I was at Bondi Beach the other day with my daughter Siena. We were at the northern end of the beach, in the kiddie ocean water pool, just underneath the grass reserve. I grew up in that pool, had my summer holiday fun with my brothers and sisters there. We had our summer holiday friends, who we would see year after year; we wouldn’t see them anywhere else, just at the pool. 

New goggles and snorkels we received for Christmas, surf mats (remember those?) were all tried and tested at North Bondi. The pool was always packed with children and their watchful parents. 

We played games – which could hold their breath the longest underwater, which could swim from one end to the other without stopping. I did my first headstand in that pool and subsequently almost drowned in the attempt. 

One thing, I could never understand was how we ended up with so much sand in our cossie bottoms. Conveniently, we noticed it only when it was time to go home. It gave us yet another excuse to have one more last dip in the water to get all the sand out. They were fun days and remembering them always makes me smile. 

The other thing I recall was the water in the pool was always warmer than the water in the surf. There were a few possible reasons for that – the hot sun and lack of depth or it was low tide and no ‘new’ water was coming in from the ocean. Or, the fact that all the kids were probably urinating in the pool. That was a given…every kid knew that every other kid did it. We were pretty sure our parents knew, but no one ever really talked about it. It would be a confession, of sorts and as children you just didn’t care all that much. 

This all came to mind as I was knee deep, along with a couple of other parents, chatting, all of us supervising our young children. One parents’ daughter, who had been playing with Siena for some time, announced she needed to wee. Now. The father looked at me wearily and said “Oh dear, well I suppose we’d better get you out and find a toilet”. 

The toilets are not that close; well not close enough when you have a 3 year old that needs to urinate immediately. “Don’t bother,” the other mother said. “You haven’t got a chance of making it to the toilet….let her wee in the pool, it’s a tradition!”. He smiled at us and seemed relieved to get some kind of approval for such a thing, but not as relieved as his daughter, who happily pee’d in the pool and then got on with her games. 

Now, I know it’s an upsetting thought to some, that a parent would allow their child to pee in a public pool, or even, that other parents would accept it as a reality and suggest it as a viable option. What do you do when the toilet is a million miles away? Lobby council? I suppose we justified the incident because we had done the same thing as children, it was an ocean water pool so the water is constantly flowing…I mean, whales wee in the ocean, don’t they??? So we swim in whale wee. Diluted, of course.

I mentioned this to someone without children the other day and he looked at me really strangely (like, ‘how revolting!’ strange) and proceeded to tell me that a pool in Lane Cove has an alarm, that detects when someone urinates in the pool. I don’t imagine many parents and children frequent that pool.

Look, I suppose you have to be a parent not to be too bothered by it. I mean, Siena has wee’d on me, vomited on me, smeared dog vomit all over the TV, which yours truly had to clean up. I would never have imagined I would have ever been tolerant of any of that before parenthood – you get used to it! What’s a little wee in a couple of billion litres of salt water? 

Bondi Beach has become very much “the place to be and be seen” since I grew up there. And although The Flying Pieman is gone, The ‘Gelateria’ no longer exits (it was the only café in Bondi that made fresh veggie and fruit juices to order in the 80’s) and The Record Session closed down,  it brings a smile to my face to know that some things haven’t changed all that that much. No matter how “groovy” Bondi gets.

PS. To councils Australia wide – the toilets need to be as close and easily accessible as they can possibly be to the kiddie pools!