Victoria’s nudists wear nothing but an enormous stigma, which they say is undeserved. Annie Lawson reports.
Nudism is a concept that makes many of us squeamish. It’s not just the shock of seeing private bits that are usually (thankfully) hidden, but proclaiming oneself a nudist in Australia comes with an enormous stigma.
Maybe it’s Victoria’s chilly conditions, or the bombardment of saucy, sexed-up images in the media that has made us a little body-conscious, but most of us happily resist the urge to strip off at the beach.
Some critics denounce nudism as a sexually provocative act that invites promiscuity and depravity. So are nudists more promiscuous than Speedo-wearing beach-goers? “You will find that there is none,” says Werner Jacob, president of the Nudist Association of Victoria.
Jacob, 70, who has embraced the au naturel lifestyle since young adulthood, insists nudists are also less likely to perv than their clothed counterparts. “The only ones who look are the ones who won’t take their clothes off – like the men who read the girlie magazines with naked women,” he says. Such passionate community resistance to nudity is something that leaves Jacob somewhat perplexed.
“It’s a prudish idea that I think came from the Victorian era,” he says. “In Victoria, the beaches used to be naked anyway, but in the 1800s it was decided that if you want to go to the beach, you had to be covered from top to toe.”
Anita Grigg, a fellow nudist and the president of Free Beaches Australia, an organisation that promotes clothingoptional beaches, agrees with Jacob.
“Nudists are vulnerable, open, honest and very gentle people who accept any person with a major disability, all types of religions, ethnic backgrounds and sexuality, without judgement – and I can’t say that about the non-nudist community,” she says.
“Mainstream nudists are very conservative – if you’re a young woman at a nude beach, the nude men are very protective.” Members of the nudist movement, which began decades ago in Australia, don’t consume vast amounts of alcohol nor dabble in illicit substances, says Jacob. Being a nudist is about a lifestyle and attitude change more than anything else.
Nudism’s popularity can be traced back to the 1880s in Europe, when doctors prescribed summer holidays in the buff to cure an array of illnesses, according to Jacob. A populist movement in Germany, Holland and France grew during World War I, but things changed during WWII, and the communists and Nazis set about exterminating innocent naturists.
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