Friday, April 26, 2024

An ode to the pool: writers on their favourite swimming spots

David Bowie used to swim at Andrew Boy Charlton - back in 1980s and early 1990s - he was a rare humble star …

According to Steve, who lived in the same complex when Bowie owned the home, it was said to be as ‘out there’ and ‘bizarre’ as the late superstar musician itself. 



An ode to the pool: writers on their favourite swimming spots 

 From Iceland to West Hollywood Richard Ford, Sara Wheeler, Paul Theroux and other writers reflect on their favourite places to dive 

FT contributors
 
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Graydon Carter 

THE HOTEL DU CAP, ANTIBES, FRANCE
In an age of the selfie and the hyper-fit, hotel pools have become what the grand hotel lobbies used to be. They’re gathering spots, places to have a light lunch and, as a bonus, get a bit of sun. With coastal southern Europe set on broil, pools are also places to cool off, and depending on what the ravages of time have done to you, they’re where you can strut around with very little on. I wish I was one of those people, but I’m not. I love swimming and I love pools. But I’m not one for strutting around with very little on. And you should thank me for that.
The result is that I have spent very little time in hotel pools, but a lot of time looking at them. The Beverly Hills Hotel, the Pellicano and the Sirenuse all have justifiable world-class pool reputations. But when it comes to the top spot, I have to go with the opinion of my late chum Slim Aarons. And that means the glorious, curved pool of the Hotel du Cap in Antibes. Slim’s iconic photo of the pool area was taken before the age of infinity edges, when it was just a rectangle. Everybody in the picture is slim and sun-tanned. They all look relaxed and as if they’re having fun. This is presumably because they hadn’t yet seen the bill, which in those days was paid with cash only.
© Getty Images
You almost never see a movie star in a public swimming pool any more. At least not since the advent of the cell phone and Mail Online. In those long ago, pre-cell-phone days, I was actually in the pool at the Hotel du Cap with my future wife Anna. We were gazing out over the Mediterranean when a chorus of loud, American voices broke the moment. We turned and one of them screamed as he cannonballed off the rocks and into the pool. The man who came to the surface was Philip Seymour Hoffman. He didn’t do anything in his work by half measures. And I suppose that in that serene, beautiful vessel of blue water, he was showing his appreciation, his way.
Graydon Carter is the founder and co-editor of Air Mail. Double rooms at the Hotel du Cap start at €800 per night; the hotel closes for the season on October 15; see oetkercollection.com

Cal Flyn

SELJAVALLALAUG, ICELAND 
One of the most surreal swims I’ve had was at Seljavallalaug in Iceland, a rough-and-ready outdoor pool built into an isolated hillside beneath the Eyjafjallajökull volcano. To find it, we hiked up the rocky valley from the nearest road. It took 20 minutes or so, just long enough to raise our body temperatures so that stripping off in the shed by the water’s edge no longer felt like madness.
In Iceland you are spoiled for choice when it comes to outdoor swimming. We had steamed ourselves in the public baths in Reykjavik and panted in luxurious, gravel-bottomed springs at the Secret Lagoon near Fludir. We hiked into the Reykjadalur Valley, where the hot river sliced cleanly through 10ft snowdrifts, and lay down on the rocks to let it sluice right over our bodies. But none was quite so romantic as the spartan geothermal pool at Seljavallalaug, which we had to ourselves, and which offered an undisturbed afternoon of splashing around in the comfortable temperatures while we soaked in the view.

In Iceland you are spoiled for choice when it comes to outdoor swimming. We had steamed ourselves in the public baths in Reykjavik and panted in luxurious, gravel-bottomed springs at the Secret Lagoon near Fludir. We hiked into the Reykjadalur Valley, where the hot river sliced cleanly through 10ft snowdrifts, and lay down on the rocks to let it sluice right over our bodies. But none was quite so romantic as the spartan geothermal pool at Seljavallalaug, which we had to ourselves, and which offered an undisturbed afternoon of splashing around in the comfortable temperatures while we soaked in the view.
© TJ Drysdale/Icelandtrippers.com
It was March when we visited: snow marbled the upper valleys, and clouds scudding over the sun swept the landscape with shadows. I stretched out, star-like, and watched the ever-changing sky. Later, we loitered at the pipe where fresh water pumped in, warming our hands as we might by a fire. It’s not a fancy place — the “changing rooms” are bare, the walls painted concrete. But it’s a memorable trip for those who don’t mind a bit of dirt, and offers a little insight into Icelandic culture. A bit like a Highland bothy, with a swimming pool attached. (Now there’s an idea.)
Cal Flyn is the author of ‘Islands of Abandonment’ (William Collins). Entry to Seljavallalaug is free; it is about two hours’ drive from downtown Reykjavik. For more on Iceland see visiticeland.com

