Last week, Sydney nudist Anya Petrovic was so annoyed by Manly Vale Public School cutting down trees that gave her back yard privacy, that she decided to hand out flyers to the parents, with a picture of herself in the altogether! According to one of the articles:

The full-frontal nudity flyer, which had a small black square covering her lower private parts, was also left on the windscreens of cars parked in the area.

Interesting issue – it’s commonplace to be naked in your home and even your backyard, and legislation mostly talks about being nude in public places (which your house is not). However, we also have to use common-sense – if you have houses overlooking your property, then you might want to take some additional steps to ensure your privacy (and it’s never a good plan to annoy your neighbours, you do have to live next to them!!).

In this case though, it was the school that cut down the trees – but it is unclear whether the trees themselves were providing the privacy, or just making the privacy better. If there is a fence already in place, it could be argued that the students would have to go out of their way to looking into the nudists yard – is there a law against going out of your way to look into someone’s backyard?

From a nudist perspective, it’s easy to understand Anya’s frustration. However, the article implies there’s more of a story there – it mentions that the nudist couple had asked the school to replace the trees, so perhaps handing out flyers was part of that issue not being resolved? We’re speculating here of course, but we welcome comments and opinions!

Check out the articles yourself, here and here and here

But to the crux of the story – should Anya have handed out flyers at all??

It would appear the push for a legal nude beach on the Gold Coast is active again – check out the article on the Gold Coast Times “Nudists call for Coast beach sites”.

Dr Les Rootsey is quoted in the article, which is short but says what it needs to – and pleasantly avoids any social stereotyping or poor puns that we’ve seen in Victorian media in the past!

More interesting though is the reader poll, and the reader comments. The poll (at the time of writing this) had 70% of readers in favour of the idea. But a couple of the comments readers have made a quite fascinating!!

Show your support and vote in the poll, and we’ll keep a watch on developments!

Update: Another article from a couple of days ago, pointing out that Queensland tourist dollars are heading down the coast to Byron Bay, highlights that nude beaches are actually tourist money spinners – a fact well supported in the US (Gunnison Beach NJ is one of the largest around), and Europe (Cape D’Agde in France is an entire nudist town!). Click here to read the entire article.

In the process of helping out the FBA a little, we discovered today that the “Free Beach Association of Victoria Inc” is actually currently registered with ASIC?? You can check it out yourself here on this link.

First registered in Feb 1994 (!), that’s about all the info we have – does anyone have any additional information? We were advised a few years back that FBAVic was no more, so we’re not sure what this latest find actually means!

Contact us via the contact page if you don’t have an account, new user registration is still disabled pending a better spam registration robot solution!

Apologies to potential new members of this site, but we’ve had to take down the new user registration page, pending an update and some changes to the registration process. Today we received over 100 new registrations in around 3 hours, which either makes us extremely popular, or there’s a spam robot out there with a new way of doing things!!

If you want to register, please drop us a line via the contact page and we’ll manually add you! Thanks for your understanding and patience! We’ll get the functionality back on line as soon as we can!

Update!!: Turns out it’s not that easy to remove the registration functionality without also breaking other things. So we’ve implemented some new registration controls, which seem to be working (for the most part). If anyone has any issues with trying to register, let us know and we’ll help out!!

Update 2!!: Registration has now been disabled, for the time being. We received over 400 new user registrations in a day, talk about popular!! We’re planning a site upgrade this month anyway, so if you want to register in the meantime, drop us a line via contacts and we’ll do the manual option! Thanks

Last time we had beach controversy in Victoria, it was our beach fight back in late 2006. In that particular case, Surf Coast Shire Council was being watched carefully by the other councils as one particular Councillor decided Pt Impossible should have it’s clothing optional status revoked. It took a smallish battle, and the community and common sense prevailed in the end – we worked hard to protect our beaches and keep them available for ALL beach users, and we’ve enjoyed a few quiet years since then without much controversy!

This time around, Sunnyside beach at Mt Eliza has popped up on the radar, but it doesn’t look like nudists are involved (or even being accused!!). After a little research, we think this is the summary story (and correct us if you know more than we do!): Charles Jacobsen (Char) is a retirement home operator who owns the beach front property previously owned by the late Sir Reginald Ansett and Myer family. It’s hard to tell from the boundaries, but it looks like the property in question is not bordering the CO beach at all, it seems to be the next beach further along to the north.

Anyway, it would appear Char has had battles concerning development of his property in the past, and prevailed. Char raised the hackles of equal opportunity groups and divided the Mornington Peninsula community by proposing a “gay proof fence” along the foreshore of his property! Wow!!

It does appear Char isn’t short of a quid, based on his donation of the foreshore land to council back in 2007 along with 10 years of maintenance, when the subdivision was first approved. If you are interested in the original submissions, Mornington Peninsula Shire has comprehensive meeting minutes available online, along with a map of the area in question and the proposed location of the fence.

You can check out the article in The Age and read all about it yourself – the request for the 400m fence is going to be heard by VCAT in the next couple of months.

As always people, do the right thing on our beaches and make sure nudists can never be accused of behaving inappropriately!!