Brissos – swimming, surfing and still water

Swimming has special significance for Brissos. They have a love/hate relationship with it. They love swimming, but have terrible childhood memories of swimming training and their sadistic or pervy swimming coaches. Yet they take pride in their swimming prowess and still keep their school swimming medals in their top drawers. They love it that the Poms can’t swim and that those pasty visitors from Melbourne and Canberra dress inappropriately at the beach, wearing sandals onto the beach, and trunks instead of boardies.

Take a look at those open-toed strappy sandals

Brissos love it that they are good at swimming. Everyone knows Brissos are the best swimmers in the world: Stefani Rice, Liesel Jones, Grant Hackett, Kieren Perkins. In spite of their traumatic childhood memories of swimming training Brissos all go through stages of doing laps at a pool where Olympic gold medallists train.

Apart from swimming in pools, Brissos do not generally swim in still water, unless forced to when sailing, rowing or windsurfing. Brissos prefer to swim in the surf. When they say they are going to the beach, they mean a surf beach. Not Redcliffe or Amity. For a Brisso, cultural capital is measured in direct proportion to the size of the waves one masters. The surf side of Bribie Island with its small waves is low brow. Snapper Rocks when there’s a good swell is high brow.

Snapper rocks – high brow.

Once at the beach, a Brisso will always go for a surf, rather than a swim. Brissos are doers, people of action. If they’re not board riding, they body surf. Even female Brissos prefer to be dumped by large waves as they try to surf them, rather suffer the humiliation of being seen merely wading, or worse, getting out of the surf with dry hair 1. (1.This is a guilty pleasure female Brissos enjoy when away on holidays in a place where noone will recognise them.)

Brissos away – coming out of the water with dry hair….

If the surf is not up, a true Brisso will not even bother to go in the water. Since this is usually the case at Noosa, beach front bars and cafes there do great business. In fact Noosa is an anomalous place. It is a legitimate Brisso destination, associated with serious surfing, despite being dead calm most of the time.

Noosa – the surfing beach can resemble still water

However, Noosa does have surfing cred, known as one of the 10 classic wave breaks in Australia. This is usually after cyclones or major storm systems.

Noosa one of the 10 classic waves to surf in Australia Photo: Chris Rennie

At these times Brissos will show their expertise in reading weather maps. The BOM website’s popularity owes a lot to the surfing nostalgia of office worker Brissos.

http://www.bom.gov.au/weather/qld/

Same for the surf cams.

http://www.swellnet.com.au/surfcam.php?state_id=1

Still water swimming spots are avoided by Brissos, mainly because of the bogans. Bogans swim in still water: lakes, creeks, dams, rock pools, rivers, bay side beaches. Bogans prefer these places because it is easy to swim while drinking beer, and because the surf requires swimming prowess, which private school Brissos, with all those years of swimming coaching, are more likely to have. Bogans avoid surf beaches because it is hard to swim in the surf while wearing jeans and drinking beer.

While Brissos avoid still water as a general rule, there is an ‘away from home’ clause that applies (as with many of their codes of conduct). Brissos will swim in the lakes on Fraser Island. And they will swim happily in still water anywhere in the Mediterranean, or on resort islands in Fiji. Brissos are not so annoyed by the bogans there, and see them as charming locals.

still water swimming on Macleay Island

Low brow – swimming in a dam – wearing jeans

On bogans and being the butt

On bogans and being the butt.

Brissos are tired of the condescending way people from Sydney and Melbourne scoff and generalise about Brisbane and assume Brissos are unsophisticated.

Brissos know that those parochial arrogant folk from Sydney don’t realise how much Brissie has changed in the last ten years. They don’t realise it has good coffee, farmers markets, and restaurants, real estate, and city parking as prohibitively expensive as Sydney. It also has the GOMA which has world class exhibitions like Andy Warhol and Picasso.

As if to prove their sophistication to southern snobs and to each other, Brissos never tire of scoffing and generalising about Ipswich and Logan, and other cities or locales Brisbane is forced to rub up against. Brissos use an ironic, sing song tone of voice for these place names and all they stand for:

“Ipp” ( voice rising) “switch” (down)

“Red…. Cliff”

“Low ….gan”

“Bri…bie”

as if mimicking the thick people that come from these parts. Brissos prefer not to go to the Ekka, Riverfire, or anything at Southbank (see ‘Brissos and still water’) because they have to share them with these people.

Brissos don’t know exactly where the limits of their sprawling city are but are pretty sure they would know if they’d gone beyond them because they’d see bogans there. In fact they used to travel regularly through these places en route to fashionable holiday locations such as Noosa and Byron Bay. Thankfully, improved roads and bypasses have meant Brissos rarely have to encounter bogans any more, unless of course they need to leave the motorway to visit Ikea or take their child to play GPS sport at an inconveniently located playing field.

Indeed on Brisbane’s fringe there is often a fine line between an acceptable location for a Brisso to live and an unacceptable bogan location. For example a house on acreage in Pullenvale is priced at well over a million dollars, advertised as “executive lifestyle… room for a pony”. The same house and land, five minutes up the road in Karana Downs, Karalee or Goodna is “bargain acreage with plenty of room for your sheds, the tinnie, the truck, the kids, the dogs, the lot”.

Sometimes Brissos will have to visit someone they know through work at their home in such a location. Someone who moved from overseas or interstate and as such failed to understand the social geography here. They may say to their hosts “It really is quite nice out here”, with genuine surprise.