Belinda Hedley can't help being vigilant near water. Her eyes are always scanning for children in trouble since Ms Hedley and her husband Shaun brought their two-year-old twins Braith and Seth back to life after they were found floating face down in a family pool.
It happened quickly. In less than two minutes after the boys had last been seen, they'd entered their grandmother's pool at Singleton via an unlocked gate.
Since then, Ms Hedley has rescued another three children, including a young girl with Down Syndrome, who had sunk silently to the bottom of pools where a parent or carer was nearby but distracted.
"I am so non-complacent. You are watching constantly, seeing everything. It is horrible," she said.
On Thursday, the Royal Life Saving Society - Australia is releasing new research showing the price of being complacent around water with small children.
It has found 461 Australian children under five - including 91 in NSW - fatally drowned in the 15 years to 30 June 2017.
Half died in backyard pools, including portable pools and outdoor spas.
In every fatal drowning in a backyard pool, "active adult supervision had either lapsed entirely or was entirely absent", found a review of police and coroners' reports by Amy Peden, RLS national research manager.
For every child who fatally drowned, at least 10 were admitted to hospital with non-fatal drowning that often caused brain injuries. Many were much worse than the acquired brain damage that caused some problems for many years in the now 13-year-old Hedley twins, who are now doing "smart" and doing well in year 7 at school in Newcastle.
"No supervised child has ever drowned," said Ms Peden this week. When she analysed NSW data, Ms Peden found supervision was deemed to be "completely absent" in nearly 64 per cent of cases. About 5 per cent were supervised by another child, often under 12.
In more than a third of NSW cases, the child had been left unsupervised for five to 10 minutes. In a quarter of cases, it was only three to five minutes, with a few people saying they had been gone for less than a minute - as long as it may take to answer the phone or ducking inside to grab sunscreen.
Yet a child could drown in as little 10 to 20 seconds, said Ms Peden.
In 38 per cent of cases, children slipped into the pool area via a faulty fence or gate, in 26 per cent of cases there was no fence, and in 24 per cent of cases the gate was propped open.
Ms Peden urged parents to actively supervise children in the water: "When we talk about supervision, it's got to be active. You can't be sitting there on your phone. You need to be in the water, giving the child all of your attention," she said.
The society is also warning parents to nominate a designated supervisor, a sober adult, to watch children especially over summer when people may have parties near their pools.
While swimming lessons were great, the society says it is no substitute for supervision and a good pool fence in working order.
Watching toddlers do water familiarisation classes at Carlile Swimming at Five Dock, the manager of its swim program curriculum Dave DuBois said the lessons were as much about teaching parents about the need to be vigilant as teaching children water safety and awareness.
"If you can't find your child, the pool should be the first place to check, and often it is the last place people check when their child goes missing. If they have an accident in the pool, they only have seconds," he said.
The company, which operates learn to swim and water familiarisation for 26,000 young children at nine centres, also discouraged the use of flotation devices because they gradually allowed a parent of a smaller child to move farther away, until they were out of reach if something were to go wrong.
If Ms Hedley had her way, she would make cardio pulmonary resuscitation (CPR) compulsory for every pool owner.
"It is to hard to bring children back from drowning," she said. Ms Hedley and her husband had both received extensive CPR training before they used it to bring back their own sons.
"We did revive them and it is a miracle, given the length of time and lack of oxygen, and that they have mild and not severe brain damage or didn't die.
"I can only put it down [to the fact] we started CPR instantly because every second counts, often (people) wait for the ambulance or a neighbour. If we had waited four minutes for an ambulance, they'd be dead. If we had waited one minute to begin CPR, they may not be alive," she said.
The length of time in the water and before a child is resuscitated will usually determine the extent of the brain damage suffered by the child.