Paul Theroux

ANDREW ‘BOY’ CHARLTON POOL, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
A pool is for actively swimming in, ideally uninterrupted 50-metre laps, yet most pools don’t allow for a proper swim and are suited mainly for jumpers and thrashers. There are few more antagonising noises than the plunge of someone leaping into a smallish swimming pool, and it usually comes with a shriek. I speak as a former lifeguard.
Hotel pools are often misshapen or too crowded to enjoy, but if you can afford $1,500 a night for a room, or $10,000 for some of the suites, you might consider the Cipriani in Venice, a luxurious hotel on the Giudecca, which has an Olympic-size pool — the best hotel plus pool (in one of the world’s greatest cities) I have ever had the pleasure of staying in. Pass the Murano risotto, per favore.
© Alamy 
But my happiest memory of a pool is the public Andrew “Boy” Charlton Pool in Sydney, Australia, also Olympic-sized and with an old pedigree — built in 1846, enlarged over the years, renamed in 1968 for Australia’s champion swimmer, and in 2011 refurbished to become an absolute gem. It is not only a classic pool, but is situated at the edge of Woolloomooloo Bay, with views of the magnificent harbour.
I first found it in 1983, on a visit to Sydney, and later when I based myself in the city for a time while travelling for my book The Happy Isles of Oceania, I used it every day. The book, an account of kayaking around many Pacific islands, required me to be in good shape — and I was well served by my laps in the Boy Charlton. I loved my routine, the walk to it from my hotel, the welcome at the pool, the friendliness of my fellow swimmers, the space, the light, and swimming buoyantly in seawater. As for the cost: it was free then, it’s A$7.50 now.
Paul Theroux’s forthcoming book, ‘Burma Sahib’, is a novel based on the early working life of George Orwell, when he was a policeman in 1920s Burma. Andrew ‘Boy’ Charlton Pool opens for the season on September 1, see abcpool.org

Sophy Roberts

SINGITA GRUMETI, TANZANIA
With luxury inflation sweeping through the east African safari industry, there has been an expanding demand in traveller expectations, for flushable loos, fancy spas and Michelin-grade wine lists — and yes, a pool to break up a dusty day in the savannah. 
Among the bigger influences behind this shift is Singita, the high-end South African eco-tourism and conservation brand. In 2009, its founder Luke Bailes partnered with the American philanthropist and hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones II, who leased some 350,000 acres of Tanzania’s greater Serengeti. They set up in the heartland of the Great Migration — a phenomenon that sees 1.5mn wildebeest sweep through Kenya and Tanzania on an annual 1,200-mile circuit — and made levels of investment in conservation-tourism new to the industry, balancing lavish amenities with very real community engagement and local empowerment. 
Sasakwa Lodge at Singita Grumeti 
The result? A group of lodges collectively known as Singita Grumeti, which include a run of dramatically sited pools-in-the-bush — all of them best enjoyed from July to September when the long columns of migrating wildebeest spread like paint-strokes across the landscape. At Sasakwa Lodge, you can take in the show from the main pool on the top of a dramatic escarpment. For families, there’s Serengeti House (a safari home you hire exclusively for up to eight people), which has a long infinity pool with prime viewing of a natural waterhole where elephants come to drink. 
My favourite is the smaller, loose-edged pool tucked into rocks at the relaxed Faru Faru Lodge; any day of the year, the view will give you mesmeric tableaux of grazing antelope, their tails striking the beat of a metronome. From here you can watch the drama unfold, with the top half of your face poking up from the surface of the water, like a hippo cooling off in the heat of the day. 
Sophy Roberts is a regular FT travel contributor and author of ‘The Lost Pianos of Siberia’ (Black Swan). There are currently five lodges and tented camps at Singita Grumeti; rates start at about £1,500 per person per night; see singita.com

