Archive for October, 2011

I was frolicking on the beach in Surfers Paradise recently when I bumped into my neighbours from home.  We stood chatting about life, kids, our fellow neighbours and local council issues.  Then it dawned on me that I was wearing nothing but a bikini, which is basically the equivalent of chatting to my neighbours outside my home in my bra and undies.  In the cities of the Southern States such attire is simply not acceptable.  It seems when it comes to fashion the rules change as you travel from city to city and town to town.

In the Southern States the rules regarding the wearing of short dresses are clear: the shorter the dress the more material is required around the decolletage.  By contrast, in Surfers Paradise women – and in many instances girls – can freely walk the streets in skimpy dresses replete with billowing cleavage and hemlines that I have renamed flap-tamers (because the sheers number of Brazilian waxing salons on the Gold Coast renders the term muff clipper redundant!)

In Melbourne and Sydney overweight, pale-faced, work-o-holics convene in local parks to sweat it out in their baggy Bonds tracky-dacks.  This cultural phenomenon is known as Boot Camp.  On the Gold Coast the sprightly, young (and even old, although it’s hard to tell since Queensland has earned the unofficial title of Australia’s plastic surgery capital), flexible and lean converge on the beaches and the foreshores for group yoga classes where the uniform of choice is again the humble bikini or, for the more modest, a pair of short shorts.  I witnessed a woman in the throes of downward dog whose short shorts were so short you could almost see her ovaries.

A little down South in Byron Bay the general population isn’t as toned (I’m feeling a pun coming on here), perhaps because they aren’t far enough into their sea change or possibly because the midnight munchies have got the better of them.  Nevertheless there’s still plenty of flesh on show.  However with the influx of international backpackers and hippies from neighbouring Mullumbimby and Nimbin to Byron’s shores the town has more of a retro “I just got back from Woodstock” sensibility.

In Byron I saw men at the supermarket in their speedos but they teamed them with a tie-dyed “Save the Whales” t-shirts.  With the possible exception of Tony Abbot, no man has ever entered a supermarket in the Southern Sates wearing budgie smugglers.

In Byron I saw women on the beach wearing crocheted bikinis, which –  in Melbourne and Sydney – can only legitimately by worn by South African immigrants circa 1985.

Perhaps it’s the colder climate and the perpetual fear of what the boys in my high school termed NERTS (nipples erect through shirt) but women in Melbourne are more modest.  In Byron and the Gold Coast it’s more of a slip if you don’t show a nip. Up North, the young women are all wearing their boyfriends’ over-sized tank tops as dresses.  With not a bra in sight.  I call this look “I’m still breast-feeding my four-year-old chic”.

Interestingly, if you drive an hour or two North of the Gold Coast to quaint Noosa and your wearing, for example, your signature Gold Coast skimpy dress, you might feel a little like Julia Roberts did in Pretty Woman when she went shopping on Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills.  In Noosa the fashion rules roughly equate to the rules of nautical exploration.  If you’re wearing a navy and white stripped polo walking arm in arm with a man who resembles Thurston Howell from Gilligan’s Island you’ll fit right in.