Byron Bay is to be stripped of its nudist beach – and naturists blame ‘conservative creep’

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Campaigners for the closure cite ‘lewd’ behaviour in nearby dunes but naked bathers say they’re just ‘embracing the beach as Mother Nature intended’

has opened up and the six naturists – four men, two women – have stripped down to their birthday suits for a quick dip in the buff.

Tyagarah itself was first designated as a clothing-optional beach in 1998 to allow those looking to engage in non-sexual nudity to be one with the surf without risk of being fined or arrested.Duncan James, vice-president of Northern Rivers Naturists, says: ‘Many of the beach users have described it as their happy place, a place where they can disconnect from modern day stresses, a place they can feel at one with nature.’It is not the only such beach, or event, in Australia.

“My first time was probably when I was 18, swimming on an isolated beach on the north coast. We were on holiday and I just went ‘this is magic’,” she says. “The people trying to close the beach down are quite obsessed with the idea of people having sex in the dunes,” Benham says. “The people trying to shut the beach are focusing on this idea that it’s a sex beach, which has never been my experience.”

“I am so shocked by it. I can’t believe Byron Bay would become so conservative,” she says. “We have, as a people and a culture, become more conservative and I think that conservative creep has come to Byron.”If residents were opposed to the beach being at the end of their street, she says the simplest solution would be to move it.to save Tyagarah beach or find an alternative failed to get anything moving.

With Sunday approaching, Benham says there is no word about alternatives, when exactly the designation will be lifted, or how the naturists will be treated at law if they continue to use the beach.

 

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