How To Ride A Rip

(and other lessons learned this summer)

Until this summer, I have never had to save a person in the water. In the thirty or so years of beach and river time where I’ve been big enough to pull someone else out of trouble, it’s never happened. Which is kind of wild, really, and very lucky.

This summer, though, I did. Twice.

The first was the easy (easier?) one. I was the grown up in the water. It was one of ‘our’ kids (there’s a gang of us, they are all ‘all’ of ours). There was no question that I was the one to help. The child was small enough for me to hold them under their little arms, feeling their heart race, and safety-swim them in. I was only a couple of metres away when they got in to trouble. There was a deep hole before the sandbank but other than that the sea was relatively calm. Once I could stand again, everything was okay. People helped. We debriefed. I had a moment to myself where I cried a little and let the adrenaline pulse out. I woke up brain churning for a few nights. What if we hadn’t got to them? Why didn’t I have something to throw? But all in all, it passed as a fright and something we managed. As grown ups we doubled down on our water vigilance for the next week

Which is why, perhaps, the hyper-vigilance meant that I was the first one to get to the second child - a stranger. A different beach, rougher this day with big surf. We camp in relatively wild places - not too many people, certainly no life savers or flags. Our gang were working at a nearly one to one ratio with our own kids in the waves. The two kids who got in trouble - aged ten or eleven perhaps - were in the shallows. Belly-deep at most, right next to the big rocks at the end of the beach. A normally pretty safe spot. Except that this day there was a rip. We could feel the pull in the water and ushered our kids further away up the beach, but it wasn’t until we watched a surfer ride the rip out to the back of the waves that we saw it’s true speed and strength. A couple of us had already made moves to check on one of the kids by the rocks. They retreated to the shallows. We tried to make eyes with their grown-ups but couldn’t work out who they were. We kept eyes on them as we caught waves on boards with our own kids.

And then, in a literal moment, one of the kids at the rocks was in too deep. Paddling furiously and trying to keep her head above water. I was closest. I grabbed a body board off one of our kids, remembering this time the first rules of helping someone in the water, and waded through the shallows to get to her. By the time I got her hands on the board, my feet were no longer on the sand and I knew we were not getting out of the rip. She was panicking, I had to hold her hands on the board, get my body behind hers. ‘I’ve got you,’ I kept saying, not really sure at all if I did. The waves seemed ginormous. ‘We’re going to go under,’ I yelled at her, ‘and it’s going to be okay.’

In seconds we were surging away from the beach, pulled by the rip. ‘I have to go out with it!’ I yelled to my friends watching in the water. The girl could not speak. The surfer saw what was happening. Yelled out to see if we needed help. ‘Yes!’ I yelled back, trying to keep hold of the girl with my body on the board. He paddled over to us, effortlessly it seemed, despite the fact that the surf now seemed terrifying to me. He pulled us through the next set of waves until I could touch the sand. I walked her in through the shallows, my friends coming to see if we were okay. The girl ran to an adult on the beach and I followed slowly, breathing hard.

‘Thanks,’ the parent said, adding something about normally having her partner there. And then she and the girl walked away while my friend took me to sit down and my own girls, playing on the beach, asked me if I’d just saved a kid. While it smarted, for a moment, that the parent had either not been aware of the danger her child was in, or that she just took it for granted that someone would help, when I looked back out at the ocean, it looked surprisingly benign. Where the waves were breaking that I thought would drown us before the surfer got to us, was barely 100 metres out, if that. From the shore, it was hard to imagine the utter terror and danger I’d felt moments ago.

There’s a couple of reasons I’m writing this here. The first, I guess, is therapeutic. It still wakes me up. Last week at the launch of Mark Smith’s excellent Three Boys Gone, about an outdoor ed camp gone horribly wrong in the ocean, as Mark talked about rips and duty-of-care and how we never know how we’ll react in those situations, I found my breath going shallow, had to put my tongue to the roof of my mouth to calm myself.

The second, I suppose, is as Public Service Announcement. Years of being uber-aware of the dangers of the water, especially for the kids, of reading signs and checking for rips and feeling the strength of ocean and river currents and I still did not really know. I know I could not have got that kid out without that pink bodyboard. Would not have been able to keep her and myself both afloat. Could so easily have been a statistic. That’s the thing maybe that keeps waking me up.

