We just found this great little article on news.com.au, which takes quite an amusing run through some of the do’s and don’ts of going to the beach and getting your kit off!!

Won’t go into much detail here, you really need to read the article yourself!! But we will leave you with our favourite line:

Jumping up and down when the hot sand burns your feet is understandable. Star jumps, however, are indefensible.

Summer is on its way, get ready to get back to the beach!!

According to a recent post on the Melbourne_nudist-naturists forum, one of the Pt Impossible CO beach regulars has detected some shifting in the Surf Coast Shire Council – apparently one of the councillors resigned last week, and they may not go back to the polls for a replacement!

Sure enough, it only took 2 minutes of research to confirm the process – Surf Coast Shire to Fill Vacancy

What does this mean, dear readers of this site and users of Pt Impossible? We don’t actually know – to be honest, we don’t have enough info on what was the outcome of the losers of the elections in 2008!! Does this really mean we’re looking at our good friend Ron getting back on Council? Who knows – but on the plus side, our community is still fiery as always and willing to take up the fight, that’s for sure!!

Is being elected on a count-back really a win?? We wouldn’t have thought so. Ron seems to be missing the limelight though, not for lack of trying – check the Surf Coast Times last month, they weren’t backwards coming forward in this editorial:

We look forward to working with whoever the new councillor is – and wish to remind that person that the nudist community is a great supporter of community values and providing a safe, well-behaved environment for all beach users. Oh, and if there is even a hint of plans to revoke the CO status of the beach, perhaps ask Ron how that worked out last time!!

Keep an eye out for the count-back results on or soon after 23/9

As the UK heads towards the end of their apparently awesome summer, always vocal LadyGod1va wrote a long and detailed post about the notion of “Naturist police”. Definitely read the entire post, it is worth it. Here are a few snippets to give you a sample…

Naturists are obviously no different than any other group of people, you are going to get all mixture of characters, the good, bad and the ugly. However when the same happens in other social groups they perhaps are not tarred with a general image as much as naturists seems to be.

Certainly the same here in Australia, where the inappropriate behaviour we sometimes see and hear about on our beaches is associated with the extremely well behaved nudist community…

The ‘serious’ naturists tend to seek the freedom of naturists clubs through the protection they offer, however this doesn’t protect them from being related to the pervert naturists who do nothing but harm naturism.

We’ve all lamented the “tarred with the same brush” issue of unfair association, but has anyone come up with viable options that might help alleviate the issue?? Readers of this site haven’t, since we have quite a large member base but very low activity on the comments!! C’mon people!!

But in the UK, the police force (the MET) have a volunteer branch, designed to strengthen relationships between the community and police. According to LadyGod1va:

…an idea being discussed is to create a volunteer naturist special police constables. Most of you probably think it cannot be done, too complicated, too expensive not enough support, that is to be expected. My view is that unless you debate an idea, there is no chance of anything being done.

While the UK MET has the facility to at least engage with community groups like this, we’re not sure such flexibility would exist in Australia. It might be nice if such options were available though – but the real question is, would anyone actually become a volunteer and help fight the good fight??

Read the entire article, there’s some interesting observations and commentary in there!

How amusing!! According to this article from over in Austria, nude hikers don’t mind being seen nude on the hiking trail, but aren’t so keen about being seen getting changed – fair enough too!!

According to the article:

“First we wanted people to recognise our right to walk as Nature intended man to be. Then we wanted to stop people gawping at us while we are undressing. It’s very uncomfortable,” said one organiser.

Dare we dream of the day when our main challenge is getting some nude hiking changing facilities!!

When this site was first created, it was designed to simply be a static page with a few links on it – a place for people to start their search into the CO beaches and other locations around Victoria. We updated the site to add a heap more functionality just as the beach fight commenced in the middle of 2006. Now that things have settled down, and our beaches appear safe (for the time being, touch wood!), we’re wondering where to next with the site?

The original name and domain of the site was chosen because of the lack of information about the two groups that are supposed to representing nudists in Victoria – the Victorian branch of the Free Beach Association (no longer in existence) and the Nudist Association of Victoria (still exists, not actively operated) – hence the acronym FBANAVic! But is it still accurate or useful?

And on the flip side, should this site be rolled into one of the national efforts? There’s a couple of national sites out there, but we’ve always wondered about how much they focus on the states outside their home base (which we believe are NSW and QLD).

So, here we are, about to head into summer, and we’re wondering how many readers are actually interested in this site taking on the next evolution? Currently the site has a good number of registered users, and we’re getting reasonable hits daily, but many of those are overseas and not local. The site has always been free and will remain that way, but locating and posting suitable content and posting it is time consuming, and we’re only a small admin team.

We’re interested in your thoughts – perhaps the next month or so will be telling, based on how much feedback we receive. We’re happy to build and launch a new site, with more news and smoother functionality (since this site is a little clunky now, and the backend is getting a bit dated). We’re also happy to consider new domain names that better represent our overall goal – to provide information to Victorians about nudism in our great state, particularly regarding our 4 legal beaches.

Over to you, dear readers – please drop us a line and let us know what you think!!