When you hear the term synchronised swimming you may very well think of plastic women doing water aerobics in a swimming pool. They wear silly pegs on their noses and are crowned with evangelical smiles. But at the start of the 20th century, the sport was known as Water Ballet, named after the beautiful underwater dance sequences  that Australian swimmer Annette Kellerman performed in glass tanks at variety theatre shows throughout the UK and the USA.

Kellerman was successful across a number of fields, including swimming, fashion, film (where she often starred as a mermaid), and sport. One of the highlights of her career was replacing Anna Pavlova in The Big Show of 1916 at New York’s hippodrome. She was everything a modern woman should be – self-possessed, independent and active.

Kellermann is also credited with popularising the one piece swimsuit for women, after she was arrested for indecency in 1907. Her crime? Flaunting her bare legs on Revere Beach in Boston. Oh, the scandal!

Her biography is told to great effect in the 1952 MGM musical, The Million Dollar Mermaid, starring actor Esther Williams  (herself a champion swimmer). It belonged to a sub-genre called aquatic musicals whose spectacularly elaborate underwater production numbers paved the way for the fantasy film genre. The Million Dollar Mermaid’s splashy, hyperreal aquacades were choreographed by Busby Berkeley and featured Williams rising out of a  cascading waterfall amidst a backdrop of gold lamé-suited mermaids, all spinning and spiraling like tangoing starfish to create a kaleidoscope of human pattern and movement. Production values included vast plumes of coloured smoke, fearless trapeze acts, and bathing beauties shooshing down waterslides lined with flag-waving and skimpily clad modern day gods.  In another memorable scene, Esther plays a pearl-like mermaid in a white tutu who treats us to a cross between an underwater pole dance and a classical ballet  before retreating to the clandestine chamber of a giant clam shell.