20193
At Siloam: Moana Pools, Dunedin by Hayden Williams
Main BodyNerd the ageing Viking comes flexing and big-chested. He is positively Bjorn Borg-ing with Nordic sporting brilliance – until he enters the pool. In the water, all the poise, self-possession, and science are lost. He goes hard-out, with furious splashing, and gasping, and grunting . . . at a rate of approximately three lengths an hour. Sending waves to the far lanes, he is only a hare of the sunny season, come to challenge the weekly or daily tortoises. In less than ten minutes he rests. He hangs from the lip of the pool’s gutter, his arms outstretched either side of him; a beet-faced Jesus, crucified in defeat.
Nerd sulkily watches a woman, who is grim and horse-toothed with age, but who has probably been using swimming pools most of her life. She is prim and Kiwi, in a black one-piece swim-suit with silver swim-cap yanked down over fleecy steel curls. She fits her goggles with matriarchal no-nonsense, an elderly Mary Poppins eliminating a daily chore with assured but invisible enjoyment. She moves easily through the water, gathering distance in twenty-five metre lengths (the life guards have set the movable bulkhead to bisect the Olympic-sized pool since the pre-dawn elite swimmers left over an hour ago).
Next comes a white-haired old man, tanned and hunched over in navy board shorts, stiff and dry as sandpaper. Easing down the chrome-railed ladder, his bones still hold some flame. His eyes spark with it, his wasted muscles could almost crackle. Is there a splinter of passion, generated by all those now thwarted, static desires? Or is the secret of his lingering power an irreducible remainder of human spirit? Prior to entering the water, a thick tuft of chest hair stands erect between his deflated breasts, like mould in the cleft of a decomposing peach. Ill-fitting skin, blighted with liver-spots, drinks. He finds the relief of relative weightlessness, and sprawls in the water like a croc, gliding, almost imperceptibly, on his back.
The old man strays in the lane, perhaps deliberately causing that fleeting touch of a frictionless collision; the heat of human contact diluted to the more manageable tepidity of the water’s twenty-eight degrees Celsius. Then he takes a squeaky tablet of foam, grasps it and holds it out in front, and kicks along like a paddle steamer. He offers everyone a questioning face in passing: Do you see me? Do I still count? Do you have some answer?
Then a pair of slender, Aunt Sally-doll sisters arrive. In lilac Lycra, they enter the pool together. Perfumed hair is safely crammed under face-lifting swim caps, which give them a look of permanent astonishment. Their green eyes are cat-like. They cut the water, scissors leaving a scented wake. They close together again at the shallow end to giggle and chatter.
Then an Amazon steps out from the women’s changing rooms, as though from the wardrobe leading to Narnia. She is a walking celebration of human will-power, the antidote of Nerd. Striding poolside, she is blockish, animated marble. Her heavy body is a marvel of two things in one – a profane mystery of nature shaped by culture. The broad face under her swim cap and goggles becomes the mask of an androgen. A navy swim suit cuts across her chest, complementing a centaur-like quality; she has the head, shoulders, and arms of a muscular man; the breasts, hips, and thighs of a curvaceous woman. She looks almost impossible, a creature from a dream – until she dives. In real time, those disparate, stony limbs flow molten into repeated, well-practiced motion. She wriggles along, alligator fashion, before settling into the rhythm of her stroke.
Above them all is the recently installed portrait of Danyon Loader, Olympic medal-winning son of this proud city. There is also the black Perspex square of the clock. At its centre, the second hand sweeps a circle, like the turning sword of the angel, blocking the way back to Eden. But Moana Pools has been a paradise of sorts on any given day of the week since it opened almost half a century ago on November 14th 1964.
There is a metaphysical dimension too; the atmosphere steeped in something greater than any individual’s concerns, layered with several generations’ worth of Dunedinite comings and goings. It leaves an indelible reassurance with the citizens drawn to use it repeatedly, this place of community, oasis where the mundane and something greater might intersect without distinction, if only you believe that you really can find heaven’s double here, like a reflection of early morning sunlight on the water, mystery breaking in like a teenage jumper bombing from the highest board. In spite of all the synthetic materials and the sinus provoking chlorine here, the fallen flesh of young and old, the lonely, the hale and athletic, or the floundering, or the sick and disabled, will always discover the same cool embrace.
The spirit of water still works tiny miracles, even in an artificial context. It whispers of healing, of an amniotic surrender that is perhaps not so terrifying after all. It promises something hypnotic, cathartic, induced through the submission to muscle memory and rhythmic movement. In this pool’s communion, all find the calibration of body, breath and heart. And for some, maybe even the soul, too.
About the writer: Hayden Williams' creative non-fiction has won several awards. He also writes fiction and poetry, and his work has appeared in a variety of New Zealand and overseas publications. Hayden’s website can be found at downallthedays@blogger.com.
