Kay Burton is a woman of singular determination.
Years ago, she bought her old Toyota Torago - as her family tells it - from backpackers on Bondi for $10,000. In fact, she bought it from the airport, where backpackers sell the vans and cars they drive around the countryside before heading home. The van, her family jokes, is held together with zip ties, but Kay won't part with it.
Her van has a fridge inside and space for her to camp, and besides, it's helping her on her mission.
Mrs Burton (nee Rayner) is on a mission to swim in every ocean pool in Australia, and she won't let anything - even a few zip ties - get in her way.
"I honed my swimming skills at the Kyogle Swimming Club, which is one of the oldest in the country," Mrs Burton dictates carefully into my notes app on Tuesday afternoon, making sure that I have remembered to note her maiden name as a nod to her relatives scattered about the Hunter. "The club is 90 years old."
Mrs Burton started on her mission last year, working from the 2022 photography book Ocean Pools by Chris Chen, who set out to study Australia's connection to the sea by photographing 75 pools around the country.
"She calls them 'sacred places'," Mrs Burton said, standing in the shade on Tuesday at the newly refurbished Newcastle Ocean Baths, "Families are attached to them, year in and year out. There are children here today; when they are as old as me, they will remember swimming here. It is a spiritual experience."
At 85, the lifelong swimmer and Masters athlete has already added several ocean pools to the photo book, which she carries with her on her journey. When she discovers a new one, she pencils it into the contents page. This afternoon, after swimming at least a lap in Newcastle's ocean baths (including the Bogey Hole) to her catalogue, Mrs Burton added the date of her swim to the relevant page in the book.
"I've taken an aeroplane, the van, a car, train, ferry, bus and taxi," she said at one point of her travels to visit every "man-made, god-mad or man-helped" ocean pool, "I'm yet to charter a bike or a horse."
Mrs Burton has been swimming all her life. As she told me back in January as she was planning her trip to Newcastle, "Swimming is just what I do."
Except for about nine years spent in the far west of NSW, Mrs Burton has never been far from the water. She has been a competitive swimmer, a teacher, and a coach; swimming has been a part of her life for as long as she can remember. To swim well, she says - not just to be able to stay afloat, but to swim well - is something intrinsic; "It's God-given. "
Mrs Burton had been planning her trip to Newcastle for some weeks and, on Tuesday morning, swam her lap of the newly refurbished Ocean Baths before giving her assessment.
"I love it," she said, "I just love it. I haven't been to Merewether yet, but I love it."
Since January, Mrs Burton has crossed the Northern Beaches and the Central Coast off her list, adding to the around 54 others that she had collected by the end of 2023. As she flicks through her book, she has a story for almost all the pools she finds.
"They should have taken this one by drone, but they didn't," she said of Greens Pool in Western Australia - a naturally formed ocean pool on the edge of William Bay National Park famous for its clear water, "It was clear and beautiful. It blew me away."
"I feel that swimming is such a gift; to swim well is such a gift."
