Travels With Naked Girls - CHAPTER 1 - 2

Chapter 1.

Beginnings.

I suppose my travels with girls really started when I went into the Peace Corps in Malaysia in 1969, and fell in love with an Australian girl there.

My Dad sent me a Poloroid camera, in hopes that I would send him some photos of where I lived and so on. I did, but I also took naked photos of Kate. Poloroid was ideal for that, because we could do it in secret, and not have to take the photos to anyone for developing. We were both volunteers, and didn't want anyone else to know about the photos.

Kate ran off with some foreign guy, and after that I never had much to do with the romance and marriage game. My heart just wasn't in it.

I still liked girls though. I went back to the U. S. to study English in graduate school. I kept on doing nudes whenever I could find models. That wasn't hard. It was the 70's, and free-spirited university girls were easy to find.

The same was not true of university jobs in English, however. The Viet Nam war had driven lots of guys into graduate school. Competition was fierce. It began to look like I was not headed for a professorial job at Harvard or Cornell. Something like East Nowhere State Technical College at Dipstick seemed more likely.

I decided to go someplace interesting. I went to Australia. Memories of Kate may have had something to do with this. But Australia had a lot of charm simply because it was so big and so far away. In those days a lot of Americans dreamed about going to Australia, but hardly anyone actually went there.

I landed a job at a girls' high school at Armidale, a charming inland town halfway between Sydney and Brisbane. There were lots of interesting people there because it was a university town, the University of New England. In fact it was the university where Kate had studied.

I taught for 3 years in Armidale and then 8 more in Sydney and Melbourne. I still did nudes when I could. In those halcyon days, I was even able to use my students as models, though never nude of course. Photography became my passion.

Then came an event that changed my life. A couple in Queensland named Les & Jan Hotchkins started a nudist magazine, Australian Sun & Health, in 1982. In the first issue, they asked for volunteers to write articles and take photos for them.

I wrote them a letter -- this was back in the days when people still wrote letters -- and they invited me to meet them at the annual nudist convention at New Year's. We hit it off, and I started writing articles for them.

I loved visiting nudist resorts. Everyone being nude seemed very simple and natural to me. A better world. Of course, the resorts were on private grounds hidden away in the countryside somewhere, so it wasn't quite like nakedness was taking over the world. But it was a start.

I even did a few covers for Australian Sun & Health, simply by going up to girls at nude beaches and asking them. You could still find beautiful girls at nude beaches in those days.

I quite enjoyed approaching the girls, though I admit it took me awhile to get my nerve up. I loved the idea of a girl going swimming and walking around naked on a public beach, in full view of anyone who came along. It was my first real experience of girls going naked in public.

(Well, my second actually. While still a teacher, I once persuaded a girl I knew to walk around naked in a public park for photos. We took care that no one was around, but still there was a chance that people might see her. I remember the thrill.)

I learned something in those days, and I still think it's true. Most young women would like to be nude models. The only reasons they don't are

1. they feel they are not attractive enough, or

2. they are afraid people will think badly of them.

Pretty girls know they are lovely, and they are eager to show off their beauty. Girls love the sense of admiration and power beauty gives them.

Girls love to be looked at, just as guys love to look at them. If a man encourages them, girls love to pose, and often love to be very sexy in their posing. It's natural. It takes a lot of oppression to stop them, usually in the form of convincing them they are immoral or promiscuous.

If people treated them better, girls would be a lot less hesitant and difficult about sexuality, and I think the world would be a better place. I don't think the Pope agrees with me though.

Chapter 2.

Synetech.

Strangely enough, it was the husband of the headmistress at my first school who provided the next step in my progress toward travels with girls.

Les & Jan Hotchkins had inspired me with the idea of making a video about nudism in Australia. In 1987 they made a video of their own called "The Bare Facts of Oz," and it made a lot of money.

I thought I could do something similar, but the question was, what camera to buy? Les & Jan had used a professional video team with one of those huge professional cameras that cost $50,000 or so.   I wanted to do it myself, for less money.

This was in the days when the only consumer video cameras available were VHS, not sharp enough for a quality product. But in 1989 the husband of my former headmistress offered to sell me an old Bolex 16 mm movie camera which he hadn't used for years.

