Meet Australia's queen of the firsts Annette Kellerman, as told in Eliza Reilly's new book Sheilas: Badass Women of Australian History

There is one woman who is queen of the "firsts"; I've counted seven to her name. The more kick-arse ones are "first woman to try to swim the English Channel" which sounds like an episode from the Real Housewives of London, and "first woman to appear nude in a Hollywood film" which is just ... very cool. These and many other achievements were put away over 120 years ago by Sydney Sheila Annette Kellerman.

For any girl on the razor edge of puberty, going to the local pool is about as comfortable as witnessing your recently divorced uncle going through a "belly dancing phase". What am I talking about; the local pool is full-on for everyone. For Annette it was even worse: "My fears were increased by my humiliation because of my dread of exposing my weak and ill-formed legs". However, persuaded by her dad, and after being chucked in the water over and over, it eventually became the only place in Annette's world where she was able to move without assistance.

Annette was soon flipping and flopping around like the mermaid she was at heart, and even took up swimming competitively. She deserves serious Sheila props for learning how to manage her differently abled body in its weighty woollen suit and still making her peers look like they should be swimming in the kiddie pool. By the time she was in her 20s she was revered in the swimming scene. On the day she won her first Australian swim title in 1902, 11-year-old Fanny Durack and 10-year-old Mina Wylie were entered in the schoolgirl race division of the championships.

Thankfully, the media never compared Kellerman to fellow swimmer Fanny Durack or commented on our first female Olympian's appearance - "[Fanny] is no beauty like Annette, but she can swim like a duck; the Kellerman's style is more like a swan's." - Oh, that's right, the newspapers totally did do that.

Somewhere between never wanting to enter a pool and never being out of one, Annette had obviously learnt what a great feeling it is to be the "first woman" to do something. For starters, she had smashed the swimming record for 100 yards years before Fanny. Annette had become a glutton for firsts, setting the world record for the mile swim too. Unsurprisingly, the power of a swimmy-dim changed the course of her life forever.

"Only a cripple can understand the intense joy that I experienced," she said. Harnessing a differently abled body and using it to shatter the expectations of what a woman can do rather than trying to assimilate with the "normals" is a grade-A Sheila signature.

Soon her hands and feet were wrinklier than a rescue pug's face. She had kinda won everything there was to win in her home town, so it was time to dive into bigger, scarier waters.

"All in all I was doing very well indeed as a professional swimmer in my native country, but Australia, though big in area, was not big enough in population to satisfy my ambition".

She decided that the Olympics were passé, so she lived out every parent's worst nightmare ... by getting into show business. She set her sights on becoming the best in "underwater performance". Which was a pretty easy thing to do, because nobody had the slightest idea what "underwater performance" was. Annette launched it into the mainstream and did for the sport what Madonna would later do for voguing. She is now credited with being the mastermind behind what we call synchronised swimming. Or, as the Summer Olympic Games call it, "artistic swimming". That's right, even though Annette thought the Olympics were gauche as, her sport is still one of the most popular events since its inclusion in the early 1980s. That's a bloody full circle moment right there.

Anyway, she opted out of the rope lanes and onto centre stage performing as a "water ballerina", as she called herself, swimming in large glass tanks full of fish which was as popular as yum cha on Mother's Day.

If that wasn't dramatic enough, when she landed in London she drew attention to herself by skipping duty free, popping her togs on and swimming 40 bloody kilometres down the Thames. Soon after, Annette was the first woman to attempt what is still one of the hardest paddles ever - the English Channel.

Story goes, a journalist from The Daily Mirror had offered her publicity if she attempted the stunt, and she needed publicity badly. Annette and her father hadn't got off to the most lucrative start launching Annette's career overseas and they found themselves starving. They couldn't even afford to buy the papers Annette was mentioned in, instead having to read inconspicuously over people's shoulders. So Annette covered herself in porpoise oil to protect her from the cold, as you do, and glued her goggles to her face because I guess they hadn't invented straps yet ...?

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Six men attempted the feat alongside Kellerman that night, and they chose to do so completely starkers. A flirty choice, but nonetheless makes sense if you've remembered that the only other option at that time was a woollen morph suit. Annette, on the other flipper, had to wear what she described as a "tiny bathing suit" for her historic attempt. It cost her. Over the 10-and-a-half-hour swim her stupid bathers ended up rubbing through her flesh. So badly, in fact, that she later said the suit was one of the reasons she didn't make it across the channel. Reaching the halfway mark, she dropped out of the race, explaining she had "the endurance but not the brute strength" to finish.

