Nun's Pool Breakfast

The Nun’s Hole my uncle called it. Ahem!

 It wasn’t until I was older that I realised this name for a local swimming spot was a rude version of it’s proper name The Nun’s Pool. Local people used the name too, not just uncles from the north of England imbued with a tradie's humour. 

 

If you stroll in a relaxed manner across the grass of Shelly Beach park  and then wend your way north over the pitted sandstone (taking your time to peer into the rock pools) , you will come to a little rectangular sandy beach in a natural split between orange sandstone shelves.

In the 50’s the swimming spot was used by young nuns from the nearby Mercy Convent who dared to don a swimsuit, and thus the place got it's name.

 I wonder if it was a popular spot for the original Gweagal people. Cronulla in fact comes from the indigenous word Kurranulla meaning 'place of pink shells.'

 In any case the former convent which gave the beach it's modern name is now a retirement home for those same people. I imagine as they sip tea, looking out to sea, they must occasionally say to one another “Hey Sister Mary- Bernadette, do you remember the day you were bitten by a lobster?”

On this particular summer morning Fil and I have come down to this pocket-sized beach for breakfast and a swim.

 It’s just after 7am on a Saturday and though the esplanade is already heaving with frowning, healthy people intent on tuning their hearts, the Nun's Pool, hidden between the sandstone shelves, is serenely empty.

 It’s a glorious salty morning of silver ocean and lacy waves. The sun has not long been up and is playing peekaboo between clouds. Even so, the air is warm and the idea of a swim seems  a reasonable prospect.

I have often compared Fil to a Labrador in terms of fitness, friendliness and bottomless appetite and so it is no surprise he is first in the water (yes, I am more a terrier, barking at the waves).

 

 

While Fil floats in the water below like a basking sea-otter, I rove around the beach over the rock pools for a while, admiring views to the south of Shelly Beach and to the north of South Cronulla Beach (it may sound confusing but further north is a North Cronulla Beach:)

 

 

 On the sand, amongst the usual treasure of seashells is lots of of pumice stone (nub-lumps I call them). They are an anomaly here and I wonder which part of the planet they have come from, bobbing over the ocean, pushed by the wind like tiny untethered islands.  I am impressed by a nub-lump that Fil finds which is as big as my head. Later we research recent volcanic activity and discover a volcano has been erupting for months in Indonesia. “Halo! Apa kabar nub-lumps?”
I also read somewhere that after a volcanic eruption in Fiji some years back, pumice rafts some 30km long were travelling around the sea. My head-sized nub-lump no longer seems impressive.

 I take my knees for a dip in the clear water and stand there watching the salmon sunlight glint off the sea.  It’s so peaceful and lovely…

 I take ten slow deep breaths and decide I have laboured enough to deserve breakfast. We place our towels on dry sand and haul out or booty of fresh coffee and a couple of pastries from our local baker. I ask which variety is mine and Fil looks hurt since he thought he would have some of both.
 Ahh, Labradors…

Munching on a half a danish, I admire the shells around my towel. In Kurnell where I grew up, there are lots of seashells ,but at Cronulla, with it’s pounding surf, most of the beaches are veritable shell-deserts until you move further south along the peninsula toward the mouth of the Port Hacking river.

 

Though I grew up in Kurnell, I was in fact born just around the corner (well to my mothers relief I was born at the hospital, but my parents lived just up the road from here) so I have been visiting this spot on and off for four decades now. The land behind the beach has changed immensely in that time; buildings growing taller and taller, but the beach remains the same and yet is somehow always fresh and new, no two days the same.

 

 

One thing that is particular to this area, surrounded as it is by sandstone and small surf, is the presence of sand-blasted glass on the beach. I have collected it many times and it’s something I never feel bad about taking a little, even though it seems a part of the beach as much as the shells.

 The glass I notice is diminished in quantity theses days. I can’t help mixed feelings about this. Of course it means there is less pollution which is wonderful and how I should want it, but it means there are less pieces to appreciate.

Can you appreciate broken glass? Of course you can. None of that sharp, nasty stuff; the sea has sorted that out, rolling it around in the waves like a boiled lolly in the mouth, until its smooth and frosted.

In my later teens when I had seen too many Indiana Jones movies, I did a week’s work experience in archaeology. A certain Museum in Sydney did a good job of deflating my interest in whip-cracking adventure science by making me sort bottle shards from early Sydney (the fifth day I sorted their latest archaeological dig/boozy camping photos).

I hated that week at the time, but an interesting consequence was that I could no longer help, upon finding beach glass, trying to identify a lip, base or body of a bottle. There are pieces that are decades old- milk bottles and soda bottles from when both these items were delivered and the bottles reused. Wine and beer bottle pieces from a thousand celebrations and commiserations.

The colours- browns and greens and whites and rarer blues (pale blue is my favourite!) are like jewels - some are common and some unusual and I fully admit to excitement on finding unusual colours or even patterned glass or decorated porcelain.

The shells are the real stars though, tinkling as the waves wash in and out. And the colourful rainbow of sandstone...
And you can't forget the myriad of rock-pools with their micro-worlds of sea anemones and shells and squirty old cunjevoi, and the rock crabs skittering around the crevices, blowing bubbles at you as you peer in at them.

Most of all, I just love that this quiet spot still exists among the bustling suburbs for those that rise early enough to find it, like some mystical little sanity isle.

Standing in the clear cool water facing east at dawn with nothing but the wide Pacific before you and the murmur of civilisation behind you... now that is a wonderful way to start your day.