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From the blog
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They Cried For Their Mothers – A Poignant Anzac Poem
Listen to Ria on the Podcast Going The Extra Mile. In this episode she reads her poem, They Cried For Their Mothers – A Poignant Anzac Poem. Listen to the Podcast here:
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Brighton Icebergers Fortnightly Newsletter
My hobbies are swimming, photography and writing – all three come together in my role as Editor of the Brighton Icebergers fortnightly Newsletter. I have edited the Newsletter since early 2020. Here is a link to the current Newsletter and, for those who wish, there is also access to previous editions. Enjoy! View the website:…
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Ria’s Iceberger Profile extracted from The Iceberger News edition 2nd September 2021
Official Newsletter of the Brighton Icebergers ICEBERGER PROFILE – RIA BLEATHMAN Joined Icebergers: June 2018Early days: my formative years were spent in the Steppes in Tasmania’s Central Highlands, so-named after the Russian Steppes with both areas sharing the climatic extremes of hot airless summers and marrow-freezing winters.Learnt to swim: in the inland water holes of…
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They Cried for Their Mothers – Explanatory Note
The words in my poem They Cried for Their Mothers, which appeared in the Iceberger News on 15th April 2021, are an evocation of my personal connections to Gallipoli and explained as follows: My Great, Great Uncle Herbert Hare and his brother Charles ‘I think of all those farm-boys’ landed at Gallipoli with the Mediterranean…
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Covid Days – Messaging
With Melbourne in lockdown and the consequent de-peopling of the city, I have developed a heightened awareness of messaging from strangers, unknowns, equals, about how we are being affected by these isolating times. Like sending a radio beam into the wide expanse of the universe, or putting a message in a bottle and throwing it…
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Running on Empty
Living and working in Melbourne during the current pandemic lockdown means our vibrant city has effectively ground to a halt. Emptiness is an all-pervading descriptor. I now walk through once-busy arcades and renowned laneways, past eateries and across boulevards and thoroughfares and bear witness to a barren, empty streetscape. I recall the stark, post-apocalyptic images…
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Open Water |
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Swim The Planet – Freedom Swim 2020
Despite passing some wonderful swimming milestones last year, they did not extinguish my burning desire to complete the Freedom Swim in South Africa, so frustratingly cancelled by organisers on the eve of the event last year. I once read that a distinguishing attribute of open water swimmers is that, when they see a stretch of…
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Swim The Planet – Hellespont / Dardanelles Strait
This historic body of water is called the Hellespont in Greek and the Dardanelles in former Turkish times. In modern-day Turkey it is known as the Strait of Çanakkale. The Strait separates both the Asian and European land masses and has been a natural barrier for invading armies for millennia, including King Xerxes I of…
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Swim The Planet – Swim NYC
Inasmuch as New York is the city that never sleeps, it is also the city that, possibly due to all this ‘unsleeping,’ seemingly never swims. I could find just one Olympic-sized swimming pool in Lower Manhattan. It was the aptronymically named Hamilton Fish Pond, so-called after former local luminary Hamilton Stuyvesant Fish. The ‘Fish Pond’…
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Swim The Planet – Memphremagog Marathon
On 15th August 2019 I completed The Lake Memphremagog 11.3 kilometre marathon swim which is part of the week-long Kingdom Games in North Eastern Vermont. Twenty eight swimmers started the race at 9.30am with an average water temperature of approximately 21C and air temperatures around 22C. The breeze was minimal and the water conditions were…
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Going Global |
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From Struggle Street to Wall Street
I grew up in the tough northern suburbs of Hobart Tasmania and went to an even tougher public school. My school life focussed less on Shakespeare and more on survival, but I scored well in resilience. After my school and university days, I worked in the pressured investment banking environments in London, New York, Sydney,…
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Styling |
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Style Series
Forty percent of women’s shoes sold in 2018 were runners, which means these have now become my latest styling ‘weapon of choice’. Over the summer I developed several different styles and worked through their manufacture with a bespoke leather shoemaker during a recent trip to South Africa. Our final design included runners made exclusively from…
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Style Never Goes Out of Style
These are some of the most empowering and iconic images over the past half a century. Jean Shrimpton, Jackie Kennedy, Michelle Obama and Megan Markle. They share the same characteristics: bare arms, minimal accessorising, block colouring and arms by their sides. Each woman is making a statement about their relationships to their bodies and their…
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The Harmony of Contrasts
Based on its Latin origins, the term ‘piano’ is half a word. The other half being ‘forte’. The term, piano e forte, is the full name of what we know today as the piano and was first used in the 1700’s. The term literally means soft – loud and was devised to contrast the graduation…
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Rock the Frock
I recently started a designer label. It’s my own. I did it because nothing on the racks these days seemed to work for me. I also like the concept of my style over someone else’s fashion. Style is about expressing who I am. Fashion is about someone telling me who I am. And that’s never…
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