Annette was in the water for 10-and-a-half hours, a women's record that stood for 17 years. She didn't attempt to swim the English Channel ever again. If that's the biggest fail of her career, you can imagine what an absolute powerhouse she was on a good day. She didn't let it get her down, though, because soon afterwards she became the reigning champion of the long-distance swim down the channels of Vienna and the rivers in Paris. She attracted crowds into the millions that would come to watch her swim after hearing of the Australian woman who was said to be daring enough to try something others hadn't.

We'll never know when Annette decided that she was going to be the "first woman" hog. She has simultaneously made life so much easier for all of us and made it almost impossible to claim our own first.

Annette's most famous "first", however, was born more from necessity than ambition. She was hanging out in London performing her underwater ballet to sold-out crowds. She would often perform in a men's cotton bathing suit because it allowed her flexibility that the women's swimwear did not.

"I want to swim. And I can't swim wearing more stuff than you hang on a clothesline," Annette declared. It was also really risqué because it showed a little of her bare shin.

One fateful day, she was told that the King and Queen of England were coming to her show. Annette was officially ordered to cover up and told that showing any bare skin below the shoulders was unacceptable in the presence of royalty. And not only did she have to obey the royal orders, she had only hours to get it sorted as they were visiting that very night.

Annette may have been the famous mermaid in London's vaudeville scene with her signature men's bathers, but the reality was that she and her father were so poor she actually had no other swimsuit to wear. She and her father were flabbergasted by the last-minute request to wear a dress they couldn't afford to buy, let alone get their hands on with mere hours until showtime. So Annette did what any great Sheila would do when she was told her bathers were unacceptable for a royal audience: she improvised.

"We hit on the idea of sewing silk stockings to the racing suit I always wore and that was really how the one-piece bathing suit was launched."

That night's performance wouldn't be remembered because of the royal guests of honour, but because it was the night the women's one-piece bathing suit made its worldwide debut.

The real genius of Annette's one-piece swimsuit was that it made everyone who saw it go gaga, yet it was still technically legal to wear. The law stated that a woman had to be covered from neck to toe with thick black material, but it didn't say anything in the law about how exactly that should be achieved on a woman's body. A technicality that showgirl Annette exploited with sensational results.

An editorial from an 1890s society paper explains the skin-tight wardrobe loophole better than I: "It seems that bathing suits are respectable enough when dry, but when wet, lead to a riot of personal license between the sexes which leaves nothing to the imagination."

When she had finished performing for royalty and swimming in every river and stream and trickle in Europe, Annette and her trusty dad travelled to the only place left to go. The country that combined both love of the surf and show business: America. To their shock, though, there apparently wasn't any long-distance swimming to make a living off there. So she was all, "Hey Dad, here's an idea, what about I throw myself off some high things for money?" And that's exactly what she did. We love a career pivot.

Annette soon became a household name, executing never-before- seen dives and stunts. But she couldn't do it in her original swimsuit design. Wearing your entire lady winter wardrobe while you swam was still heavily enforced by police and officials both in the United States and back home in Australia - where Fanny and Mina were still competing in steampunk bo-peep cosplay. "I was amazed seeing the bathing suits worn by American women. What difference is there wearing 12 yards of linen in the water rather than lead chains?"

It really was lose-lose for a woman swimming at her local beach or pool back then. She could get full-on fined, arrested and banned for not complying with the rules. On the other hand, if she did obey the dress code, drowning was a very real option. There are countless awful reports (countless because I got anxious and stopped looking, not because it's uncountable) of women drowning in their "compulsory" swimwear. I don't know how many times we have to go over this but wool when wet is extremely heavy. So trying to swim is extremely hard. It's not really an "ability" thing, more of a "logic" thing. The men, however, did not see it that way. They concluded that women drowned because of their incompetence and weakness. This stuff riles me up.

To rub organic pink Himalayan rock salt in the wound, in 1907 back in Annette's home town of Sydney, everything was a bit boring. So to spice things up, it was proposed by Waverley Shire Council that men should wear the same thing as women while bathing on beaches. The men were outraged and organised a mass protest on four of Sydney's major beaches featuring thousands of men dressing up ... as women. The mere suggestion that men might be held to the same standards as women was all too much for their fragile masculinity. The media flocked around the protesting men, celebrating what a fun time they were all having wearing "their sisters' or grandmothers' underwear, ballet frills, curtains or tablecloths" and, of course, women's swimming clothes. All to exercise men's right to protest how stupid they looked wearing them swimming and generally what a reckless idea it was to wear them in the water at all.

