Another Sydney cover-up - bathers are getting their gear on (SMH)
www.freebeach.info
Another Sydney cover-up - bathers are getting their gear on
JOSEPHINE TOVEY
February 27, 2010
[Photo] Veteran naturist Bob Reed remembers bustling summer days at
Reef Beach. Photo: Kate Geraghty
PHOTOGRAPHER Spencer Tunick, renowned for capturing images of naked
crowds, arrived in Sydney this week to find a city desperate to cover
up.
A popular, though unofficial, nude beach was raided last weekend, two
weeks after a legal nude beach came under fire from a Woollahra
councillor.
''I think Sydney is a little bit conservative,'' said Mr Tunick, who
hopes to photograph several thousand people in their birthday suits at
the Opera House on Monday. ''I sensed that from the difficulty I had
in finding people.''
Mr Tunick, whose project is part of Mardi Gras, said nudity had again
become something illicit or even criminal, ''when it should be the
opposite. Being nude should promote a sense of freedom.''
According to veteran naturist Bob Reed, Sydney hasn't always been so
reluctant to disrobe. Mr Reed remembers bustling summer days on Reef
Beach in the years after Neville Wran legalised nude bathing there in
1976.
''On a warm Saturday or Sunday you'd get 300-400 people,'' he said.
Last weekend six officers swooped on Little Congwong beach at La
Perouse, instructing about 80 unsuspecting and unclad beachgoers to
cover up. Ten were issued official warnings. Police said they would
return.
Superintendent Gavin Dengate, who oversaw the raid on Little Congwong,
said that if he had found school-age children naked there last week,
he ''would have looked at a referral'' to the Department of Community
Services.
Earlier this month, a Woollahra councillor moved to have Lady Bay
''reinstated as a family friendly beach''.
Professor Doug Booth, author of Australian Beach Cultures: the history
of sun, sand, and surf, said the utopian ideas surrounding public
nudity, and particularly nude bathing, held by young baby boomers have
been thoroughly rejected by their offspring. Even Speedos are now
considered indecent.
In the past 10 years he had noticed ''a remarkable conservatism which
reveals itself in attitudes towards bathing costumes''. ''I think it's
a combination of social hysteria around paedophilia and a fear of
technology and what technology can do now,'' he said.
Even a statue of a naked child on the beach can cause angst and have
to be covered, as happened with an entry in last year's Sculpture by
the Sea exhibition.
Mr Reed conceded in this climate, the movement was having trouble
attracting new recruits.
'''Most naturists are the naturists who were nude in the 1970s and
1980s. This is who [the police are] harassing now - people in their
50s, 60s and 70s.''