I had to leave Australia to feel at ease on the beach for the first time | Omar Sakr

I grew up with an awful self-consciousness - not being as smooth and hairless as the white bodies I saw around me. In Italy, I finally took my shirt off and let the sun hit my furry chest

I tolerate beaches, I do not love them. This is only one of many ways I sit outside the popular Home and Away-mythologising of Australia as a waterside paradise of fit white bodies becoming an acceptable shade of light brown.

Among my Lebanese family, I was alone in feeling this way. On Sundays we would often go on a long drive to Wollongong beach in a caravan of cars, to dive or be hurled into the ocean. I'm not sure why we went so far from our home in Liverpool, in Sydney's south-west. All I know is I hated it: the amount of time it took to fill Eskies with food and drink, for everyone to get ready, the hours in traffic that felt like forever in the heat, the flies, the BO, squished and sweating in the back of a Holden Commodore with half a dozen cousins.