William Dalrymple

AMANJIWO, JAVA, INDONESIA
I have never swum in any pool quite as stunning as that at the Amanjiwo hotel on the island of Java in Indonesia.
You reach the pool terrace from the central rotunda of the hotel down steep flights of steps reminiscent of an Aztec pyramid, and pass through two crescents of villas with traditional thatched roofs, shaded with palms. The pool lies at the bottom, behind a tall curtain wall. It is huge and magnificent, a shimmering blue rectangle, lined with honey-coloured limestone, set between round masterworks of umbrella topiary on one side and spreading magnolia trees on the other.
Beyond, falling away in successive flooded terraces, lies a patchwork of bright green paddy fields. As I swam last November, from the end of the pool you could see in the distance lines of rice farmers carefully transplanting the young seedlings. Above, more magnificent still, rose the astonishing cloud-piercing dragon’s-back volcanoes of the highlands of Java: improbable prodigies of geology covered with virgin rainforest.
All this, on its own, would probably have been enough to make it my favourite pool in the world. But the most wonderful feature is what lies straight ahead, rising through the early morning mist and directly aligned with the pool: the great stupa of Borobudur.
Completed in the early ninth century, Borobudur is quite simply the largest and most sophisticated Buddhist monument in the world. Built on a volcanic hilltop between two mighty rivers, it brings together several complex, esoteric Buddhist concepts into a single multi-tiered, mandala-shaped step pyramid made up of nearly 2mn blocks of stone. These are arranged in terraces of decreasing size, five rectangular and four circular, symbolically mirroring the sacred slopes of Mount Meru.
Five hundred statues of the Buddha and the Bodhisattvas look out in the cardinal directions, locked deep in meditation, focused within as they hover on the threshold of enlightenment. Beneath and around them, some 1,350 Buddhist narrative panels instruct devotees on the essence of desire, suffering, karma and rebirth, as well as the ethics of dharma.

What’s your favourite pool?

Grand hotel, spectacular spa or scenic escape? Let us know in the comments below 
The plan was to represent in stone a Mahayana Buddhist cosmogram or vision of the universe. Exactly which one is much debated: possibly the three realms of Mahayana Buddhism, or the six (or 10) perfections, or it may be a sermon on the nature of causation. It was intended to lead the pilgrim towards a meticulously planned climax as the viewer ritually activates the power of the mandala and with each tier reaches an ever-higher level of consciousness.
It is true that the esoteric Buddhist designers of Borobudur probably did not intend their pilgrims to activate this engine of enlightenment while swimming in the pool of one of Asia’s most luxurious hotels; but it worked for me. There is no other place on the face of the earth that has brought me a greater sense of peace or wellbeing.
William Dalrymple’s next book, ‘The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World’ is due to be published next year. Double rooms at Amanjiwo cost from £953 including transfers from Yogyakarta or Solo airport; see aman.com

Caroline Eden

RADISSON BLU IVERIA, TBILISI, GEORGIA 
In February, I was in wintry Tbilisi researching a book and staying in the only reasonably priced apartment I could find in a rental market puffed up by tens of thousands of Russians who’d arrived fleeing conscription and sanctions. Looking to supplement my basic digs with a little luxury, I unexpectedly found it via gym membership at the Radisson Blu Iveria, an ordinary business hotel except for two things: its history and its magnificent swimming pool.
Early each morning, I’d pack a gym bag and take the metro to Rustaveli and then ride the hotel elevator up to the 18th floor. After a treadmill run, I’d head to the swimming pool and there, submerged in warm water, I’d gaze through the wraparound floor-to-ceiling windows and begin sightseeing. To one side: the Kura river, crossed by Galaktioni bridge, which leads to the theatre district of Marjanishvili and the UFO-shaped Dinamo football stadium. In the other direction: the hiking trails of Mount Mtatsminda and the silver belfry of the Church of Mikhail of Tver. On a clear day, the far-distant snow-capped mountains of the Caucasus.
And by swimming above the city, I’d also be immersed in the hotel’s intriguing history. Built as Tbilisi’s first high-rise in 1967, it started life as the Soviet-run Hotel Iveria, then in 1992 was converted into a vertical refugee camp for 800 people displaced by the Abkhazia-Georgia conflict. After falling into disrepair, it was clad in glass and in 2009 was born again as the Radisson Blu Iveria.
Most memorably of all, I once swam as a blinding blizzard blew around the hotel, giving the unique sensation of paddling inside a giant snow globe.
Caroline Eden’s books include ‘Black Sea’ and ‘Red Sands’ (Quadrille). Doubles at the Radisson Blu Iveria Tbilisi cost from about £125. Day passes to use the pool start at 100 laris (£30); monthly gym membership starts at 400 laris; see radissonhotels.com

