Topless bathing was common on Australian beaches when I lived here 30 years ago but it has diminished, perhaps thanks to Asian and Muslim immigrants.
I used to see some lovely sights just off the main Tannum beach, sheilas just lying back in the sun on their towels without a care in the world, letting everything hang free. Nowadays however, one has to be grateful for the girls in bikinis.
Frankly, I blame the new prudishness on the Muslims.
Daniel says: “So the Muslims are cool with women in bikinis??? Why the hell do these people move to modern, western countries if they want to turn it into another Jihadstan, or wherever they’re from?!”
I assume they follow the dictates of their religion which aims to conquer the world, through violence if necessary, and rule everybody with Sharia (Islamic law). It seems to me that the West and Muslims are enemies and that the West admits Muslims and allows them to practice Islam to its destruction.
Sydney Morning Herald reports in 2008:
Conservative MP Fred Nile says he wants topless bathing banned in NSW to protect Sydney’s Muslim and Asian communities.
The Reverend Nile has rejected allegations that prudishness is behind a bill he has prepared to ban nudity, including topless sunbathing, on the state’s most popular beaches.
Australia’s reputation as a conservative but culturally inclusive sociery was at risk of erosion by more liberal overseas visitors, he said.
“Our beaches should be a place where no one is offended, whether it’s their religious or cultural views,” he said.
“If they’ve come from a Middle Eastern or Asian country where women never go topless – in fact they usually wear a lot of clothing – I think it’s important to respect all the different cultures that make up Australia.”
The practice was at risk of raising the ire of Muslim men in particular, Mr Nile said.
“I don’t want to have any provocations or disturbances on our public beaches,” he said.
A TOPLESS sunbather is being investigated by police after being accused of sensuously rubbing sun cream on herself on a public beach.
Police were called to a beach at Anzio south of Rome by a furious mother who said the way the “attractive” sunbather was rubbing lotion on her body had “troubled her sons aged 14 and 12.”
The mother said she had asked the 26-year-old woman, identified only as Luisa under Italian privacy laws, to cover herself up. But the woman, still topless, refused and an argument broke out and police were called.
“A patrol was stopped by a mother of two sons who was angry at a topless sunbather and the way she was applying suntan cream,” a police spokesman said…
The number of women sunbathing topless on beaches in Italy and France has dropped in recent years, Italian etiquette expert Countess Barbara Ronchi della Rocca told the UK’s Daily Mail.
Ms Rocca said the beach is no longer the place where you go to get a tan, as people spend the winter topping up their tan in salons.
On any given day, acres of tanned flesh are on view at Bondi Beach: men wearing the briefest of briefs, women sunbathing topless. But it wasn’t always so. In the 1940s, a legendary beach inspector, Aub Laidlaw, patrolled the golden sands, ruler in hand, ensuring that men’s and women’s bathing costumes conformed to bylaws governing public decency.
Costumes had to cover at least three inches of thigh, as well as the entire front of the body, and wobbly bits had to be kept in place by robust straps. Mr Laidlaw frogmarched 50 or more people a week off the beach, including, in 1945, the first woman to brave Bondi in a bikini, and in 1961, a group of men wearing Speedo swimming trunks.
The fanatical Mr Laidlaw retired in 1969, eight years after the bikini was legalised, but now his ghost is once again stalking Sydney’s beaches. A Christian fundamentalist politician, the Rev Fred Nile, is calling for topless sunbathing to be outlawed, and he has received backing from several mainstream MPs.
