from bush to bathhouse

It was just what we did. Creeks, rivers, waterfalls, irrigation channels, dams, tributaries, lakes. Temperature wasn't aesthetic, it was something you moved through, something that shifted your state whether you were paying attention or not. You got in, you stayed, you adjusted, and along the way your body recalibrated itself, taking in the yellow textures of the surrounding grass, the immersive greens of the rainforest trees, the browns and grey of formed concrete and rock.

Any time we spent on acupuncture and healing paled in comparison to our childhood priority for a daily swim. We were more interested in building cubbies, holding our breath underwater and disappearing into the bush for entire afternoons, returning home only when we thought we might be in trouble if we stayed out any longer.

For us, water was not just a salve from the glaring heat; it was hours of escape from rules and responsibilities, where we learnt to keep up with our older brothers, endlessly challenging our agility and bravery, daring each other to do stunts and jumps, building our own little worlds. Our connection to water was a connection to our landscape and to ourselves.

My love for bathing led me to almost a decade of work for Peninsula Hot Springs, where I witnessed many of our childhood sentiments return in a very different setting. People arrived carrying the pace and noise of modern life and, often without realising it, you could see their shoulders dropping, breath slowing, a kind of quiet recognition passing through the body before it reached the mind. Nothing dramatic, just a subtle reordering of internal pace, a noticing of the trees and rocks around them, a weightlessness as their body softened into the water. My own worries and endless mental lists would similarly dilute and dissolve in the mineral waters.

That decade also brought me back to my own life with a clearer sense of why bathing had always mattered to me. Living in the city, it is easy to lose many of those childhood bathing rituals. Freshwater creeks become harder to find and water temperature becomes something we mostly control with a lever or a knob. Entire days spent outdoors are replaced by calendars, deadlines and responsibilities.

We did, however, have a sauna connected to this shared bathroom, dashing outside to collect pine needles to carry out Finnish whipping techniques, and taking turns to run under the hard jets of a cold garden hose, carrying out our improvised version of a Kneipp affusion.

We grew up hearing stories about Sebastian Kneipp, our family's most famous export, whose enthusiasm for hot and cold water therapy continues to ripple through modern life. My father was an acupuncturist and had set up our home as an acupuncture school, so we were all studying or practising some form of healing, and water was simply one of the many tools woven through daily life.

Ignoring the camp-like shower facilities, our preferred daily ritual revolved around choosing which fresh bodies of water we would spend each afternoon. Growing up on a huge bush block in Far North Queensland, we would stomp through snake-ridden grass, amble down rocky hillsides, and dash along concrete irrigation walls, finding the day's best swimming source, many within walking distance of our house.