Pauline Jean English, OAM, is an Australian paraplegic swimmer, who won five medals at two Paralympics. She later became the first person with a disability to swim across Sydney Harbour. English has been paralysed from the waist down since the age of three due to transverse myelitis. In December 1971, shortly after she had finished school at the age of 14, her father encouraged her to take up competitive swimming. He enrolled her at Don Talbot's swimming pool in the Sydney suburb of Hurstville. At that pool, one of Talbot's assistants, Trevor Ellis, taught her how to balance herself and gain power by making her swim against a rubber hose that was tied to both her ankles at the edge of the pool. Four weeks after her first lesson, she broke two Australian records at the New South Wales Parap