Battle of the bulge: Australians fret over men's bathers

By Sid Astbury Jan 19, 2012, 3:06 GMT

Sydney - Fifty years ago, a pair of swimming trunks that easily revealed gender could see you ordered off Sydney's Bondi Beach. Men flashing their groins were considered as indecent as women wearing French bikinis.

Fast forward to 2012 and prudishness is back, tearing like a rip tide across Australia's most famous strip of sand. Men in bathing costumes affectionately known to the locals as budgie smugglers or Speedos are outnumbered 10 to one by blokes in boardshorts that hide their thighs and sometimes even their knees.

'I don't know whether it has come from the States, this issue of prudishness or covering up,' said Paul Ellercamp, the owner of oceanswims.com, an open-water swimming website. 'Some women find looking at blokes in budgies obscene.'

Boardshorts - boardies, in the local lingo - are colonizing the beaches. Men in budgies are being sent up as exhibitionists, as being indecent, as being old fogeys. It has become a political issue. Kevin Rudd, the foreign minister, has had a go at Tony Abbott, the leader of the opposition and a volunteer lifesaver, for being pictured in the Speedos that are standard issue at his Sydney surf lifesaving club.

Adam Brown, London-based proprietor of top-shelf fashion label Orlebar Brown, does not feature swimming costumes at all in his beachwear range, only shorts. 'People responded to the concept of shorts that you could swim in, which is at the heart of the label,' he told fashion writer Damien Woolnough.

Take-home message: throw out your bathers and buy shorts or risk ridicule for a hideous fashion faux pas at the world's better beaches.

However, budgies are not a threatened species, insists Vania Dauner, a regular at Bondi Beach. 'Who wouldn't want to see a fit young bloke in Speedos?' she asked. 'You don't find real swimmers in boardshorts.'

It was not until 1961 that bikinis were officially acceptable on Bondi Beach. It was in that year too that officious beach inspector Aubrey Laidlaw was urged to leave his measuring tape at home and stop checking to see whether men's bathers had sufficient fabric.

Ten years earlier, Laidlaw had made headlines for red-carding Hollywood starlet Jean Parker for wearing a swimsuit 'at least five inches below the navel.'

Some see in the proliferation of boardshorts an attack on beach culture. Australians are devoutly egalitarian, proudly protective of the notion that the great outdoors is the great leveller.

Suanne Hunt recalled being in a swimming club where a couple of members who bore heart-surgery's tell-tale scars were apprehensive about people seeing the zipper marks on their chests. 'It's the same thing really,' she said. 'It's part of the culture not to think too much about what you look like.'

A backlash is building. Bondi is the spiritual home of beach culture and Bondi Icebergs, the clubhouse at its southern end, is something of a temple. It was here that in the New Year the national water polo team struck a blow for briefness in briefs. Tom Whalan arranged a friendly with the US water polo team that turned into a celebration of budgie-smuggler wearing.

'It's time we were a bit more proud about wearing them, so blokes are not afraid to put them on,' Whalan told The Sydney Morning Herald. 'I don't have an issue with it but when you go to the beach now, plenty of other people do. It's almost as if wearing budgie smugglers has become an underground movement when a few years ago it was the norm.'