In February the police raided an unofficial nude beach in Sydney – Little Congwong Beach – and demanded the unclothed reclothe, or else.
People have been going naked at the beach for decades, but it was my first visit there when I met Juan and his wife Katina at the beach on a sunny Saturday morning.
“We don’t know everyone here by name,” said Juan as we walked to their favourite spot. “But we tend to see the same faces every week … and sometimes we see more than that.”
Katina stripped off and lay on her towel.
Juan did the same and, in a deft and practised movement, produced a small wooden chess set.
“Now, I won’t insist you take off your clothes,” said Juan, shaking the set. “But you must play me at chess.”
“Yes, I might keep my clothes on,” I said, settling onto my towel.
“No problem. Black or white?”
“White.”
“Just like your bum, I think,” said Katina, from behind her book.
As we set up the board, Juan explained the difference between naturists (who like to get naked in nature) and nudists (who prefer to be nude all the time).
“Mike, over there – he’s a nudist. Always goes nude!”
“Except when he’s frying up a fish for his dinner,” said Katina.
“Even then,” Mike chipped in. “But I turn it over very, very carefully in the pan.”
“I get nervous if I iron a shirt when I’m naked,” I volunteered.
“If that scares you,” said Mike, “you should try chopping carrots.”
Our chess game was attracting old men, and I soon found myself eye-to-eye with a small council of penises. Looking up, I saw some of the old guys were clutching bathers in their hands in case the police came bursting through the bushes again. Once they learned of my profession, the conversation turned to legal options.
“We’ve been here for so many years,” came a voice belonging to a particularly wrinkled member, “isn’t there a law that gives us some rights to the land?”
“You’re thinking of adverse possession,” I said. But while some of them had been coming to the beach for 30 years, no one was prepared to say they actually lived on the beach.
“What about native title?” wondered a sage and uncircumcised someone.
“Interesting angle,” I said stroking my whiskers. “I suppose there is some ongoing connection to the land, but could it be said to be of Indigenous origin?”
“I might be able to pass as Indigenous,” said one particularly leathery fellow.
“No, my friend,” said a fresher-looking specimen. “You just look like something that’s been left out in the sun for two hundred years.”
I was getting concerned. The game was dragging on and I felt my flesh was starting to burn. I took a break to cool off in the water and then joined a long queue of naked people to buy an ice-cream from a sort of Mr Whippy boat that had arrived at the beach.
Back at the chess match, the now ice-cream-licking elders expressed puzzlement and fear at the reported statement of the police superintendent in charge of the raid, “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”.
“Could he seriously be worried about naked children?”
“But there are naked kids on almost every beach.”
“It could be about naked kids,” I said. “But it could also be about people who allow their children to go near naked people.”
“So, if you bring your children near nude criminals, you become a criminal yourself?”
“So it would seem.”
The penises disbanded in mutters.
I won the chess game in the end. Juan was gracious in defeat. I said my goodbyes and went home, sunburnt on my back, shoulders and feet.
Two days later I showed off my new sunburn by stripping naked with 5,000 others on the Opera House steps – all in the name of photographer Spencer Tunick’s art.
Our presence was planned, celebrated and sanctioned. There were naked men, naked women, and even a few naked children. The police were there, to protect us.