Sara Wheeler

DANDÁR BATHS, BUDAPEST, HUNGARY
Like seals we lay in the warm water, a metallic mineral perfume heavy on the air. On the grass beyond, salmon-pink Hungarians reclined, cradled in deckchairs, staring at the sky.
Dandár Thermal Baths nestles in a post-industrial district of Pest on the east bank of the Danube. Budapest itself sits on more than 120 thermal springs, and bathers have enjoyed the waters since Marcus Aurelius built the first bath complex at Aquincum on the outskirts of what is now the capital.
Architect Ferenc K Császár completed Dandár in its eponymous red-brick street in the 1930s as a public bath for abluting, not lounging. The Soviet hand remains visible — in the elderly waitresses’ lipstick in the unfunky spa café; in the floating chess boards; in a general air of desuetude. A serpentine low wall separates the two main outdoor pools in a kind of yin-and-yang pattern. Canopies shade parts of the swimming area. Butter-yellow walls rise up two or three storeys, entirely enclosing the baths complex in its urban oasis. The two indoor pools are kept at 38C and 36C.
© Alamy
Most tourist packages include a visit to the more famous Széchényi Baths in City Park. Széchényi is the largest thermal spa in Europe and a neo-Baroque act of homage to the Austro-Hungarian empire. Gellért on the Buda side is also hugely popular, an Art Nouveau palace of stained glass and pillared pools, the main one with a swooping glass roof. But I favour the quotidian pleasure of human-sized Dandár, where the waters reflect the daily realities of a city to my mind far more interesting than Prague.
I can picture myself now, propped on one of the snoozing stations in the corner of a pool, trailing a hand in the water. Or was it a flipper?
Sara Wheeler’s memoir ‘Glowing Still’ is published by Abacus. An ‘all in’ ticket to use the indoor and outdoor pools at Dandár costs Ft3,400 (£7.50); see dandarfurdo.hu and, for Budapest’s other pools, spasbudapest.com

Richard Ford 

RIVERSIDE PARK, JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI (NOW CLOSED)
I was a child before regular people had swimming pools in their back yards. The rich, of course, had them. They had, and still have, everything. But Jackson, Mississippi, where I grew up, had “public” pools — big, limpid, shimmering, over-chlorinated receptacles made of concrete, open to the blistering sun and crammed all day, May to August, with kids and parents, all of it enclosed in barbed-wire fencing to ensure no one snuck in without paying the 35-cent “basket fee”. And also — our white, segregationist city fathers insisted — to make sure no black Americans thought they were free to come in and cool off, too. (Eventually, the place was shut down altogether.)
© Alamy 
Cooling off was what the whole business of public swimming was about: seizing a chance to beat the terrible Mississippi heat. Oblivious to history and much else, I loved it at age eight and didn’t care a fig for who wasn’t permitted to be there with me. The pool was my medium of pure, cool freedom. 
Riverside Park was a short drive from our house. And in those long summers when there was no school, I “lived” at the pool. I learnt to swim there (the lifeguards gave lessons). I mastered the complex strokes and dives. The butterfly, the breast and the Australian crawl; the cannonball, the jack knife, the swan, the back dive, the heady layout flip off the high board. I lolled and floated and breathed between my strokes. I held my breath and touched the deep-end bottom where the water was coldest. My mother had never learnt to swim and so was forced to wait outside the fencing, surveilling me from a distance, smoking cigarettes on a green park bench, fretful my bobbing head would disappear among the crowd of teeming, laughing faces and not bob up again.
Was this my favourite pool? I suppose. It was at least my first. Pools of later vintage have been variations on its theme; more alike than unalike, and as with memories of the Jim Crow South, imperfect in some way. These were the Palais Jamai in Fes, where the water was hot. The Fontainebleau in Miami Beach, with great glass windows underwater through which spectators gawked at me swimming like a fish in an aquarium. The alberca at the Selva in Cuernavaca, where in my thirties I swam because Malcolm Lowry had written about it in Under the Volcano. Though, always the great, cool aquatic freedom, my legs adangle, my arms groping to stay afloat, the fantasy that this will last for ever.
Richard Ford has just published ‘Be Mine’ (Bloomsbury), the last in his Frank Bascombe series

