!["We are water people," says Australian author Anna Funder, pictured at the Ian Thorpe Aquatic Centre in Sydney. "We ...](http://web.archive.org./web/20170812020720/http://www.afr.com/content/dam/images/g/x/q/w/k/d/image.related.afrArticleLead.620x350.gxquqf.png/1502258684558.jpg)
![Stephen Todd](http://web.archive.org./web/20170812020720im_/http://www.afr.com/content/dam/images/g/w/g/2/d/q/image.imgtype.afrAuthorAvatar.120x120.png/1500594756481.png)
Australians share a pool gene, if not a gene pool. We may come from many lands, but we're brought up on water. As a kid growing up in the Melbourne suburbs, the local swimming pool felt like a birthright. A gathering place, a watering hole, a source of all sorts of knowledge. Including the wisdom of SPF50.
So when the curators of the Australian Pavilion at last year's Venice Biennale of Architecture decided to export a pool to the northern Italian archipelago to demonstrate the essence of our culture, it seemed appropriate.
"We are water people," says Australian author Anna Funder. "We cling to the edge of the continent, and we swim from a very early age. We pride ourselves on our incredible Olympic swimmers, and we pride ourselves on our swimming capacities. I think that those things are very important in our minds."
Funder is one of nine notable Australians whose voices have been woven into the soundscape that animates The Pool installation, which has been shipped back from Venice and opens at the National Gallery of Victoria on August 18.
![Anna Funder has been fascinated with the connection between swimming pools and creative contemplation since growing up ...](http://web.archive.org./web/20170812020720/http://www.afr.com/content/dam/images/g/x/q/x/a/c/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1502083512181.jpg)
Along with Olympians Ian Thorpe and Shane Gould, musician Paul Kelly, author Christos Tsiolkas, environmental activist Tim Flannery, curator Hetti Perkins, and fashion designers Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales of Romance Was Born, Funder narrates an aquatic dreamscape, a viscous soundtrack that reverberates around the 11-metre swimming pool installed in the NGV's Ian Potter Centre at Federation Square.
"My first memory of a pool is actually linked with books," says the author of Stasiland and the Miles Franklin-awarded All That I Am. "I went to a smaller inner-city public school, Rathdowne Street Primary, and we used to walk to the Carlton Baths. For me, as a very uncoordinated kid who couldn't catch a ball, I was very happy to be gravity free and free of anything to do with hand-eye co-ordination in the water, but I was also fascinated with the idea of a pool as a place for creative contemplation or even inspiration.
Pools that inspire creativity
"As a kid, I knew already of Helen Garner and her book Monkey Grip. Inner-city baths, be they Carlton or Fitzroy, were so important in that book and I used to think that the pool was a place out of which this great writer had sprung. So pools have always been places which inspire creativity. That connection has been so strong I've just always assumed it."
Funder, 51, grew up in North Carlton, one of three children of a professor of medicine and a psychologist. She remembers a solar-heated, salt-water, in-ground pool overhung by a poisonous datura, which she recalls more lyrically as a 'tulip tree'. "We used to have long dinners under the tulip tree, around the pool, its flowers floating on the surface. We didn't even swim in it that much but it was such a nice thing to be there."
![The Pool exhibition invites visitors to ‘take a dip’ inside the gallery.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170812020720/http://www.afr.com/content/dam/images/g/x/q/w/m/j/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1502163490133.jpg)
Funder, her architect husband and their three children moved to New York from Sydney in 2012. Or, more accurately, to Brooklyn. "Not Williamsburg, but Park Slope," to be precise. "We were conducting an experiment to see if we could substitute green for blue, manicured park for ocean."
It didn't work. Funder and family moved back to Sydney in 2015 and are now comfortably ensconced in the inner harbourside suburb of Glebe.
"Brooklyn was interesting, everyone is a writer. Not like Los Angeles, where every waiter is a wannabe writer, the literary scene in Brooklyn is really happening."
Brooklyn counts Paul Auster, Martin Amis, Jhumpa Lahiri and Jennifer Egan among its luminati. Jonathan Safran Foer and his wife, Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love, were fellow Slope residents. John Updike watched the Twin Towers meltdown from a tenth-floor apartment in Brooklyn Heights, reporting in The New Yorker that it "had the false intimacy of television, on a day of perfect reception."
"It's hard to work out what we expected because it's mitigated by what we now know," says Funder of her time in New York. What's certain is that she and her family have rediscovered their feet. And their water wings.
"Our youngest is part of the Bronte Nippers squad. My husband and I are constantly astonished by the beauty of Bronte, of the Pacific. Of the natural rockpool there in which kids paddle without fear of the raging ocean. There's something so beautiful about the way these hundred-year-old structures were designed to contain the violence of the sea."
It's this paradox of sublimated nature that The Pool exhibition seeks to express. On the one hand reining in desire, on the other hand letting it rip, the pool is perhaps the most potent metaphor of a nascent Australian culture.
Dip in, the water's fine.
NEED TO KNOW
The Pool Ground level, NGV Design Studio, National Gallery of Victoria, Federation Square
Correction: A previous version of this article attributed the following quote to author Sergio De La Pava: "Brooklyn is repulsive with novelists; it's cancerous with novelists." This was incorrect.
AFR Contributor