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!!

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 3rd, 2008 at 5:35 pm and is filed under General News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.