Featured in Farrago Magazine Edition Two 2026 as part of the Dyke's Daily column

Design by Ashley Oetomo

Melbourne summers were for median strip picnics, skirts so short that your thighs itched on the tram seat and days that swam away at the local pool. But no one ran the inner-north baths scene quite like the Melbourne lesbians. Dom, Alexandra, Clover and Sophie found themselves at their usual Saturday morning pool spot. The Carlton Baths (along with Cinema Nova on a Monday night) was what Sophie described as “Hinge in real life”.

“Look at that girl reading Monkey Grip,” Sophie continued her theory, “That’s such an overused mating call. We’ve all lied about reading Helen Garner to get laid by a girl who works at Readings.” Her eyes were fixed on a woman on the other side of the pool.

“Jesus Sophie, not everyone’s as desperate as you.” Clover, who both appreciated Garner’s authenticity and had slept with a woman who worked at Readings, was usually the first to see through Sophie’s cynicism. She tried to spot Monkey Grip-woman, but the sea of people made it nearly impossible. Just minutes after the girls arrived, the grass turned more skin coloured than green, dotted with the occasional pop of a patterned or glittery bikini sitting alongside multicoloured book covers. At midday a spot on the poolside-lawn became a precious commodity, something as difficult to find as a park on Rathdowne Street.

Dom, on the other hand, was unfazed by the abundance of beautiful women and books from the ‘Cultural Studies’ section. Before the girls even had time to sunscreen each other's backs she was in the fast lane kicking off on her second lap of backstroke. This was what Dom could liken to a baptism. A weekly cleansing (if you could consider the public pool water clean in any way). Solitude for herself and her body and her mind. Minutes of uninterrupted routine. Breathing as the only sound that mattered. Fingertips flitting in and out of the water. Fingertips to water to air to water to air to.

“Fuck.”

She had hit something with her hand. Something sturdy and moving. She turned around to see that her worst nightmare had come true—hitting another swimmer’s head while doing backstroke in the pool.

“I’m so sorry…” She was flustered as she took her goggles off and turned to face her victim, but paused before any more words came out. She rubbed her eyes to make sure that, in her blurred and panicked state, she had not imagined a mirage or an apparition of what appeared to be the most beautiful woman she had ever laid eyes on. Beautiful, even with her goggles and swimming cap on. Beautiful, even after having just been hit in the head by Dom’s arm.

“Don’t even worry about it, darl.” She winked, popped her goggles back over her eyes and swam off.

And just like that, Dom’s dream girl (fast swimmer, great arms, cute wink) freestyled away from her, their moment washed away in the chlorine, leaving just Dom and her ashamedness to finish off the lap.

For Alexandra, this was the first day in summer she had spent outside her room. Her girlfriend had ended their four-year-long relationship over a phone call after telling Alexandra that she and her ex had “reconnected” at A3 last November. All the other girls knew this meant that they spent the three-day-long festival fucking in a tent. Alexandra believed her ex’s story that all they did was “spend hours talking about our singular and collective past, present and future so that we could forgive each other and our deep-rooted mistakes. I guess you just wouldn’t understand me like she does…” and give each other tarot readings. All lesbians agreed that giving tarot readings was equivalent to giving head, yet Alexandra could not be reasoned with. But today she was determined to stop watching The Queer Ultimatum on the constant verge of tears. Today she was going to talk to a woman. She had her carabiner strapped to her bikini and nail clippers stashed in her bag (in case things went really well).

Sophie and Clover weren’t so affected by matters of the heart and were instead much more focused on evening out their tans and airing out the gay gossip they knew about their friend’s friends spotted on the grass.

“Clover, you would not believe who just walked in.” Sophie sat up, abandoning her copy of Girlhood. “I think that’s Angela, Evie’s ex that she ran into at the bouldering gym in Brunswick. Apparently Angela broke up with them because they wouldn’t commit to buying a strap.”

“A strap can be something really personal.” Clover took her sunglasses off. “Some women feel uncomfortable replicating heterosexual dynamics. A lot of queer people think we’re queer for a reason—we can have sex that sits outside of roles often predetermined by genitalia. Why complicate all that with a fake penis? Besides, there’s always the custody issue.”

“The custody issue?” As far as Sophie knew, none of their friends had children.

“Who gets the strap in the breakup? The top or the bottom?”

The carabiner'd bikini proved to be less successful than Alexandra had hoped—most women she spoke to (with speaking perhaps being too bold a word for her efforts) were either in a relationship, entirely uninterested in her or, worst of all, straight. None of her classic pickup lines worked. “Do you know what a lesbian’s favourite swim stroke is?”, only received confused looks and downcast eyes, sometimes followed by a desperate dive into the water. She never even had time to deliver the punchline: “It’s breaststroke!” Two women training for a triathlon faked chuckles when she asked them if they “Come here often?” and another thought Alexandra got chlorine in her eyes when she started to bat her eyelashes (something that Sophie claimed they should “leave for the femmes”). It seemed those nail clippers would be of no use.

Because maybe after four years in a relationship Alexandra had lost her charm and humour and possibly even the personality that got her into a relationship in the first place. “No wonder Trish left me for her ex, I probably haven’t made a funny joke in months.” She lay back down on her towel with a deep-rooted fear that she would never have sex again. She had let her youth wither away as she got comfortable with Trish and their cat and their Saturday afternoons spent cooped up baking vegan brownies and crocheting on the couch. Now she would have to spend her twenty-fifth birthday all alone—a sad, single lesbian spinster with no one around but her circle of loving friends and accepting family.

“Hey Alexandra, who got the strap when you and Trish broke up?”

Clover’s question hit Alexandra like a wave. She had forgotten about the strap until this moment. But now, memories flooded back. Memories she would rather forget. Memories that, she realised, were the reason she could no longer flirt with women. Never had Alexandra considered that so much heaviness and history and longing and love could be carried in a dildo and its harness. She couldn’t even answer Clover. All she managed was a painful grunt and a “Idunnodon’taskmeaboutTrish.” Sophie elbowed Clover in the ribs and they both decided it would be best to go back to their books.

Dom relived her humiliating ‘swim-in’ while washing her hair in the pool bathrooms. If only she had been swimming in a different lane! If only she had not run into such a gorgeous woman! She needed to get out of the pool as soon as possible and potentially never come back. The Fitzroy or Brunswick Baths would have to do. Maybe even the Richmond