Swimmingpod

Doing research is like swimming in custard. That’s the take-home from Maddalena Borsato in this podcast. She is a researcher in aesthetics at the University of Gastronomic Science, Pollenzo, Italy, and she combines pastry making withphilosophy in her website aristortele.it, where she philosophises with a spoon and creates thoughtful pastry recipes. In this podcast she describes the French dessert Iles Flottante, islands of soft meringue floating in a lake of custard,and the lone swimmer – me – making steady progress in research, or a life of swimming in custard. Its not swimming as we usually know it, nor is it pastry or cake, strictly speaking. But life is full of hybrids, and here is another. 

Dr Rebecca Olive is Vice Chancellors Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research explores how every-day, recreational sport and leisure activities are experienced through cultural politics, ecological encounters, social media production and consumption, and much more. Her Fellowship at RMIT University involves research into recreational sport and leisure in urban bodies of water - oceans, estuaries, rivers, and outdoor pools – in short, urban swimming. She has three foci - public safety, climate resilience, and urban regeneration. She has produced a StoryMap, Swim Melbourne, which maps places to swim across the city, sharing stories of risk, safety, and community. In this podcast we discuss all of these things, and more.

Murder doesn’t often feature in swimming. In this podcast, two places are linked through this theme: Ballarat and St George’s Lake, in Australia, with Wallingford and the River Thames in Oxfordshire, in the UK. Both places have factual andfictional claims to being ‘murder central’ in their respective countries. Both have good swimming, and both have murder mysteries attached to their locale. In addition, Ballarat has seen several real-life, gruesome murders in recent years. It shouldn’t put you off swimming in its nearby lakes though.

Swimming is in the DNA in Australia. Even in inland places, lakes, human-made and natural, form ideal swimming places. Human-made lakes include dammed waterways for reservoirs and goldmining works in mid- to late-nineteenth century Victoria, during the period that Australians moved toward self-determination as a country. I explore these lakes and the ideas that came with them, in and around Ballarat, Victoria, with resident Lyn Wilks.

Before the pandemic, some friends in Metz, a mid-sized city in France, near Strasbourg, were looking for somewhere to swim outdoors. The Moselle River flows through Metz, on its way to the North German wine country, before joining with the Rhine at Koblenz. This seemed the right place to make a new swimming place, in the Moselle River in and around Metz. Sibylle van der Walt was one of this group of friends. From this desire to swim in the local river, which was often contaminated in the ways that so many rivers in the Global North are, came a group, Metz Ville d’Eau, Metz City of Water. Sibylle was central to this group, with the intention of making the Moselle at Metz much more regularly swimmable. Metz Ville d’Eau continues, going from strength to strength. Since then. Metz Ville d’Eau has joined hands with other environmental groups, city councils and water-focussed agencies in the Swimmable Cities Alliance, where organizations across the world coordinate activities for making cleaner and accessible urban waterways more available to citizens who swim, and for blue spaces more generally. Sibylle van der Walt is central to the development and growth of the Swimmable Cities Alliance, which had its first Summit in Rotterdam in June 2025. In this podcast we discuss how Metz Ville d’Eau has been fashioned as a model campaign for urban river swimming.