For regular readers of this site, you’ll know that a group of us head out every year to take part in Clean Up Australia Day, with Point Impossible beach as our chosen clean-up location. This will be our third (4th?) year of taking part, and every year we find a little less rubbish than the year before – testament to the care and dedication nudists have to looking after their beaches! Even the dunes area (where no-one should be anyway) seems cleaner each year.

This year is no different, with our group seeking (and likely getting) permission to enter the dunes area (clothed) for our clean-up efforts. We walk the beach as well, to make sure it is spic and span!! The carpark and surrounding areas also get the once-over.

The details this year are similar to prior years – meet at the carpark at 10am on Sunday 6th March. The plan is to work until around 1pm (if we need that long), followed by a sausage sizzle (bring a gold coin!).

Our clean-up site is registered already – head on over to http://www.cleanupaustraliaday.org.au/Pt+Impossible+Beach and register your details!

We’re looking for more supporters this year to come out and assist – while it’s great to see the regulars each year, a few new faces would be great!! If you use the beach and appreciate the facilities that we are lucky to have access to, then half a day out of your year is not much to ask!

A huge thanks to Jenni for being our organiser this year, your efforts are appreciated!

You may recall our previous posts regarding Skinbook, and how there seemed to be a definite trend toward social networking and nudism. Well, that trend seems set to continue, with Vita Nuda opening an Australian site at http://vitanudaaustralia.com. This could mean good things for the Australian nudist community, since there is definitely a lack of quality online nudist representation in our small pocket of the world (although we are looking to change a little of that, with the planned rework of this site and potentially others! More on that later…).

Vita Nuda focuses on the “youth” nudist demographic, catering specifically to the under 36 age group. Not sure why 36 was picked, probably seems old to your average 22yo! But we digress – sites like Vita Nuda are unlikely to gain much traction IRL, unless they can bridge that invisible chasm that sits between a young nudist comfortable in front of their computer, and actually getting them to leave the house and meet other people!! From our perspective, it seems pretty damn hard just to get them to leave the couch, nude or otherwise! Sorry, generalising…

Most of the people involved with this site are mid-30′s on average – we have a few younger, and a few older. And what we’ve noticed is that the youth of today are spending more time on their iPhone’s and Bold BBs than they do actually meeting new people! Sure, you see them hovering around town in their little groups, but how many of them can count more than 10 of their 1000′s of FB friends as being actual, real, “I’ll hang out with you, let’s catch up for coffeez” kind of friends?? It seems slightly sad, that the youth have so many friends and still seem somewhat alone… but we digress, not trying to solve cultural demographics and societal/technology trends in this post!! And we are generalising again, before you start flaming us!

But the point remains – building a website is great, but we’ve been there and done that. We hope Vita Nuda actually complete some of the plans they list on their site, because it’s all good for the nudist community if the youth can get energised enough to balance the older demographic we currently have and ensure nudism remains strong in Australia. It’s critical from a beach perspective too – we need nude people on the legal beaches every summer in bigger crowds if we don’t want to constantly risk losing them.

Good luck Vita Nuda, we wish you every success in getting the under 36′s excited about nudism. Here’s hoping it’s not another Skinbook, because according to the site “Once our new site is online, we will be auditing all users to ensure they fit our profile of membership”. And we all know how successful membership profiling is!

Nudism has always suffered a little with a (perhaps stereotypical) view by society that it’s mostly populated by old guys, and is a dying institution. But this is not so – certainly nudism is changing in a variety of ways, and there’s no doubt that the way nudists interact with textile society is evolving as well.

A couple of the drivers towards positive change is the requirement to enlist the support of the next generation of nudists. While the 30-45yo club is somewhat reasonably represented, the 20-35yo crowd are really the future of this community.

So it was with delight that we discovered the Young Naturists and Nudists America have created and launched an iPhone app!! Brilliant – many of us here are iPhone users, so an app that allows us to

find nudist and naturist events , parties , meet-up groups , beaches , groups, organizations and destinations anywhere in the world at a click of a button

is a pretty cool idea! Particularly since such an app has the potential for much wider use (integration with other sites/services like Facebook and meetup.com, etc)

But the excitement was quickly dampened, when a visit to the iTunes store to check it out revealed that it is going to cost $8.99 for us Australians ($6.99 in the US). Nine bucks for an app that searches for something, provides some detail and then draws a map? Isn’t that what Google does?? Sure, Google’s results are not as specific to nudists, but still??

I hope they do a bit more analysis and quickly realise that the best way to get their app out there is to make it attractive to the target market. iPhone app buyers won’t pay that kind of money for an app unless it does something that cannot be done any other way!!

As a side note, administrators of this site and probably those involved in the Australian Free Beach Association and the Australian Naturist Federation would probably be interested in getting involved, and perhaps assisting with keeping the Australian content fresh. It would make the app much more attractive to this market!

While naturist issues nationally are not our core interest here on a Victorian site, we still like to report when our interstate community members are in the news. In this case, Coolum naturist Mark Hayter has decided to get vocal about the fact that Alexandria Bay (A-Bay) is basically a rubber stamp away from being legal, if only the parties involved would stop passing the buck!!

According to this article:

“It’s very frustrating as it is such hypocrisy,” Mr Hayter said.

“They’re burying their head in the sand.

“We got permission from (former Premier) Peter Beattie, this was honoured by Anna Bligh who said the council should make an application. All Bob (Abbot, Sunshine Coast mayor) has to do is get off his bum and make it legal.

“It’s annoying that they pass the buck here, there and everywhere.”

It’s an interesting article and well worth a read – if anyone from the FBA is reading this site, perhaps this is a good opportunity to wade in and lend your support!! It is important to remember that there are NO legal CO beaches in Queensland, so even getting a rubber stamp on A-Bay probably has a little “precedent” baggage attached to it.

A new article appeared in the Surf Coast Times (read more here) providing an update on the “stalker” event on New Years Day. If you want to refresh your memory, you can check out the post previous to this one!!

Anyway, the summary is that the court date is set for February 17 in the Geelong Magistrates – everyone please keep an eye out and let us know the result if you hear it.