Didn’t take long for news of the Clean Up Australia Day effort at Pt Impossible to hit the media. Yes, the title of this post is one and the same title used in the Geelong Advertiser article (Click Here for the online version or Click Here for the version scanned direct from the paper itself).

The article itself is fine and covers the important information quite well (kudos to journalist Daniel Breen), but who comes up with these titles? The title has zero to do with the content of the article, and seems to be intended purely to lure people in!!

Just to re-iterate what we’ve all being saying for years (and what the police reports still verify), there are no reported or documented inappropriate or illegal acts in the legalised clothing optional areas on Victorian nude beaches - that does not mean these things are not happening in car parks, dunes, access trails, caravan parks, bush walking trails, monuments, road side rest rooms and car back seats all over the country, including on and around the regular textile beaches, but the stats suggest the CO areas are some of the safest beach real-estate around.

Police have previously confirmed that they have more issues with the textile beaches than the nude beaches, so why the media seeks to perpetuate the myth is a mystery to us. The readers are tired of these lame sensationalist headlines, nudists are just average people on the beach wearing 200gms less clothing than other beaches, and are 200% better behaved - it would be nice if beach-goers could feel as safe on all textile beaches as they do on the nude beaches…

Nudists are some of the best behaved and responsible beach goers in this country - we are more marginalised than your average beach goer, and so are more protective of our facilities. And less tolerant of unacceptable behaviour!! A reminder to everyone, if you see inappropriate and/or illegal behaviour on or around our nude beaches, report it!! We’ve worked hard with the council and police to get our concerns voiced, so they want to hear from you if something is not right!! And if you do happen to see the police patrolling the beaches, say hi to them!!

Come out and support your beach on Clean Up Australia Day, we want to see you there!!

A short note to remind everyone that Clean Up Australia Day is fast approaching, and we’ll be cleaning up Posso again this year!! Sunday March 2nd is the big day, and we’d love a bigger turn out than last year!!

If you use the beach, and support keeping it for your use into the future, then help us out once a year and let’s clean it up!! Show everyone that you support the fight to keep the beaches nude, and you like to keep your beaches clean!!

More details can be found by clicking the big blue logo over there on the right side of the page!! We look forward to seeing you there!!

An article in The Age yesterday titled “The Naked Truth” (Click here for the link) does a reasonable job of discussing the state of nudism in Australia, in comparison to the rest of the world.

Interviewed were 2 people of long standing in the nudist community - Lindsay Parkyns, president of the ANF (www.aus-nude.org.au) and Werner Jacob, president of the Nudist Association of Victoria. A variety of other representatives were also interviewed, including Mayor of the Surf Coast Shire Dean Webster (who had a couple of interesting and complementary things to say - we aim to be the best behaved on the beach, so kudos for noticing that nudist beach issues are unrelated to the nudists themselves!!).

We found this to be a very interesting article - it discussed how Australia seemed to be going backwards with attitudes to nudity, while accelerating on things like alcohol and gambling!! Apparently we’ve become a “wowser” society, attributable to things like the Howard Government (?), a really killer sun, and an easily tittilated population.

But the kicker of the article (in our view) was the memberships - since the 1960’s, nudists community memberships are falling, and the average age of nudists is 55-80!! There is a recognition that with an aging community, very low uptake of younger members, and no new beaches added since the 1980’s, there’s a real risk that nudism in Australia will die out!!

Well, the good news is some of us are not in the average age group (including the webmaster of this site!!). There are other online forums where the average ages are much lower - nudists are online more, which could distort the membership numbers since we tend not to join the clubs and resorts. Of course, harnessing the power of a large online population can be tricky, since our past-time is still not particularly mainstream…

And in case you are wondering, Werner Jacob has been the head of NAV (Nudist Association of Victoria) since forever!! But NAV has no online presence and an email address that is not widely distributed. This website, although using the NAV designation, is not formally/officially supported by NAV. We simply wanted to give the nudist community an information portal that was sorely lacking, for both NAV and the (now defunct) FBA Victoria. NAV does most of their work with the clubs/resorts, and has the ANF affiliation - it’s no wonder there is very little uptake from the younger generation, when it is so hard to find information about our community!!

In case the link to The Age stops working, you can also get the PDF -> Click here

Finally, for everyone aged 18-40, if you already like to hang out nude at home and in the backyard, and have even briefly contemplated the idea of hitting one of our great beaches, just do it!! Drop us a line here and you’d be more than welcome to come along and catch up with a great group of people!!

And don’t forget the DTE Confab swim nights, if you prefer the pool!!