‘At Siloam: Moana Pools, Dunedin’ was written for the Memoir & Local History Competition 2011, run annually by the New Zealand Society of Authors (Bay of Plenty Region) with support from Tauranga Writers, and was Highly Commended by judges Susan Brocker and Tommy Kapai Wilson.
Nerd sulkily watches a woman, who is grim and horse-toothed with age, but who has probably been using swimming pools most of her life. She is prim and Kiwi, in a black one-piece swim-suit with silver swim-cap yanked down over fleecy steel curls. She fits her goggles with matriarchal no-nonsense, an elderly Mary Poppins eliminating a daily chore with assured but invisible enjoyment. She moves easily through the water, gathering distance in twenty-five metre lengths (the life guards have set the movable bulkhead to bisect the Olympic-sized pool since the pre-dawn elite swimmers left over an hour ago).
Next comes a white-haired old man, tanned and hunched over in navy board shorts, stiff and dry as sandpaper. Easing down the chrome-railed ladder, his bones still hold some flame. His eyes spark with it, his wasted muscles could almost crackle. Is there a splinter of passion, generated by all those now thwarted, static desires? Or is the secret of his lingering power an irreducible remainder of human spirit? Prior to entering the water, a thick tuft of chest hair stands erect between his deflated breasts, like mould in the cleft of a decomposing peach. Ill-fitting skin, blighted with liver-spots, drinks. He finds the relief of relative weightlessness, and sprawls in the water like a croc, gliding, almost imperceptibly, on his back.
The old man strays in the lane, perhaps deliberately causing that fleeting touch of a frictionless collision; the heat of human contact diluted to the more manageable tepidity of the water’s twenty-eight degrees Celsius. Then he takes a squeaky tablet of foam, grasps it and holds it out in front, and kicks along like a paddle steamer. He offers everyone a questioning face in passing: Do you see me? Do I still count? Do you have some answer?
Then a pair of slender, Aunt Sally-doll sisters arrive. In lilac Lycra, they enter the pool together. Perfumed hair is safely crammed under face-lifting swim caps, which give them a look of permanent astonishment. Their green eyes are cat-like. They cut the water, scissors leaving a scented wake. They close together again at the shallow end to giggle and chatter.
Then an Amazon steps out from the women’s changing rooms, as though from the wardrobe leading to Narnia. She is a walking celebration of human will-power, the antidote of Nerd. Striding poolside, she is blockish, animated marble. Her heavy body is a marvel of two things in one – a profane mystery of nature shaped by culture. The broad face under her swim cap and goggles becomes the mask of an androgen. A navy swim suit cuts across her chest, complementing a centaur-like quality; she has the head, shoulders, and arms of a muscular man; the breasts, hips, and thighs of a curvaceous woman. She looks almost impossible, a creature from a dream – until she dives. In real time, those disparate, stony limbs flow molten into repeated, well-practiced motion. She wriggles along, alligator fashion, before settling into the rhythm of her stroke.
Above them all is the recently installed portrait of Danyon Loader, Olympic medal-winning son of this proud city. There is also the black Perspex square of the clock. At its centre, the second hand sweeps a circle, like the turning sword of the angel, blocking the way back to Eden. But Moana Pools has been a paradise of sorts on any given day of the week since it opened almost half a century ago on November 14th 1964.
There is a metaphysical dimension too; the atmosphere steeped in something greater than any individual’s concerns, layered with several generations’ worth of Dunedinite comings and goings. It leaves an indelible reassurance with the citizens drawn to use it repeatedly, this place of community, oasis where the mundane and something greater might intersect without distinction, if only you believe that you really can find heaven’s double here, like a reflection of early morning sunlight on the water, mystery breaking in like a teenage jumper bombing from the highest board. In spite of all the synthetic materials and the sinus provoking chlorine here, the fallen flesh of young and old, the lonely, the hale and athletic, or the floundering, or the sick and disabled, will always discover the same cool embrace.
The spirit of water still works tiny miracles, even in an artificial context. It whispers of healing, of an amniotic surrender that is perhaps not so terrifying after all. It promises something hypnotic, cathartic, induced through the submission to muscle memory and rhythmic movement. In this pool’s communion, all find the calibration of body, breath and heart. And for some, maybe even the soul, too.
About the writer: Hayden Williams' creative non-fiction has won several awards. He also writes fiction and poetry, and his work has appeared in a variety of New Zealand and overseas publications. Hayden’s website can be found at downallthedays@blogger.com.
‘At Siloam: Moana Pools, Dunedin’ was written for the Memoir & Local History Competition 2011, run annually by the New Zealand Society of Authors (Bay of Plenty Region) with support from Tauranga Writers, and was Highly Commended by judges Susan Brocker and Tommy Kapai Wilson.
Location
Map Address60,Littlebourne Road,Roslyn,Dunedin,9010,New ZealandLatitude/Longitude[1]
Relates To
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Hayden Williams , At Siloam: Moana Pools, Dunedin by Hayden Williams . Pae Korokī, accessed 24/03/2025, https://paekoroki.tauranga.govt.nz/nodes/view/20193