While the blokes were taking the piss out of women's swimwear, no one seemed to connect the dots that perhaps women weren't all that chuffed about it either. After the event the council's proposition was swiftly dropped and men were allowed to go back to doing whatever the hell they wanted. Meanwhile, Annette was arrested on a beach in Boston for wearing her very own one-piece bathing suit, a men's one-piece. She was taken to court and charged with indecent exposure.

As Annette said: "There is no more reason why you should wear those awful water overcoats - those awkward, unnecessary, lumpy bathing suits, than there is that you should wear lead chains. Heavy bathing suits have caused more deaths by drowning than cramps. I am certain that there isn't a single reason under the sun why everybody should not wear light weight suits. Any one who persuades you to wear the heavy skirty kind is endangering your life".

It's all very chill, though, because Annette said that the judge was "really very nice" due to him generously allowing her to wear the satanic bathing suit for her work on the strict condition that she also wore "a full length cape".

A few years later Annette had pivoted her talents to the silver screen, starring in not one, but 14 silent films. Her movie career took off, and so did her line of one-piece bathers. They were so popular that in the United States one-piece swimmers were simply called "Annette Kellermans". Of course, the swimsuits sold like sausages at a sizzle.

A lot of Annette's dazzling achievements were overshadowed by the simple fact that she was a genuine hottie. How she looked framed almost every feat she accomplished, and comments about her body or the way she looked accompanied her throughout her life. Her body even landed her the role of centrepiece specimen of a Harvard University study.

"After making examinations of 10,000 girls, Annette Kellerman is the closest to physical perfection of any," declared Dr Dudley Sargent, director of the Harvard University Gymnasium in 1912. The young girl who was told she'd struggle to walk without leg braces was now declared proportionally the "most perfect woman of modern times".

She was compared to the Venus de Milo, "the most perfectly formed woman of ancient times".

"Miss Kellerman embodies all the physical attributes that most of us demand in the perfect woman."

Whatever the case, one can't help but see all this as super creepy. I am going to declare right back that this guy sucks and so does his study. Annette tended to agree: "From that time on I was called 'the perfect woman' and if you think that's nice? Oh! It's the most ghastly thing in the world to be called the 'perfect woman'. Every other woman was saying "' don't see that she's anything'".

Professor Greaseball's study was a response to the hilarious concerns that women were becoming more "masculine with their increasing levels of physical exercise". Society obviously didn't have enough to worry about in the early 20th century.

This persistent idea that a woman's strength would take away from her beauty is the complete antithesis of Annette's philosophy. It had crept into every faction of modern society, but it wasn't strong enough to survive once Annette did something about it. Published in 1916, How to Swim was Annette's first book.

Advocacy for women's health and fitness was at the forefront of Annette's work for the rest of her life. She spent the later years of her life publishing exercise books and teaching women how to use their bodies in the water and for health. She also taught women lots of cool stuff like how to win a challenging race, how to artfully keep your hair dry with a colourful scarf, and that having a rig that rivals a man's didn't diminish your femininity, but rather enhanced it.

"Women are infinitely more graceful than men, in the water."

The International Swimming Hall of Fame describes Annette as a figure who "did more to popularise swimming (especially for women) than any other person".

Oh, and how could I have forgotten; in the 1916 film A Daughter of the Gods, Annette took on a role that is still considered a defining moment in film and television, becoming the first woman to appear nude in a Hollywood film.

Annette was what we would now call box office gold for her star power, grossing silent film profits of over a million dollars. That's how she earned herself the title of the million-dollar mermaid.

She was just such a trailblazer! Even today women are scared to get their kit off. We all still consider the social pros and cons and some of us (myself included) decide it's not really worth it if things go bad. Which is something Annette would probably spit on us for. In fact, getting your kit off needs to be remembered as an Australian woman's legacy.

She pioneered the truth that a woman is both a sexual being and as tough as tits. She showed that a sex symbol can also be open about her trauma without fear of being seen as broken. She was simultaneously objectified and revered and demanded it all with respect. Annette held all those truths in her own hands.

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