In late 2021, as Sydney’s COVID lockdowns were eased and travel became possible once more, playwright Steve Rodgers and arts lawyer friend Michael Easton hatched a plan to combine a hankering for a swim with some inter-suburb adventures.

Over the next couple of years, they met regularly and travelled to one of the city’s municipal swimming pools – all points of the compass, from the northern beaches to the foothills of the Great Dividing range and the outer south west.

“We became swimming pool nerds,” Rodgers tells Limelight. “We were obsessed with the details in tiling and signage, the history of each pool. So many of Sydney’s pools were built in the 1950s and ‘60s – part of that post-War, post-Olympic Games thinking – and they are like signposts of another time when the idea of an egalitarian Australia took hold, a time that, personally speaking, I’m quite nostalgic for.”

Researching the subject, Rodgers learned that Sydney has more public pools per square kilometre than just about any other city in the world. “From Camden up to places like Hornsby, that whole great Sydney basin area has about 60 pools – including ocean pools – which is incredible for our population size.”

[caption...