Amanda Ducker on the discomfort and bliss of the sauna

In the latest issue (Issue 43), Amanda Ducker writes about a mobile sauna run by Tasmanian artist Selena de Carvalho. Here, she explains the “primal power” of Selena’s retrofitted 1950s council trailer… 

Most of my memories of visiting Elsewhere Sauna are as misty as its rose-tinted window. That’s because I have made the pilgrimage, driving 60 kilometres south from Hobart to Drip Beach or Randalls Bay, many times since it opened two-and-a-half years ago. 

One sauna experience is rather like another. It varies as little as the temperature dial on the back wall, which may dip from the 80℃ ideal if someone leaves ajar the heavy timber door, with its oversized blacksmith-crafted hinges and river-stone knob, for a few unnecessary seconds. Or it may rise incrementally if one of us ladles water onto the coals.

Each session runs for an hour with a maximum of five people. I prefer it when we are all women, which is mostly the case. Sometimes I go with a friend or four. On a recent solo visit, I recommended the wonderful 2023 Estonian documentary Smoke Sauna Sisterhood to the other guests. “In the darkness of a smoke sauna, women share their innermost secrets and intimate experiences,” runs the logline, “washing off the shame trapped in their bodies and regaining their strength through a sense of communion.” The film was made over years with the same group of women, whereas I was among strangers that day, so I revealed little, enjoying my self-containment. At the end of the session a young woman named Amy said she felt completely transformed and that only in this renewed state could she recognise how stressed she had been all week at work. 

I savour the sameness of the sauna. I know what I will be getting. I know I will feel too hot at times then way too cold when I first plunge into the ocean to cool off. I know that if I repeat this sequence, with its paradox of discomfort and bliss, three or four times in my allotted hour I will emerge as a far better version of myself: calmer, stronger, happier, cleaner and clearer. I will tingle with joy. And that does not happen very often. The sauna is teaching me I need a certain intensity to shift my dial out of daily-ness and into the realm of the profound. All of this is to say, I suppose, that my Elsewhere Sauna experience is sacred and comforting to me.

My mother died on the second day of winter in 2023. I had a longstanding sauna booking two days later with a good friend, who asked me if I preferred to cancel. I said no, I need the sauna more than ever. Mum had not wanted a funeral service but some of our many lifelong friends were flying in anyway and a gathering was brewing. With little warning (she died suddenly) and a tight deadline (we had to catch the waxing of the full moon), I was called to lead Mum’s ritual farewell. Towards the end of my hot and cold hour, I waded into the ocean and raised my arms above my head in a V formation. Valhalla. Voila. I knew what to do for my viking queen. It all became clear. Fire. Circle. Moon. We would all call Mum’s name one last time then we would call to the heavens to take her. And so it was.

Selena de Carvalho, who created Elsewhere Sauna with fellow artist Nanna Bayer and now runs it on her own, understands the primal power of her offering. We talked about it the other day when we met at the Longley Waterhole, near her home on land that once belonged to the Mouheneenner people of the South East Tribe.  

“Sauna originates from Finland but it is a global practice,” Selena said, gently tossing small water-smoothed stones in her palm as if she were weighing them. Every now and then we’d notice another stone cairn her child, Tiki, 17, had balanced into pyramid formation along the mostly dry riverbed. 

“All cultures have gathered around fire with different technologies, different modalities and different ways of becoming intimate with that heat, so sauna feels like a really old human practice,” she continued. “The joyousness is people recognising, even if they can’t articulate it, that they are returning to an evolutionary partner. Humans are the only species that are custodians of fire. We know how to build it, gather around it, cook with it and heat ourselves with it. The sauna brings a deep sense of joy through a return to something very elemental and simple.”

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