From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The underground stone swimming pool beneath the city
This article concerns a fictional location in the embedded story. For related settings, see Newcastle (city) and Water and swimming in Beach Surgery.
An abandoned underground swimming pool situated beneath Newcastle, NSW, Australia, accessible by passage through a street-art mural and fed by water from the harbour. The pool appears in Chapter 3 of Half One of the embedded story Beach Surgery, where Leif (character) and Katita (character) traverse its interior, triggering intervention by the mechanical seagull.
The narrator describes the pool as constructed of stone and abandoned, its age and original use unspecified. Access via street-art mural situates it within Newcastle's ontologically incomplete geography, where buildings and passages exist in uncertain permanence and are said to vanish when unobserved. The pool's water source is the harbour itself, creating an architectural paradox: swimmers enter from above, pass through stone, should exit to the sea—yet instead "land back on the same apartment balcony," enacting the novel's one-sided coin motif in architectural form.
The pool functions symbolically as threshold and surgery: Leif (character) and Katita (character) enter as surface-dwellers; they exit marked, witnessed, transformed—recognized by the seagull as "instruments of return." The passage through stone gutwork, the impossible return to the familiar balcony, the circulation that violates geography—all stage the glitch's logic at the level of physical space.
In global adaptations, the pool has been variously realised: as a literal architectural space (immersive installations in Tbilisi and Kinshasa); as dream-logic or threshold-space (stage productions); as the seam where Half One and Half Two become briefly continuous. Some scholarly readings interpret the pool as the novel's architectural fault made literal—the unsealed gap where incompatible worlds press against each other underwater.