Pico Iyer

THE MONDRIAN, LOS ANGELES, US
All day long, on my annual book tour, I used to hang around the pool at the Mondrian in West Hollywood. Waitresses glided from table to deckchair in sarongs, bearing drinks. Beautiful young people — pretending to be actors — struck poses while standing in the warm water. In the distance, throughout the day, was the appropriately hazy blur of LA; after nightfall, the view became a switchboard of flashing lights.
When the hotel first came to prominence, in the 1990s, it was unlike anywhere many of us had seen, with its white-on-white interiors, the blue pool in the distance. No longer did luxury mean gilt and chandeliers and heavy furnishings; in the age of movement, it meant light, emptiness, nothing at all. The property was taken over by Ian Schrager, co-founder of Studio 54 in New York; the little TV monitors in every elevator confirmed the sense that it was a place to be seen, as much as to see. At its centre wasn’t an infinity pool; the opposite. A very finite, shallow rectangle of blue, like a product placement in a nightclub.
I stretched out on a chair poolside, reading Frances Wilson’s dashing biography of De Quincey. I took long meetings — dinners with friends, in truth — in one of the alcoves beside the water. At breakfast, in the sun, I could imagine myself part of the glamorous “Industry”. No one ever swam in the pool in the Mondrian, which was ideal since, despite being drawn by the pool day after long languorous day, I was the rare soul who had never actually learnt to swim.
Pico Iyer’s latest book is ‘The Half Known Life’ (Bloomsbury). The ‘Skybar’ pool area at the Mondrian Los Angeles is open to the public, and it is possible to reserve tables; double rooms cost from about $320 (ennismore.com)
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Bowie Down Under: star hooked on Sydney

