When Queensland police fined people for taking their clothes off at a well-known nude beach last month, they “poked the bear” that is the naturist community, Scott Rider says.
“That’s b.e.a.r.,” the Queensland Naturist Association vice-president spells. “And we’re all riled up now.”
Queensland is the only state in mainland Australia without a legally recognised clothing-optional beach but, for decades, that didn’t matter so much to the sunshine state’s naturists, according to Rider.
Since the 1960s at least, the Scenic Rim construction worker says, people had been skinny-dipping freely at a number of beaches on the Sunshine Coast including Alexandria Bay, a relatively secluded spot within Noosa national park.
‘A-bay’, as it is known to locals, has hardly been a secret – last year, travel guide Lonely Planet described it as “perhaps the most beautiful of all Australia’s nude beaches”.
But for Edith*, a 68-year-old retired art teacher who was the sole woman among 11 people issued infringement notices for wilful exposure last month, A-bay is – or was – much more than a beautiful beach.
Since the 1970s, when she first started visiting Noosa, it has been a place to meditate, ground herself on sand crystals, absorb nourishing vitamin D, inspire paintings and “be at one with life”.
While naturism has been important to people like Edith, it has remained a lifestyle on the fringes. Not that it seems to have been bothering many.
Retired maths and science teacher Joy Ringrose says she has lived in the Noosa shire for more than 20 years and “doesn’t know anybody” who is unaware of A-bay’s unofficial status.
Ringrose is one of the many Noosa locals who has been to A-bay once or twice over the years, but mainly preferred to leave Edith and the other nudists to their own devices.
“You’ve got to go to a fair bit of trouble to get there,” she says. “And if you don’t like seeing dangly bits and naked people, you don’t go there.”
For years, such was the status quo at A-bay: frequented by a few, tolerated by most and quietly condoned by authorities.
But the era of turning a blind eye may have come to an abrupt end on 16 April, when police issued seven fines of $287 and four warnings for wilful exposure.
Police said the crackdown came after multiple complaints regarding adverse and predatory behaviour – including masturbation – around A-bay.
“It’s been an unofficial nudist beach,” Noosa Snr Sgt Anthony Cowan told the local newspaper days afterwards. “Now it’s officially not. We’re going to police it.”
Public safety fears
The official pushback against nude beaches is not confined to Queensland. In both New South Wales and Victoria, councils have been investigating revoking the clothing-optional status of the few legal nude beaches, primarily citing concerns about indecent acts spilling out into surrounding dunes and carparks, rather than with the naturists themselves.
In 2018 Byron shire narrowly voted down a bid to revoke the clothing-optional status of Tyagarah beach. The council opted instead to try to stamp out acts of public indecency by other means. Cameras now record the registration of vehicles entering the beach car park, signs define where nudity is allowed, police strictly enforce the law where it is not and a safe beaches committee of “genuine naturists” watches and reports indecent behaviour, says Debra Conomy of Byron Naturists.
“That was what had to happen just to make sure that we can get rid of all the inappropriate behaviour.”
Byron’s mayor, Michael Lyon, concedes the measures have “improved the situation”, but he remains concerned about public safety and that surrounding areas have become “a bit of a beat”.
“I thought we should have, and I still think we should, close the beach to nude bathing,” he says.
Farther south and the Australian Naturist Federation’s Victorian state representative Michael James barely had an opportunity to celebrate saving one of three legal nude beaches in the garden state before kicking into campaign mode to preserve a second.
In December last year, Mornington Peninsula shire opted to retain the clothing-optional status of Sunnyside North beach – the only nude beach in greater Melbourne – after a campaign spearheaded by James in which he set out to debunk claims of a link between the beach and antisocial behaviour.
Within weeks, James opened a new front, taking aim against changes to the clothing-optional boundaries at Point Impossible, near Torquay, that naturists believe could lead to the end of nude swimming there.
“Every clothing-optional beach in Victoria has been and is under threat on an ongoing basis by different groups for different reasons,” James says.
But if one of those threats is public indecent acts, then the naturists say they want to help stamp that out.
Rider, up in Queensland, says there is nothing sexual about getting nude at a beach. “That is something for the bedroom, not for public. They are not linked things.”
But, Rider says, “there are freaks everywhere” – and if Queensland naturists had a legally recognised beach at which to bare their bums, they would be the first to call police to report perverts.
“You’re more willing to call the cops if you yourself aren’t worried about being arrested,” he says.
‘Attitudes have changed’
Making Alexandria Bay a legal nude beach would first require change to Queensland law, then support of the local council.
State Noosa MP Sandy Bolton recently conducted community consultation among her constituents on the topic. She says 973 people responded to her two questions. Of those, 820 supported changing state laws to allow legal nude beaches and 798 backed A-bay being considered a legalised, clothing-optional beach.
Bolton says there are passionate views on both sides, with many in the nudist camp having lived in Noosa for decades, harkening back to a time when it enjoyed “that laid-back lifestyle that we talk about”.
For them, the April crackdown came as “quite a shock”, Bolton says.
Edith, who emerged from a deep meditation to be confronted by police in “big boots with guns”, says she was traumatised.
But Bolton concedes that times have changed. New waves of arrivals have flocked to Noosa. The national park is busier. A-bay, she says, “has lost some of its remoteness”.
Bolton says she is in the process of “obtaining the facts and data” as to whether legalising nude bathing would lead to a rise in inappropriate behaviour. If she is satisfied it would most likely not, she will take her constituents’ support for legal, nude bathing at A-bay to parliament.
In the meantime, Edith has come up with her own innovative, though “slightly embarrassing”, solution. After police told her the closest to nudism they could allow was topless with a G-string, she went to the hardware store, bought some string and made her own outfit.
The situation, like the times, she says, is “bizarre”.
“People used to walk along the track and think: ‘oh there’s some nudies down there’,” she says. “People have changed. Attitudes have changed. I don’t know what’s going on in the world.”
*Not her real name
