My 5yo daughter Callista has no comprehension of the barriers caused by clothes. Recently another child her age asked "Why aren’t you wearing togs", Callista replied "Because I don’t have to", and they played for hours. Kids this age have a beautiful understanding, tolerance and blindness to differences that we look at and admire. I believe naturism fosters this sort of tolerance.
I met many ‘children’ at River Island over the October long weekend. While some were nude, most were not and while some may view this as a failing for naturism in Australia, I see instead children that are already tolerant and accepting of alternative lifestyles. We have to remember that naturism is a lifestyle choice. These children will grow into adults who may or may not embrace nudity themselves, but if they take this tolerance into the general community it can only be a good thing.
When I read Bob’s regular column (page 37) which shows how prevalent social nudity was in the late 60’s, I had to wonder what’s changed. Perhaps some of us just got complacent as conservative politicians gradually eroded choices; progressively legislating legal public nudity out of existence. And here we are again with all of Victoria’s nude beaches under threat (page 31) and I wonder what are we going to do? If we sit back and do nothing someone else will make this decision without us and don’t be too be surprised if the results aren’t in our favour. The recent win for nude camping at Samurai Beach (page 15) shows what successful lobbying can do. So let’s not take this win for granted, remember if we do nothing conservative perceptions tend to become disturbing reality.
If only the rest of the world could see Naturism through Callistas eyes, just last weekend I had nothing on but a pair of sneakers and sat down to take these off. She said to me "Why are you taking them off mummy? To get naked?"
From the mouths of babes...
An apology to readers (due to a printing mistake).
As you can see issue 2 has arrived! We’re very excited about this issue and believe we’ve improved on issue one in every way; and we plan to continue delivering a better and better magazine with every issue. On time, every time!
Unfortunately, looking through issue 2 we’re found a few mistakes. Particularly it seems a random selection of the letter "I" and the letter "l" went missing from a couple of pages of this issue somewhere between us signing off the proof and getting the magazine delivered to our office. Perhaps a victim of a last minute change, we’re not exactly sure yet but we’re talking to our pre-press people and our printer now to see what exactly went wrong to be sure we can stop these types of mistakes creeping into the magazines in the future.
So we apologise to Frank Maundrell, Rob Stephenson and Gary Hogbin, who’s letters to the ‘bottom line’ suffered most and ask that you could please overlook the small instance of this problem on pages 13 and 52. With each issue we are working hard to minimise any mistakes.
The letters from Frank, Rob and Gary are very important to us and to ensure you are able to read them the way they intended, we have reproduced them for you on the following page. We will also post them on our website.
Thankyou again for supporting the new Australian Sun and Health. Perhaps I will see some of you at the ANF convention held in December/January at the ACT Nudist Club.
Kind Regards
Sarah Scriven,
Editor, Australian Sun and Health
