The Naturist Centuries
I have been to Obelisk Beach many times, and each time I notice the same thing. The walk down is steep, through bush that closes behind you, and the harbour opens in front of you as you descend—the water very blue, the city visible through the gap where the heads meet.
When you reach the sand there are men lying out, swimming, talking. Ships pass in the harbour channel close enough to see the details of the hull. Occasionally people walk the cliff path above and stop to look. The cruising that happens in the bush at the edges is not concealed from anyone who knows to look for it, though it is not addressed directly either. The beach occupies a position that the culture has not quite decided what to do with: legally protected, physically secluded, nominally non-sexual, practically otherwise.
What I find interesting about it is not the eroticism, which is unremarkable in itself, but the architecture. The beach requires effort to reach. It is inside a national park, at the bottom of a long set of steps, with limited access from the water side. The official nude beaches of Sydney harbour—Obelisk, Lady Bay, Cobblers—share this quality: they are protected by their difficulty. The condition of their existence is that they are hard to get to. The body, to be legally uncovered in public in this city, must first complete a mild ordeal.
I have been thinking about this alongside what I have read about the history of the naturist movement, because the architecture of access—the deliberate inaccessibility, the physical barrier between the unclothed body and the general public—seems to me to encode something about the arrangement the law was willing to make. The body could be uncovered, but it needed to demonstrate that it wasn’t trying to impose itself. The difficulty of access was the body’s credential.
The German movement that gave the twentieth-century naturist tradition most of its vocabulary—Freikörperkultur, Free Body Culture—began in very different circumstances. Late nineteenth-century Germany was undergoing rapid industrialisation, and the Lebensreform movement that produced FKK was a reaction to what the cities had done to the body: sedentary work, polluted air, the disconnection from sun and earth and physical exertion.
The nudity these reformers advocated was health-based, not primarily erotic—sunlight on skin was heliotherapy, used by doctors to treat tuberculosis and rickets; the nude body in outdoor exercise was the rational body claiming what centuries of clothing had denied it.
One of the movement’s early voices, Heinrich Pudor, who coined the term Freikörperkultur in 1906, wrote in 1893: “We don’t want to deny it: for the people of our time, a naked person is tasteless and looks like a slap in the face—that’s how unnatural we have become.”
I find that sentence striking for its directness. The problem, for Pudor, was not the naked body but the reaction to it. The reaction was the evidence of damage—the proof that something had gone wrong between the body and the culture that housed it. The nudity was the proposed remedy.
The movement’s origins notes that FKK was, from the beginning, complicated by the politics it inhabited. The Lebensreform movement intertwined health reform with völkisch nationalism—the ideology of ethnic purity, of the German soil and the German body as co-extensive facts. The ideal body the movement was training and displaying was always already a racially defined body.
By the 1930s the Nazi regime had absorbed and redirected these energies: naturist organisations were dissolved or forced to conform, the socialist and anarchist strands of FKK were suppressed, and the display of healthy bodies became, for a period, a tool of state racial ideology rather than a counter-cultural proposition. The strand of FKK that survived the Nazi period in East Germany was different—more working-class, more connected to the left, nudism as an escape from state conformity rather than an expression of it—but the early movement’s entanglement with racial ideology left a residue in the history that naturism has not always been willing to acknowledge.
What I notice, setting this history beside what I observed in Australia, is the gap between the philosophy and the demographics. The philosophy of naturism as it arrived here—via the German FKK tradition, via the English naturist clubs that borrowed from it, via the mid-twentieth-century health literature about sunlight and fresh air—proposed the unclothed body as a universal democratic fact. All bodies equally present, equally un-assessed, the hierarchies of clothing dissolved.
The reality of the beaches I have been to, and of the naturist movement as I have encountered it in practice, is somewhat different. On the days I have spent there, the bodies present at Obelisk are, in the main, the bodies of men—specifically men who are white, who live in the inner suburbs, who are gay or gay-adjacent, who have the leisure and the physical ease to make the walk. This is not a criticism exactly. It is an observation about the distance between what the movement said it was and what it actually assembled.
Lady Bay sits below a cliff that tourist buses stop on. The ships that pass through the harbour heads can see the beach clearly and sometimes, I have been told, announce their passage audibly. There is a Royal Australian Navy base on the adjacent property. The beach’s official status as clothing-optional dates from 1976.
The nudity below and the Navy base above occupy the same headland without apparent irony, which seems to me to capture something about the arrangement the state made with the unclothed body: it could exist, but it would exist under observation, in proximity to the institutions that managed the rest of public life, and with the clear understanding that it was a permitted exception rather than an ordinary fact.
The legislation that produced the exception is itself worth dwelling on. In Australia, the legalisation of nude bathing at specific beaches required specific acts of parliament. South Australia acted first under Don Dunstan in 1975, designating Maslin Beach. New South Wales later followed with legislation that protected clothing-optional spaces after a long history of police crackdowns on spots that had been used informally for years. The need for legislation—for a specific act of parliament to permit a man to take his clothes off on a beach—is itself evidence about the arrangement. The body in its natural state was not a natural fact in public space. It was an exception that required statutory authorisation.
What the legislation could not resolve was the question that the naturist philosophy had been trying to answer since Pudor. Is the nude body in public sexual or not? The official naturist position was consistent: nudism was not sexual. The clubs had rules about it. I have read accounts of the codes that organised naturism enforced in its early decades—rules against visible arousal, rules about where eyes were directed, rules designed to maintain the distinction between the health-and-sun-worship of the movement and the other thing that the culture kept insisting the naked body implied. The rules were the movement’s attempt to hold the line that Pudor had drawn: the problem is not the naked body, it is the response to it.
What I have found is that the line is harder to hold than the philosophy suggests. The body, uncovered, is not simply one thing. The same man on Obelisk Beach, lying in the sun, is sunbathing and is also available to be looked at. These are not identical conditions but they are not cleanly separable either. The men on the beach know this—which is why some go there to sunbathe and some go to look and some go for both reasons, and why the beach accommodates all of these simultaneously without anyone being required to name which category they are in. The bush at the edges provides a different kind of accommodation for what the beach itself cannot quite acknowledge.
I do not say this as criticism. I say it as an observation about what the naturist project ran into when it tried to legislate the meaning of the uncovered body. The uncovered body did not obediently become health and sun. It remained what it had always been: a body, with everything that implies, placed in a new social arrangement and producing some of the same responses it produced in any other arrangement.
The men who came to me over thirty years included a handful who were active naturists, who belonged to clubs, who spent their weekends at the designated locations. What I noticed about those men was not that they were more comfortable in their bodies—they were no more comfortable, on average, than anyone else. What they had, in some cases, was a particular vocabulary for the uncovered body, a set of propositions about what nudity was for and what it meant, a philosophy that gave their preference a frame. The frame was useful. It was also, sometimes, a little at odds with what was actually happening in the body that carried it.
Heinrich Pudor’s complaint—that the reaction to the naked body was the evidence of damage rather than the naked body itself—keeps coming back to me. He was right about something. But the century and a half since he wrote it has not resolved the question he was pointing at.
The ships still pass through Sydney Harbour and slow slightly as they approach the heads. The tourist buses still stop on the cliff above Lady Bay. The steep steps down to Obelisk are still the body’s credential for being there.
The arrangement persists. The question it encloses persists with it.
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