When Bettine Baker was ordered to leave Bondi beach because of her skimpy swimwear, she couldn’t help but scoff.
“The whole business is so old-fashioned and narrow-minded that it’s not even funny,” the 20-year-old said.
She later returned, having rolled her bikini bottoms up to her waist, Sydney’s Sun newspaper reported.
The year was 1952.
A University of Sydney gender studies expert, Catharine Lumby, said the idea that “women have to be God’s police and dress in a way that doesn’t inflame men” was as relevant then as it was now.
The latest furore about “what women should and shouldn’t wear” began after Blue Mountains Leisure Centre, which runs five pools in New South Wales, decided to clear up “confusion” about appropriate swimwear and stressed in a now-deleted Facebook post that G-strings were “not acceptable”.
There was not much support for the G-string ban in evidence but talkback radio, media and social media quickly filled with criticism.
Much of it ran along similar lines to this by Lauren Rosewarne, an associate professor in the University of Melbourne’s school of social and political sciences. “Somehow, the responsibility is on women not to stir desires in men, because then men might act badly and be punished, so we have to put the responsibility of morality on to women’s shoulders,” she said.
Until the 1900s daylight beach swimming was banned and women were expected to wear pants in the water. The Australian swimmer Annette Kellerman smashed conventions and sparked controversy by baring her legs then donning a one-piece.
From the 30s to the 60s, women’s swimwear was policed – often enthusiastically – by beach inspectors who patrolled shores with tape measures to ensure that beachgoers complied with modesty standards.
As rights for women increased after the second world war, and with the invention of the bikini in 1946, newspaper archives show regular run-ins between inspectors and women.
One inspector, Aubrey Laidlaw – dubbed the “King of Bondi” – “never hesitated to order bikini-clad women from the beach”. He “admitted his attraction to the female form” but thought skimpy outfits attracted sexual perverts.
He was a major player in Sydney’s decades-long “bikini wars”.
The National Film and Sound Archives has a short clip from 1955 called Beach Inspectors’ ‘Battle of Bikinis’. It’s footage of Australia’s first annual beach inspectors’ dinner, where women model a range of swimwear that the inspectors must judge.
The voiceover sets the tone. “There are some very tasty dishes on the menu,” the male voice says.
As a woman shows off a neck-to-knee costume, he describes it as from a time “when women went swimming to swim not just to get wolf whistles”.
When a woman appears in a bikini, the inspectors leap to their feet in glee, then order her off.
“The thing that does concern me is the idea that women are responsible for keeping men in check through what they wear,” Lumby says. “If you don’t like looking, look away.”
On the Gold Coast last year a man called for a ban on skimpy swimwear because while he “admired a shapely bare bum” it made him feel “uncomfortable”. The year before a pool in Adelaide said it would remove anyone who disobeyed its “modest swimwear” rules.
On the apparent other side of the spectrum is the burkini, designed in Australia and banned in France. Here it was described as “controversial”.
The fashion historian Dr Lydia Edwards, from Edith Cowan University, wrote in 2020 about the history of swimwear including the burkini. “It doesn’t seem to matter whether women’s swimsuits bare all or cover all: those wearing them will still be judged,” she wrote for the Conversation.
As for the Blue Mountains Leisure Centre dress code, it’s not alone. Other pools have swimwear rules too – but most of them have posters of acceptable and unacceptable kit in change rooms rather than on social media.
Lumby says it’s “not up to women to control men’s sexuality … it’s a very conservative attitude and I would have thought we’re well past that.
“I think there’s a lot of fun to be had in dressing up and feeling attractive.”
