North of the Rocks: Cable Beach's Shrinking Nudist Tradition
Cable Beach has two signature crowds, and they share the same hundred metres of sand. One is the camel trains: strings of tourists led along the beach at sunrise and sunset by two competing operators, Red Sun Camels and Broome Camel Safaris, distinguished by the colour of their blankets, red and blue. The other is older and much quieter — a naturist tradition that has used a stretch called "north of the rocks," north of the main beach access road from the car park, since the 1960s. Both are real. Only one of them is shrinking.
A Tradition Older Than the Tourism Industry
Wikipedia describes Cable Beach as home to one of Australia's most famous nudist beaches, and the practice at "north of the rocks" predates almost everything else that now makes Cable Beach a destination. Naturists have gathered there since the 1960s to sunbake, fish, and swim without clothes, on a stretch that continues north toward the mouth of Willie Creek. For most of that history it worked the way informal beach customs usually work: a specific patch of coast, a self-selecting group of regulars, and no particular need for anyone to write the arrangement down.
That is still technically true. There is no bylaw reserving "north of the rocks" for clothes-optional use, no sign marking a boundary, nothing that would show up in a planning document. What has changed is not the rule but the traffic around it.
The Camel Problem
Four-wheel drive vehicles are permitted north of the rocks, and camel rides run there around sunrise and sunset — precisely the hours naturists have traditionally used the same stretch. By 2016, Broome had three camel tour companies operating in exactly the same hundred-metre run of sand as the clothing-optional section; today only two, Red Sun Camels and Broome Camel Safaris, remain. An ABC News report on the state of naturism in Australia that year put it bluntly: the arrangement meant "hundreds more sets of peering eyes moving slowly past" the naturists on any given ride.
That is the tension in one sentence. Camel tours are not new to Broome, and neither is the naturist tradition; what is new is the density. A beach that once offered enough space for both uses to coexist without much friction now compresses them into the same narrow strip, at the same hours, because that strip is also where the light and the tide happen to be best for photographs.
Three or Four People
The clearest evidence of decline in the source record is a single quote. A longtime regular told ABC News in 2016: "so now there's only three or four of us that come down here regularly." That is not a precise headcount so much as an admission — a tradition that was once, by implication, considerably more populated has been reduced to a handful of people who still bother to show up.
The ABC's framing treats this as part of a national story: public nudity's popularity fading across Australia generally, not a Cable Beach-specific collapse. That is a fair reading, and this page will not claim more than the source supports. But the same report's own detail about camel operators sharing the strip complicates a purely generational explanation. A shrinking, aging group of enthusiasts is one story. A shrinking group of enthusiasts sharing their remaining ground with an expanding tourism operation, on the same schedule, is a different and more specific one — and the record supports both readings sitting side by side, without forcing a single cause.
What the Record Does Not Say
It is worth being precise about what this page can and cannot claim. There is no count of naturists at Cable Beach more recent than the 2016 report, so there is no way to say whether the "three or four" figure has held steady, kept falling, or reversed. There is no record of any formal move by the Shire of Broome, or anyone else, to protect the area for clothes-optional use, restrict it, or otherwise change its informal status. And there is no source connecting the naturist tradition directly to Cable Beach's 2025 foreshore redevelopment, which closed the beach's vehicle ramp from 3 June 2025 until mid/late 2026 and now routes pedestrian access to north of the rocks, and to the camels, through the surf club access point rather than a car park at the site. That closure changes how everyone gets to that stretch of sand. Nothing in the sourcing says it was built with the naturists in mind, one way or the other — it is a separate infrastructure project landing on the same geography at the same moment as a decades-old cultural squeeze.
Two Uses, One Strip of Sand
None of this makes camel tours the villain. Red Sun Camels and Broome Camel Safaris are running a legitimate, long-running Broome business on a public beach, riding a route that happens to cross ground with a much older, informal use attached to it. Nor does it make the naturists trespassers: custom, not law, is what created "north of the rocks" as a clothing-optional strip in the first place, and custom does not stop being real just because it has no legal weight.
What the record supports is narrower and more honest than either a triumphant tourism story or a straightforward decline narrative: a small, specific piece of Cable Beach has hosted two very different uses for roughly sixty years, one of which has grown into an organized, branded, twice-daily tourism product, and the other of which has, by its own participants' account, shrunk to a handful of regulars. Both still use the same hundred metres of sand. Only one of them still has room to grow.