from the Freedom Ride. Golding asked the kids if they still felt "barred from the baths" — and the answers they gave were shocking, Chapman says. But the students' work also included stories of survival and resilience. "Ultimately, there was a really hopeful tone that the future can be bright," Chapman. Golding also produced a series of ceramic sculptures, echoing the form of lane dividers and etched with the phrase "we can go to the pool now", that wind across the gallery wall between the students' prints. "[It's an example of] how the new commissions offer an alternative perspective on the historical works in the exhibition," Chapman says. For many, the show has acted as a prompt for them to rethink their relationship with the water. "Everybody has a story about a swimming pool … Some of them are tinged with nostalgia. Some of them are more contemporary," Chapman says. "But once we start asking these questions, you realise those stories always speak to the complexity of life and an overriding sense that people in our society are good and they do want the best for themselves and for other people as well."