The Starman bought an apartment in Elizabeth Bay in 1983 and for the next decade was a star sighting in the city, enjoying a drink at the Evening Star hotel, turning up at the Bondi Lifesaver and filming his landmark Let's Dance video on location here.
By Daisy Dumas•
Updated January 16, 2016
Anything can happen on live TV, they say – even to the paragon of smooth, Don Lane. And so it was that David Bowie, in Australia for his Serious Moonlight tour, came to surprise producers at Melbourne's Nine studios midway through the very last broadcast of The Don Lane Show and announce with a toothy grin on air that "somebody made a great mistake" by bringing the show to an end.
Play Video The stunned audience – and presenter – went wild.
It was November 10, 1983, and the tour, far more ambitious than anything Bowie had originally planned, was a sellout, the star's bleached hair a beacon of London cool in '80s Australia.
David Bowie runs through the script of Let's Dance in April 1983. Terry Roberts at right, figures in the video, towing a milling machine.
David Bowie runs through the script of Let's Dance in April 1983. Terry Roberts at right, figures in the video, towing a milling machine. SUPPLIED
It turned out that we were as hooked
on Bowie as Bowie was on Australia.
The death of the singer, songwriter, actor and artist in New York City on Sunday shocked generations of fans, bringing to an end the life of an extraordinary man known for many things and many guises, not least Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke. His final album, Blackstar, was released on his 69th birthday, just three days before he succumbed to cancer.
But he also called Elizabeth Bay home for nearly a decade, marvelled at the Top End, watched gigs at the Bondi Lifesaver and put Aboriginal Australians on the international rock map. From his first visit in 1978 to his fourth and final tour of Australia in 2004, Bowie's unknown love affair with a "brutal" and "terrific" country afforded him both relative anonymity and the contemplation and magnitude of the outback. It all started, Bowie once said, with an entrancing image of Uluru on the cover of a Stravinsky record he bought aged 12. "Somewhere in him is part Aussie, without a doubt. He wasn't just a visitor here. He had a great fondness for this country," recalls Guy Gray, Tin Machine II's sound engineer at EMI's 301 Castlereagh Street studios, who first met Bowie in 1989 after he arrived from a trip to Kakadu. Declaring it was like heaven and wearing an outback hat, "he didn't look very David Bowie, he looked countryfied and Aussie," Gray told Fairfax Media from his home in Queensland. "He loved the Top End, he was connected to it in a cosmic kind of way."
David Bowie performing to more than
16,000 people at the Showground in Sydney on 24 November 1978.
David Bowie performing to more than 16,000 people at the Showground in Sydney on 24 November 1978. PURCELL
The singer also took to the city, and in 1983 bought a three-bedroom apartment on Elizabeth Bay Road. He sold the home in 1992, going on to regret the sale, musing over its massive increase in value in true Sydneysider fashion.
But back to 1989. Dressed conservatively in button-down shirts, trousers and with a short beard, Bowie was a regular at Surry Hills' Evening Star hotel, where, over spring, he and Gray would head from the studios for a beer and smoke, or "pig and poke".
David Bowie bought this apartment in Eizabeth Bay for $700,000 in 1983. David Bowie bought this apartment in Eizabeth Bay for $700,000 in 1983. COLLIERS "People would be amazed and come up to him and say 'Are you David Bowie?' He'd say 'I certainly am'," recalls Gray, or as Bowie would call him, "chief knob-twiddler". Leon Zervos​, now mastering engineer at Studios 301 in Alexandria, remembered how comfortable Bowie seemed at the studios. Let's Dance star, Joelene King, photographed in 2013.
Let's Dance star, Joelene King, photographed in 2013. EDWINA PICKLES Bono visited him while recording one night, as did a young couple Bowie had met on the street one day. "This lovely young couple came up and they were just gobsmacked. A couple of strangers off the street, invited to come up and hang out with David Bowie in the evening. How's that for luck? "His music was everything to him, he liked to share it with everybody, it was a really amazing quality," Gray says. David Bowie departs Sydney airport (almost) unnoticed on 22 November 1983.

