The Nippers swim assessment took place on a cool spring day, warm in the sun, freezing in the shade, on the campus of an all-girls Anglican school in what felt like an Australian secret garden. It was a world unto itself and entirely unfamiliar. Even before we found a parking spot, I could see a flood of families with swim-ready children in tight Speedos rushing towards a narrow stairway that seemed to cut through a brick wall covered in foreign flowers.

I paused at the entrance with Diana, Baz and Amelia to let the foot traffic ease. I could hear splashing and squealing from the outdoor pool. The parents looked like they’d come from a schooner. One, two, three sets of mothers and fathers walked past, their stomachs too flat, their straw hats too stylish, their chatter routine – as if it was entirely normal to have hundreds of children swimming outside three months before the summer.

‘Find our people,’ Diana had said when I came to Sydney for the first time to find a place to live. Were these our people? I had my doubts. At the pool, my first impression was harder to deny: no, they were not our people. The bodies there lacked the middle I brought with me from New York. Little things everyone had, like towel ponchos, I’d never seen before. Just the range of goggle styles and swimsuit colours astounded me. No wonder they called them costumes, or what was the Sydney abbreviation again – cossies?

I stood there in a daze, confused, intrigued and nervous. We had the wrong clothes, the wrong accents and we were clearly out of our comfort zone. Diana, the family introvert who nonetheless managed everything, stretched into the gap. She immediately found someone she knew – Woz, Amelia’s Nippers coach, a bearded bear of a man with a daughter the same age as Amelia, who had just turned seven. He was wearing a green sun visor and a white moisture-wicking shirt that identified him as an ‘age manager’, a phrase I would have otherwise associated with geriatrics. But in a weird twist of fate, for Diana, he was an old friend; she’d known Woz twenty years ago, during her semester studying in Sydney. We’d been to his house for dinner a few nights earlier.

‘Can she swim 100 metres?’ Woz asked. We all looked at Amelia, the unpredictable, often-stubborn baby of the family in a rainbow bathing suit. Four laps of the pool. She shrugged, jumped in and started swimming. Up and down she went, her little body twisting and splashing.

‘Aw she’s gonna be fine,’ Woz said. She finished easily.

Her older brother, Baz, short for Balthazar, was next. He had to swim 150 metres, two more laps than his sister. We figured he’d be fine, too. He’d taken swimming lessons when we lived in Mexico. The day he turned four, he rode a bike on two wheels the first time he tried. His strong little body always seemed to work well with a physical challenge.

‘Go!’ came the shout – and he was in. He finished two laps as Diana and I swivelled our heads to take in the scene, but with the third, another boy had caught up and bumped into him. Baz looked up. The other boy’s arm whacked him again as he passed. I winced. Just keep going. It wasn’t a race and there was no malice in the incident. But after a few more strokes, Baz stopped at the opposite end and got out of the pool. When he turned to look at us, Diana and I shook our heads and mouthed the word ‘no’.

He walked slowly towards us, looking angry. He’d never been very good with unpredictability, even as a baby. He buried his face into my hip and burst into tears. When I tried to comfort him – ‘Hey it’s okay, you can try again’ – he hardened, flopping down on the grassy hill near the pool, pulling his knees into his chest and refusing to give it another shot.

‘I’m not doing it,’ he said. ‘I’m not.’

His dark eyes narrowed. He was only eight years old, and he looked too serious for his age.

‘You just need to try again,’ I told him.

‘No,’ Baz said again, tensing up, like a coil. ‘I’m not doing it.’

I looked around. No one seemed to take much notice of us. Not the six-year-old twins twisting goggles out of their hair; not the blonde moms with their big sunglasses; not the awkward twelve-year-olds chasing each other with the first buds of attraction. But I had a hunch that a very public dispute with American accents would change that. It felt like the kind of place where we were one shout from being closely watched.

Baz lifted his head out of his arms. I could see the gap between his two front teeth.

‘I just want to go home,’ he said.

I hated seeing him fail. Even more, I hated that we didn’t belong. As a reporter I was used to awkward situations; as a father, I hated the sensation that everyone else knew what they were doing except for me, and now, my boy.

I looked at him sitting there, an unmovable boulder. Baz, my type-A wonder of intensity, the one who adapted easily when we moved to Mexico City then New York, he was shivering, wet, wrapped in a fluffy striped towel, wearing the baggy little-boy swim trunks that no serious swimmer would touch. But he was not a serious swimmer. That was the problem. Does he need to be? Really?

***

I often ran along the coastal walk between Bronte and Bondi, and after Baz’s swim test, the view shifted from a vista to photograph to something rougher and more tangible. My kids had never gone swimming past where they could stand, in any ocean, anywhere. They were just eight and six. Forced to imagine Baz and Amelia being pushed into Bronte proper, I realized that I needed to study what they would be up against, as if it were a bully or enemy army. 

All along Sydney’s eastern coast, large swells rolled in regularly, making it look like there were trains under the surface. In some areas the waves seemed to break far out back, while at other times, they crashed on the sand or into cliffs that made the water explode into a burst of white. It was loud. Deafening in its dissonance. Whenever and wherever I looked, the water was in constant motion, bashing against the land as if at war. Advance, retreat, advance.

But instead of being pushed away, the Australians around me seemed drawn to it. Nippers was one scene in a lengthy episodic drama. The beaches were packed at sunrise, no matter how heavy the surf or rough the conditions. I saw surfers jumping off the rocks to get to waves the size of two-story homes, and swimmers and spearfishing men and women far from shore in areas where (I discovered from the news) sharks were sometimes seen.

Looking at the ocean, trying to figure out what to do with Baz and his failure, I was surprised by the gap between the boldness of my Australian neighbours and my own dithering. I’d always thought the appetite for risk was elemental – either you’re the kind of person who jumps out of planes and goes to war or you’re not. If I had to define it for myself, I would have said that a risk is anything that scares and excites us enough to be memorable. Big or small, risks are life’s imaginable uncertainties – the adventures, disasters, windfalls or accidents that humans have a role in anticipating and shaping. Given the need for skill and knowledge not just luck, maybe risks are the ultimate tests of our humanity.

But in Sydney, I could see that our responses to those tests can be as varied as the weather and the tides. Each of us is not just strong or weak, brave or neurotic. Culture and context also shape what we see as risky and dangerous or normal and manageable. I kept trying to picture Baz and Amelia in the waves. They were new. Maybe they just had a lot to learn.

Clearly I did, too.