This was great. I had a lot of experience with film, so I was familiar with exposures and focusing and so on. The Bolex didn't need electricity because it ran on a wind-up motor. That was perfect, because I was going to be shooting in remote places.

My first shoot, in fact, was at a camping festival. I went to ConFest, an annual counter-cultural gathering that took place every year around New Year's on various sites in the Murray River valley.

ConFest stands for conference and festival. People come with tents or combi-vans and camp for a week or two. There are workshops in meditation, yoga, playing the didgeridoo, theatre games, tai chi, environmental issues, and so on.

People enjoy activities like body painting, mud bathing, and swimming in the river. There are impromptu saunas too, called sweat lodges.   People bake awhile in the nude inside and then emerge rosy and sweating to run and splash into the cool river.

In fact, since New Year's is the middle of summer in Australia, people can do just about everything naked. It's the closest our society comes to general freedom of nudity.

While I was a teacher, I had been going to ConFest each New Year's from 1983 on. It was a great relief from the tensions and pressures of academia.   Once I had the Bolex, I knew I could get lots of good footage at ConFest.

And so it happened that I did my first shot on 31 December 1989, the last day of the 80's, a glorious decade for nudity. It was a shot of the market, and a boy walked into the shot and did a wonderful double-take when he saw the camera. You can still see the shot in my second video, Goddess of the Earth.

I soon found there were gatherings in America too. This was lucky, because during 1989 - 1992 I had to return to America to look after my mother, who had Alzheimer's. I was able to leave her for a few days at a time with a carer, so I was free to explore American gatherings.

Starwood is the best of these. It takes place every year for a week in July at a camping site called Brushwood at the western end of New York state. It's a wonderful festival, and in those days lots of people went naked there.

Doing a video about gatherings around the world seemed like a great idea to me. I soon ran into a problem however. You could shoot film anywhere you liked at Starwood, but you had to get permission of everyone in the shot.

This got complicated if you wanted to do footage of a workshop in yoga, say, or a meditation session, or people dancing around a campfire. Not only did it take a lot of time to get everyone's permission, but then as soon as you had set up, someone else would arrive and you'd have to ask again. It wasn't really very practical.

Then I met Jane. She was young and beautiful and loved to go naked all day at gatherings. She told me she loved the way men looked at her, since the gathering was a safe area and she knew no one would hassle her.

She had just fallen in love with a guy who did acrobatics, and was learning to be his partner. He carried her around on his shoulders, swung her around by a hand and a foot, and did all sorts of things to flex her beautiful body.

I got the idea of shooting film of those two in a quiet corner of the site, where no one would walk into the shot. They loved the idea. It looked great, with their tanned bodies above the rich green grass of Brushwood.

Soon I found others. Donna loved doing naked tai chi for my camera, and Raven did a daylight dance around a fire while her boy friend drummed. Lynda made up a whole ritual with her magic wand festooned with coloured ribbons like a Maypole.

A really beautiful girl named Gabrielle got body painted and did a willowy dance around the main fire dancing area. She also showered the paint off and did a sensual massage with her boyfriend in the midst of an open green field.

The result was Beauty of the Nude, my first video. It took me awhile, because I had to learn how to edit and then transfer the film to video. I also had to learn how to add sound, because the Bolex was not a sound camera.

The editing was a great experience, because with film you actually cut and splice the film together, so I could learn by doing. (This was long before the days when you could edit on a computer, of course.)

For sound, I made voice-overs myself, and also discovered some of the many companies that sell royalty-free video music. I also discovered wild sound, that is, things like crowd noise or running water that you can record anytime and fit to video.

The best thing about it, of course, was meeting and filming attractive young people who were happy to perform naked right out in the open air of gatherings.

I started a company named Synetech, and brought out Beauty of the Nude. I invented the company name by taking "Syne" from cinema, with a change in spelling, and "tech" from "technology."

Beauty of the Nude was 30 minutes long, and I sold it on VHS tape. I put an ad in Australian Sun & Health to sell it. I was also lucky, for Bern Loibl, the editor of Naturally, an American nudist magazine, bought 50 copies and sold it through his magazine.

To my pleasant surprise, Beauty of the Nude started to make money. I was also happy because I thought the video would help bring the worlds of nudist resorts and the counter-culture closer together.

Best of all, it seemed I could get paid for watching pretty girls go naked.