Once on a beach, as I was sanguinely enjoying the feeling of late summer afternoon sun on my entirely bare self, the shoe-shod feet of a man trudged past my line of sight as I gazed out to sea. They were expensive business loafers, stomping angrily through the sand. They were attached to the body of a man wearing a suit, including a tie. The man seemed to have been teleported from the centre of the Sydney CBD to this beach. It is by a wide margin the weirdest thing I have seen at a nude beach.
People who wear clothes to a nude beach are breaking an unspoken social contract that has been in place for decades. It is not somewhere to turn up fully clothed and stare at naked people.
Nude beaches in Australia occupy a particular place in the cultural lexicon. They combine both the life-right of everyone in the country to enjoy for free some of the most spectacular swimming anywhere on Earth. They also tap into a rapidly vanishing streak of egalitarianism: without the trappings of your day-to-day uniform, or the masks we wear in our working lives.
That these spaces exist at all is somewhat miraculous in a culture infamous for its enforcement of – and obedience to – rules, laws, fines and tolls. Government-approved public nudity thankfully slipped past the censorious eyes of paternalistic bureaucrats.
Sydney is rich with more than 100 beaches, three of which are legally designated nude beaches. Clearly, there are plenty of options for you, if being seen as nature made you is not your bag. But if freedom is what you crave, resist the nanny state by visiting your local nude beach, today! But please do not wear a suit – you’re making the rest of us feel uncomfortable.
