There is no place in Australia as egalitarian or as democratic as the beach. The beach doesn’t care who you are or what you wear. It doesn’t discriminate on the basis of race or religion. It says come as you are, and all over Australia we heed that call.

The day after Boxing Day, at Sydney’s Bronte beach, so many different tribes are down at the water. Huge multi-generational families are having picnics next to blonde, Botoxed social media influencers, sat next to a sunburnt man with a Southern Cross tattoo on his right shoulder blade and his freckled missus under a disposable tent, near shirtless Brazilian guys drinking beers and kicking a ball around, next to a group of Tongan boys and who are running and back and forth from the baths doing bombs, while at the shore, a pregnant venture capitalist who lives up the hill stands near a hijabbed woman with her son in board shorts, all three gingerly testing the water.

‘The beach belongs to all of us.’ Photograph: Tim Wimborne/Reuters

Young Australian backpackers abroad often have their first real culture shock when they hear about private beaches.

“What do you mean you’re not allowed to swim there? What do you mean you have to pay?”

We take it for granted that the beach belongs to all of us. If someone says they own it, it feels like a deep affront, the symptom of a society gone wrong somewhere along the line. It’s like trying to own the sky.

We are a secular nation but if we have a spiritual place, somewhere where we might access the divine, it is in the ocean. You see swimmers at that second before they fully immerse themselves – the concentration, the intake of breath. It looks as if they are praying. After that first full-bodied contact, they emerge gasping and exultant.

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At the river mouth, near the bend before water shapeshifts into the broad wild beach, we are teaching my niece how to swim. She is two and can’t ride a bike or tie her shoelaces but we hold her in an inadvertent echo of Pentecostal baptism rites – arms under her small back as she leans her head down into the chill of the river, gasps a little, and then settles herself in our arms and the water’s gentle swell. We move her through the water, her eyes are pointed up to the sky, her heart full of trust, her belly full of air. She’s learning to float. Floating is like dreaming while you’re awake. The river is full of children learning how to be here.

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At the baths the other day a woman was telling her young son she was washing away her day.

“Did you have a bad day?”

“Yes I had a bad day.” And under she went, into the green water, and washed it away.

It’s our own best medicine, we prescribe it to ourselves and each other for all manner of things: jetlag, heartbreak, hangovers, colds, headaches, sore muscles, fatigue.

We go to the beach to feel alive again.

It’s always worth it – the malarkey of the sand and sunscreen and finding a park and a clean towel and getting changed. You never regret a swim. For the most part.

Washing away the day: the Bronte baths. Photograph: Alamy

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Once I had to be rescued at Bondi. It was dusk, and I had come to the beach after work to swim. I was a Victorian kid, used to long summer twilights that at their height slipped away around 10pm, like a guest regretfully leaving a dinner party. I was swimming near the Pavilion when two things happened at once: it suddenly got quite dark and a rip took me out quite deep and at speed towards Ben Buckler Point.

The lifeguards had gone home. I had passed them packing up their stations as I wiggled out of my corporate clothes with eyes only for the ocean.

But now I wasn’t so much drifting out as being towed as if by an invisible speedboat. It got darker still, like someone dimming the lights. I knew not to swim against the current but panic overrode this. The stronger the current, the more I pushed against it. It was like trying to move a mountain. Messy waves crashed over my head. I started freaking out.

I flung my arm in the air and waved it around. A young lifesaver packing up his watch saw me and got to me fast on his board. I can still see it now, like it just happened – the two of us in the black churning ocean, the feeling of my hands curling around the yellow plastic board, deep gulps of air. I clung on the side but it was no match for the current.

Now my rescuer was in trouble too, and we both continued to drift at speed. But the alarm had been raised – more lifesavers came to us on an inflatable motorised raft.

When I was deposited on the sand, gasping and spent, I lay there for a long time, in the proper dark, thoroughly exhausted but also full of wonder. The sea will kill you if you’re not careful. The democracy of the ocean cuts both ways.

‘The sea will kill you if you’re not careful.’ Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/EPA

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More than once when travelling, I’ve sat at a table with strangers, all Australian, and we’ll spend a pleasant evening swapping stories about the ocean. Our favourite beaches, the secret spots and, of course, the times we’ve almost died.

Most people I know have a story; where the ocean has sucked them out to sea, or smashed them against rocks, or slammed them hard into a sandbank, and they have to wiggle their toes to see if they’ll ever be able to walk again. Yet still we go back in; crazy in love, unable to stay away. Promising to be more careful next time.

What draws us to the beach again and again and again? Why do we take our children down to the water before they can ride a bike or cross a road? Why do we go waist deep and hold their bodies partially submerged and tell them it will be OK?

I sometimes think the sea is our missing element, that a bit of it should have been put in us when we were made. How else can you explain that feeling of being in the water? It’s the feeling of being whole.

It’s the feeling of coming home.