David Bowie departs Sydney airport (almost) unnoticed on 22 November 1983. FAIRFAX ARCHIVES
And so to Whale Beach Surf Club, where the world-famous star played a one-off, secret gig to a small crowd on November 4, 1989. "The guys had done a good job of keeping it secret," says Gray. "We walked through the kitchen to get to the stage, and the chef yelled 'David Bowie!'.
Aboriginal dancer Joelene King with David Bowie while filming Let's Dance. Aboriginal dancer Joelene King with David Bowie while filming Let's Dance. SUPPLIED "I always remember people running for the telephone and calling people and telling them to come down to the club; there were hundreds of people outside the front by the end."
He took Bahasa lessons – he recorded the song Amlapura in both Indonesian and English – and revelled in the view from his apartment, which looked over the yachts of Rushcutters Bay (by 1987, he owned superyacht, Deneb Star, in which he sailed around the Caribbean. Its head stewardess was Australian backpacker, Janine Allis​, who went on to found the Boost Juice chain). But he also loved the relative anonymity, telling Gray that it was amazing to have his privacy respected. David Bowie at a press conference at Sydney's Quay Restaurant for his Reality World Tour in 2004.
David Bowie at a press conference at Sydney's Quay Restaurant for his Reality World Tour in 2004. STEPHEN BACCON
"I keep telling people that if they want to start their lives over again, go over to Australia to do it," Bowie told the Herald in 2003, recalling his home in Elizabeth Bay. "I would come over for a month or so at a time, it was really, really fabulous. I loved being there. It was just a great place to be."
Jeff Duff, who lived in a neighbouring block, had an impromptu coffee with the singer in the Elizabeth Bay Cafe in 1989, a decade after he first met him, rather less sober, at The Embassy club in London. Duff, who has devoted much of his performing career to Bowie in the form of his Ziggy and Bowie Unzipped shows, was taken aback by his hero's "unstarriness". "He was very hard to recognise, he was very casually, normally dressed, a dude wandering around in Elizabeth Bay, nothing stood out about him apart from that he was a very handsome man," says Duff.
"He later said it was his favourite suburb on the planet." It was this backdrop – without forgetting the social inequality so linked with Australia's past – that became the focus of one of his most famous videos, Let's Dance. The Carinda Hotel, in the northern NSW cattle town, might not have known what hit it this week, as attention came pouring in from all corners of the world following the news of its most famous patron's death. In the 1983 video, a young Aboriginal couple dances in the typical, smoke-filled outback pub while Bowie famously sings "put on your red shoes and dance the blues". To Bowie, Carinda – then with a population of 40 – had a "frankly brute character". "As much as I love this country," he told Rolling Stone magazine in 1983, "it's probably one of the most racially intolerant in the world, well in line with South Africa. I mean, in the north, there's unbelievable intolerance."
Those red dancing shoes were more than a scarlet innuendo. Joelene King, chosen for the role of the video's young Aboriginal woman who refused to conform to white man's ways, was a 22-year-old student at NAISDA Dance College. Now living in Sydney's west, she told NITV on Thursday that she will be forever grateful for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and for the role she played in highlighting racism. In one scene, she scrubs Broadway, while her co-actor Terry Roberts, now deceased, drags a piece of industrial machinery up the road. "David said 'Well I want you to walk out in traffic, here's a bucket and we'll put some water on the road'," she says. There was an embrace with Bowie after the scene was shot: "Then the guy said 'Cut' and I looked up at [Bowie] and he looked at me and we just grabbed each other." Co-director David Mallet was later incredulous that not a single car had stopped or slowed down while two Aborigines were put to hard graft on a main Sydney street.
Another political statement, this time a direct hit at Asian stereotypes, was Bowie's China Girl video, for which Geeling​ Ng was cast in Sydney. A waitress at the time, the New Zealand-born actress and model filmed the video in Chinatown and on Sydney's beaches in early 1983. Underneath his shock of yellow hair was a man remembered by Australians – and worldwide – as well spoken and ever polite. Rock writer and broadcaster Anthony O'Grady remembers when Bowie – "erudite, quick witted, with beautiful manners, he had the facility of being simultaneously engaging and politely distant" – brought Serious Moonlight to Sydney.
"INXS' management knocked back the spot on the tour, saying the band was too big to do supports," says O'Grady. "But come the Sydney after-show, INXS were camped in the foyer of the Sebel Townhouse [in Kings Cross], desperately hoping for entry to the party. They were allowed and David was gracious, taking time to chat with them, in particular an awe-struck Michael Hutchence."
And further back, in 1978, Bowie made a lasting impression on The Angels, whom he had hired as his tour's special guests without meeting them beforehand. "My first sight of him was at the Adelaide Oval," remembers Angels guitarist John Brewster. "I thought 'That could be David Bowie', then, 'No, that's not David Bowie'. He was in slacks and a V-neck, a very well-dressed English gentleman. He invited us to dinner that evening ... and that set the tone for the tour."
A break in the schedule in Sydney saw The Angels booked to play at the Bondi Lifesaver club in Bondi Junction.
"We'd started our show and all of a sudden David Bowie and his entourage came in front of the punter barrier [the security fence separating the audience and the stage] and watched our show. It blew me away, here's this superstar watching our show. They wanted to spend their night off coming and supporting our band. We thought that was pretty amazing, actually.

"He didn't come to the show for any other reason other to enjoy it."
For Joelene King, Carinda drinkers, Guy Gray and all whose paths crossed that of the esoteric, crooked-toothed boy from Brixton, here was a gentleman whose mind changed their lives forever.
"It was a microsecond in his life but a huge thing in ours," remembers Brewster. "I think the man was a genius, that's not a word you should use easily."