NEW Year's Eve: A trio packs a simple picnic of lettuce from the garden, tomatoes, olives, several dips, some corn chips and a bottle of cider.

They fill an old plastic cooler with ice blocks, don bathers, grab towels, whistle up the dogs and head out the road.

Their destination? Helen's dam, a glorious pool of black water that would frighten more delicate types.

But this is the country and the trio know about redgum cordial - water coloured and flavoured by the fallen leaves from the trees that shade the dam and other detritus.

They arrive, set the picnic makings down on the jetty, shed their clothes and in the drink they go.

Aah, the glorious cool and freedom of it. Reprieve from the day's heat.

Two of them venture off around the Bay of Benjamin, the Greek Isles and up to Madagascar.

The third takes the canoe and paddles through the Suez Canal.

Helen's been playing global architect, recreating parts of the world and its islands and continents in her watery idyll for years, naming a tiny indent of grasses, or a patch of reeds.

She's elsewhere tonight, but we're enjoying a swim with her permission.

Summertime pleasures like this are jewels in a lifetime.

Most Australians live near or head to the coast for holidays.

In some parts, such as Victoria's Western District, it's quite the thing to head off to the beach and long-established holiday houses for summer.

Yet for many rural dwellers, summer's luxuriant waterside hours are spent inland at dams, creeks, rivers, and (don't tell anyone) in irrigation channels.

The latter, of course, is not condoned - but our Christmases wouldn't be the same without ritualistic outings to the Big Channel.

We know the risks of channels. We lost our baby brother Nicholas. Not in the Big Channel, but in the little irrigation off-take in 1971. It wasn't a swimming expedition.

His tottering 18-month-old legs took him off beyond the home garden while we weren't looking.

We love him still and wonder what he may have become. But it's never stopped our ritualistic plunging into the Big Channel.

It's a notable fact that everyone in our family, from the oldest, baldest uncle to the three year olds can swim like fish.

We do not forget that we remain vulnerable.

Adults and children alike scramble for a spot in the utes for the ride to the Big Channel.

Often the numbers warrant a convoy and someone usually does a head count.

Aah the bliss of it. We walk barefoot 500m or so upstream, dancing and ouching between the thistles, sometimes carrying tractor tubes, and cajole each other when we reach the rocky diving point.

Some dawdle, others can't wait.

Then we're in, oo-ing at the water's coldness, or aah-ing in relief from heat.

We swim against the current, then float, then swim again.

When we reach the bridge we test our agility and strength, clamoring for the steel pipe above to pull ourselves up.

We repeat this for hours in glorious harmony.

As kids we yabbied in dams and spent countless hours under the waterfall at the off-take channel, conversing like bush mermaids in our watery eyrie and seeing who could conduct the longest conversation there.

Times change. Dams, creeks, rivers and channels are deadly places, it's said.

Water is feared. But for some, the coloured inland waters are places of delight, not danger.

May we always remember this.