The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. This week’s issue is written by Isabella Kwai, a reporter with the Australia bureau.

Recently, in my 20s, I decided to finally learn to swim.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t keep afloat. Like many Australians, I’d learned the fundamentals of how not to die in open water during school classes. But for a child of Chinese immigrants who’d settled in a Sydney suburb miles from the ocean, swimming was more a matter of survival than of sport.

Last year, we lived through the hottest, driest year we could remember, setting the scene for a fierce fire season in which thousands turned to bodies of water as a literal refuge from smoke and fire — a somber sight for coast-dwellers who had more pleasant associations with beaches, pools and inlets.

Living inland, we had less access to water. The trip to the beach was always a drawn-out affair. Once a year, we’d pack drinks and food (there were always slices of watermelon, for some reason) into the car. Then, after enduring seatbelts hot to the touch and the drama of finding a parking spot, there the horizon was, sparkling away.

My parents rarely went in the ocean. Instead, they sat in the shade and inhaled the other Australian birthright — deep, full breaths of fresh sea air. Chest-deep in the waves was as far as I dared to go, watching the far-off swimmers in their caps and goggles slip through the water like seals.