Wreck Beach Nudist: An Endangered Species

Sadly this scenario is being repeated all over the world. I'm from Auckland, New Zealand and we are having a similar fight over a beach on the North Shore called St Leonards. Years of intimidation from the local council and police have scared off the couples, families and genuine naturists leaving a handful of perves behind. Now they're gone and naturism on St Leonards is now defunct. The perves did not help things and gave the local authority the "moral" authority to act. Similar problems are happening in Australia. Comercial interests are behind it too: in your case it seems to be a developer-driven university. In our case it was big moneyed people building cliff top mansions and then deciding that nudists were spoiling the scenery. The 'free beach group' here in NZ has been of very little practical help trotting out the line that "there is no specific law prohibiting simple nakedness in a place where it is commonly known to occur", an idea that is great in theory but falls down in practice because the law is a lot more complex than that. The nudist club movement doesn't want to know. What annoys me the most about this whole fight is that beach nudity (or 'feral' nudity as we could call it) is about the values that you state in your article. Instead we are heading for a society where naturism is confined to artificially-created environments that cost a fortune to join - thus it moves away from its class-blind values to something with a class structure where the poorer members of society (those who could most benefit from it) are denied access to it. Only one thing surprises me about Wreck Beach's situation: you have a university right behind it. Doesn't it have some free-thinking arts and humanities people who would be sympathetic to it? I would have thought that proximity to a clothing-optional beach would be a fantastic draw-card for students and staff or has the university lost its conscience too?

All the best in the fight
Darrell