By Phil Jarratt
On Labour Day I decided to let it all hang out at A-Bay.
It was a stunningly beautiful autumn day, and with most parts of my body wracked with pain from weeks of challenging surf, I decided to forego the waves for an eight-kilometre round trip walk to see what all the nudism fuss was about. And, if the mood should take me to chance a therapeutic skinny-dip, well, let’s just hope that Senior Sergeant Anthony Cowan is not lurking in the dunes ready to pounce.
The good sergeant, you may recall, told Noosa Today a couple of weeks back: “It’s been an unofficial nudist beach. Now it’s officially not. We’re going to police it.”
And police it they have, issuing fines for wilful exposure to 10 men and one woman during a blitz over the Anzac Day holiday period.
Not that I want to pick on the local coppers, who by and large do an excellent job of keeping us whole and happy. I know they have to respond to complaints, but is this really necessary?
No doubt the thrill will wear off, as it has over many crackdowns (no pun intended) of the past, including the big daddy of them all, in November 2016, when barely clad nudists protested a huge police blitz outside Noosa Police Beat in Hastings Street, with Australian Sex Party member Robin Bristow answering then Noosa MP Glen Elmes’s negative position on legalising nude bathing in Queensland by revealing the words, “Glen Elmes kiss my arse” written on, well, where do you reckon?
Elmes, a man of ample girth and great good humour, responded: “They’ll be waiting a while.”
And the protests didn’t help A-Bay’s Nude Olympics event, which had attracted hundreds of people every year since its inception in the 1980s for a frolic in the nick on our most isolated beach. Not wanting participants to end up in the nick in the nick, so to speak, organisers moved the Nude Olympics to the saner environment of Byron Bay.
The row about skinny dipping at A-Bay has been raging periodically since 1975 when Queensland became the only state not to have created a legal nude bathing beach, thereby sparking nearly 50 years of taxpayer money funding a compliance program even more doomed than the war on drugs.
But of course nudism (or naturism, if you will) had been rampant in Noosa since the start of the postwar era, and ramped up big-time in the ‘60s and early ‘70s.
And it wasn’t confined to A-Bay either.
In a Heritage Noosa interview a few years back, Hey Bill Watson revealed that he got his start in the beach selling caper in the late 1960s flogging oranges to thirsty nudies hidden away around the rocky ledges of Granite Bay.
Said Bill: “It was all happening at Granite, everybody in the nude and playing beach cricket or basketball or whatever. No one ever really went around there in those days, unless it was to get your gear off. But there was a lot of them, and I sold a shitload of oranges!”
In an interview with this writer a few years ago, pioneer restaurateur Pierre Oth recalled this incident from the early ‘70s: “One day I was sitting around at Granite Bay, in the nude of course, playing backgammon, and a fellow came up the beach and asked if I was French. He was in the nude too, of course.”
The encounter led to Pierre being funded to start his first restaurant.
Anecdotally there are many fascinating and often hilarious stories about public nudity in Noosa, but very few, if any, have hit the authorised histories.
And this one certainly hasn’t.
Soon after arrival to make Noosa our home in 1990, my wife and I dined at Palmer’s on Hastings Street, where we probably had too many celebratory drinks with hosts Leonie and Stef. Around midnight we left and made the decision that it would be sensible to jump in the ocean to diminish the effects of alcohol before driving home. We plunged naked into the ocean at a deserted Main Beach and laughed for sheer joy. We had found a new home where anything was possible, if a bit stupid.
This was by no means my first skinny dip. I grew up in the ‘60s when it was de rigueur, when I worked in the Canberra Parliamentary Press Gallery in the historic year of 1972, on steamy summer nights after nightcaps at Charlie’s Bar it was normal for journos and even a few game pollies to sit naked in Lake Burley Griffin and sip from the wine sack; my wife was topless when I met her on Whale Beach, then known as South Bali for reasons which have now evaporated, as a new modesty prevails in Bali’s south and north.
Around that time I persuaded a future world champion surfer and a few other local heroes to surf naked at a remote break near Brunswick Heads for a magazine cover story called Teddy Bears’ Picnic. What was I thinking? Naturally I jumped in for a few waves with them.
But to get back to the here and now, like my friend Glen Elmes, I don’t feel any compunction to share my naked form with the general public, but I do believe that the vast majority of those who do are safe, sane human beings, if sometimes a little odd, and I think it’s absurd, without any real due cause, to deny them the right to let it all hang out. Which is why I walked around to A-Bay on Labour Day, dropped my boardies on the sand and jumped in, sharing the section of beach with maybe a dozen other similarly attired.
God it was good! I can’t explain why, it just is. Naked ball games on the beach, or any other group activities for that matter, leave me out. But please, can we leave people alone to natural and innocent pleasures?
