The Great New Zealand Swimming Project
One year I set out to swim every day outdoors through the four seasons in New Zealand. From Northland to Fiordland, I swam our rivers, lakes, ponds, seas, estuaries, wetlands, springs and outdoor lido pools. Across the country people shared their swimming stories with me, introduced enthusiastic family swimmers who swim anywhere, any season, and invited me to try their local, often secret, swimming places.
It emerges that New Zealanders have a serious passion for water and outdoor swimming, with enough stories to write a book about it. So I did. The result is Swim: a Year of Outdoor Swimming in New Zealand, published by Potton and Burton in 2018. It includes stories of urban swims, brave swims, night swims, forbidden swims, famous swims, winter swimming, the endurance swimmers of the Depression, and the swimming ANZACs. Threaded through these tales is the diary of my year of swimming. Outdoor swimming is known in Britain as wild swimming, a description well suited to the natural swimming wonders to be found in New Zealand.
You can hear my interview about Swim with Kathryn Ryan, Nine to Noon on Radio New Zealand, here: https://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2018669962/enthusiasm-for-wild-swimming
If you would like to purchase a book you can do so from the publisher's website, Potton and Burton, here: http://www.pottonandburton.co.nz/store/swim
Swimming and strategy
While this book is primarily a celebration of all things watery, I was intrigued to discover resonance with strategy in our swimming history.
Collective impact, for example, is an approach to achieve better outcomes by partnerships of organisations, government and communities aligning actions and pooling resources to meet common goals. Collective impact (although of course they didn't call it that) was practiced by the 1930s Labour Government in an effort to teach all New Zealanders to swim. With a tagline not unfamiliar to complexity theory of our current century (‘A Way out of Chaos to a Land fit for Heroes’) the Government brought together the New Zealand Amateur Swimming Association, the Royal Life Saving Society of New Zealand and the New Zealand Surf Life Saving Association to discuss how they might work collaboratively to create a nationwide initiative. The three organisations joined forces with the Department of Education and the newly formed Physical Welfare Branch of the Department of Internal Affairs to teach New Zealanders to swim, en masse; a partnership of five agencies, government and non-government, for transformational change.
Extract from 'Swim: A Year of Swimming Outdoors in New Zealand' by Annette Lees.
Swimmers during learn to swim week, at a suburban swimming pool, probably Wellington region.
Photograph taken by William Hall Raine.
Ref: MNZ-2303. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.
"As well as swimming instructors from the Amateur Swimming Association, 1,700 volunteers enlisted and trained as learn-to-swim instructors. Swimming lessons were free of charge, and were held in school pools and municipal baths. Where no other facilities existed, creeks were dammed, stretches of beach and rivers roped off, waterholes commandeered, and in one case a sheep dip ‘thoroughly cleansed and used quite successfully’. New Zealand’s champion swimmers toured the country to give demonstrations and instructions. At town halls throughout the country people crowded in to watch the Royal Life Saving Society give resuscitation demonstrations, to receive pamphlets on the Holger Nielsen method of resuscitation, and to hear physical welfare officers’ information and discussion evenings. The officers distributed 40,000 instructional pamphlets, along with posters and cartoons. An instructional silent film called Learn to Swim was shown. In the same towns, shop-window displays were arranged to feature swimming. Large crowds watched surf life guards perform impressive mock rescues at beaches everywhere. Most newspapers ran articles with detailed instructions on how to master swimming techniques. There were also weekly radio talks and ads in newsprint about the benefits of swimming, and inviting people along to the local Learn-to-Swim classes.
"As a result of all of this, in the first summer of the campaign, 1939-1939, 28,478 New Zealanders learned to swim."