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!!

How cool is this – posted 6 months ago on Vimeo, and actually filmed sometime during or before 2005, some of you may have already seen the French Naturism advertising spot that was shorlisted for Cannes!

We’re big fans of promoting the lifestyle and the community, particularly to the mainstream – but it would be nice to have the kind of cash required to make simple ads like this, that communicate the message really well!!

Check it out, it’s worth the 30 seconds!!

TVC – France-espace-naturiste- directed by Jerome PY- shortlist Cannes fest 2005 from Jerome PY – Director on Vimeo.

Update: Got another one – ClothesFree.com run a TV channel, it’s good to see more efforts to get the lifestyle into the mainstream by the larger international organisations. Australia is not yet this far advanced, but one day perhaps…

ClothesFree TV – Wholesome nudist fun from ClothesFree.com

We here at FBANAVic are always on the lookout for interesting and worthwhile news to pass on to our 3 readers – to do this, we subscribe to a bunch of news feeds (RSS mostly) as well as use a few keyword-based Google alerts so we’re right on top of anything exciting as it happens!!

Lately, we’ve noticed a heap of “news” traffic from sites purporting to be nudist and naturist sites, but they have some “interesting” content on offer – now, we’re sure this has been going on for a while, but with the ever-increasing popularity of nudism (particularly for holiday travellers), it would appear the spammers and v1agr4c1alis peddlers are hanging onto the coat-tails of a good thing!!

But this one stood out from the rest – My Nudist Friend appeared in our news feed, with this leading bit of text:

‘Nudist’ – now there’s a expression that brings some pretty images to mind! All joking aside, as alluring as the expression sounds, nudism is actually not really about making love at all but alternatively a natural method of living. Sure, nudists like to stroll around nude and yes, these people do so irregardless of the sex of individuals around them, but unless you definitely realize naturism then you’re likely going to have particular myths about it to state the least.

Sounds reasonable, no? We thought we had a winner amongst all the spam noise, a site with some REAL content!! But alas, we were very wrong. Warning – the link at the end of this sentence has a screen shot on it, which uses some colourful language and has very little to do with nudism (NSFW, but not extremely so, in case you were wondering) – NSFW Screenshot!!

Interestingly, the article on the front page does actually contain some content worth reading through, and there’s a Youtube video as well – it’s just all the porn and other advertising bombarding the rest of the site, as well as the highly questionable comments and other article links that ruin it.

Is this the new future, where we get our nudism information as snippets amongst the porn advertising? Never fear though, loyal readership, there’ll be no porn advertising here!! *

* – we actually have a webring link at the bottom of the page, which we do as a link share and do not make any money out of, but we also don’t control the content. We were assured it was always going to have pure nudist links, but would appreciate you letting us know if you notice any changes!!

Update: We had this one pointed out to us as well, PureNudism – perhaps this is just our opinion, but headlines like “Jr Miss Pageant Videos” and “Jr Teen Beauty Pageant” on a nudist site??? WTF??? Seriously, it might be legal according to their legal page, but we believe sites like this actually harm the nudist community and damage wider acceptance into mainstream lifestyles. AANR and other reputable organisations are certainly not dumping their informative content in favour of massive image galleries!!