But the third reason, and the one I can most easily reach for metaphor through, is that you gotta know how to ride the rip.

That sometimes, when life throws its trickiest at you, all you can do is hang on. Hang on until you find the calmer water. Until your mates (or a switched-on surfer) can tow you back to shore.

That even when you get out of the rip, breathing hard and exhausted or terrified, no-one is necessarily going to notice you were in it.

That sometimes it’s necessary to say, loudly if no one has noticed, I’m in trouble here, I need a hand.

My most well-thumbed poetry collection right now is Barbara Kingsolver’s How to Fly (in Ten Thousand Easy Steps). The first section is made up of ‘How to’ poems: ‘How to Cure Sweet Potatoes’, ‘How to Shear a Sheep’, ‘How to Get a Divorce’, ‘How to Be Hopeful’. They are exquisite. I would like her now to publish ‘How to Continue to Make Breakfast and Laugh with the Kids While the Whole World Goes to Shit’.

But that’s the point, I guess, that’s what we do. We ride whatever gurgling, frightening rip the world throws at us, and we give thanks when we make it back to solid ground, and feel very bloody grateful when we have someone there to chuck an arm around us and give us a hug.

What I’ve

Been Reading

There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak. Interlocking narratives of characters across time and place, joined by a single drop of water, Shafak’s novel is effortlessly poetic, enormous in scope and elegant in specifics, both heart-breaking & heart-mending. I cannot recommend this one highly enough. Recommended to me by author/bookseller Aoife Clifford at Fairfield Books (whose excellent latest It Takes A Town I also thoroughly recommend!)

First Name Second Name by Steve Minon. This fabulous debut novel follows four generations of one family via a bitingly clever pilgrimage of a corpse. This one is out in March and I’m delighted to be helping Steve launch in Naarm on Thursday 27 March in Carlton. Details below.

Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld. Tore through this in one sitting. Perfectly constructed, very funny rom-com that is both deeply-satisfying and so well-crafted on the line. As one would expect from Sittenfeld.

Cold Truth by Ashley Kalagian-Blunt. A novel I also read in one late night fervour. It’s way overused in our industry but believe me when I say I literally could not put this down. From the first chapter I was hooked by the extraordinary (and bloody cold) setting of Winnipeg (where Ashley grew up), the unrelenting action and the terrifying examination of tech which she’s already explored so well in DARK MODE. Author Anna Downes calls AKB ‘Australia’s queen of tech noir’ and I couldn’t agree more. Can’t wait to talk with Ashley at her Naarm launch on Feb 11 in Carlton. Details below.

And some CRACKING sneak peeks at new novels coming from Amy Lovat and Mark Mupotsa-Russell. Keep your eyes peeled for news on these, I’ll be shouting about them when they hit shelves!

Been Watching

Not much because summer camping was blissfully screen-free, but since I’ve got back I’ve been decompressing from the Jan/Feb onslaught with the excellent fourth season of Slow Horses (Apple TV) and (late to the party) the first season of The Diplomat (Netflix) which I heard spoken about on this ep of The Book Shelf and I concur: it’s literally perfect.

Got Coming Up

Looking forward to getting out and about to launch some very bloody good books in the next little while:

• This Thursday evening 6/5 I’ll be launching Somebody Down There Likes Me, the new novel from Robert Lukins. I LOVE this book, and loving it even more on second read. Come join us at Readings Carlton at 6 pm. Free but bookings essential.

• Celebrating Ashley Kalagian Blunt’s new thriller Cold Truth at Readings Carlton on Tuesday Feb 11 at 6.30pm. Free but bookings essential.

• The Naarm launcg of Steve Minon’s debut novel First Name Second Name at Readings Carlton on Thursday March 27 at 6pm. Free but bookings essential.

And some nice news

A total honour and delight to find To Stir with Love, my first picture book illustrated by the hugely talented Jess Racklyeft shortlisted for Children’s Book of the Year in the Indie Book Awards alongside amazing titles. I’m getting out and about to schools and kinders with this book in 2025, if you’d like more information get in touch or contact Booked Out for bookings.

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And for keen-eyed readers of the ‘What’s Coming in 2025’ articles in The Guardian and The Australian, you might have seen mention of my new novel coming in September! We’re still going back and forth on title but the powers that be are calling it ‘The Slap meets Nine Perfect Strangers gone feral’. No pressure! Watch this space…