Sunnyside North Beach is Melbourne's only legal nudist beach, and for a year in 2021 and 2022 it was also nearly not one anymore. The status itself dates to 1986, granted under the Nudity (Prescribed Areas) Act 1983, a law that lets the state planning minister prescribe or revoke a clothing-optional area after consulting the local council. That mechanism is not abstract. Southside Beach, one of the only other two legally clothing-optional beaches in Victoria, exists today because a previous nude beach nearby had its status revoked outright — the real-world version of the outcome Sunnyside's regulars spent a year fighting.
The council had tried before. Mornington Peninsula Shire, or its predecessor, opposed the original 1986 gazettal and floated a review as early as 2006. Nothing came of it then, and the clothing-optional status stayed in place for another fifteen years. On 1 November 2021, the shire tried again, voting unanimously to write to the state planning minister seeking a formal review and public consultation into the beach's status. It was a procedural request, not a revocation, but it opened the door.
What forced the issue was a council report, not a court case. In February 2022, a report to council alleged that the carpark and the bluffs around the beach regularly saw drug use, sexual activity and syringes left behind as rubbish, at all hours of the day and night. That is a serious allegation, and it landed at exactly the moment the shire had already asked for a review. Longtime users of the beach did not deny the carpark had problems. Their argument was about geography: the drugs and the rubbish were happening in the carpark and the surrounding scrub, they said, not on the sand where clothing-optional status actually applied. It is a distinction that matters enormously to a legal designation and barely at all to a council trying to manage complaints about a public space.
The response was public, fast, and lopsided. A Facebook group organizing to keep the beach open passed 870 followers within months. A change.org petition gathered almost 800 signatures by May 2022, and by December it had grown past 1,800. A separate petition on a different platform, gopetition.com, sat at just 11 signatures in the same window — a reminder that petition counts vary wildly by platform and say less about total support than the platform that hosts them. What actually decided the outcome was the shire's own formal consultation, which the mayor described as possibly the largest community consultation the council had ever run: almost 4,000 submissions, with about 92% of respondents in favour of keeping the clothing-optional status as it was.
On 6 December 2022, the council voted to retain the status. For a campaign that had spent over a year bracing for revocation, it was, in the words of the man who led it, an emotional moment. But the same meeting that saved the beach's legal status also passed a second motion, seeking state government funding for the things the February 2022 report had actually complained about: police monitoring, surveillance cameras, carpark bays, signage, toilets, and repairs to the access track. That was the part meant to fix the underlying problem rather than just settle the legal question.
Nearly a year later, none of it had shown up. By October 2023, the same access track from the carpark to the clothing-optional stretch was reported to be in the same poor condition, with an outdated warning sign still sitting on the rocks despite the council having been told about it. A regular beachgoer, asked whether he'd seen any progress on the cameras, signage or carpark improvements, said there was no evidence of any of it — though he allowed that it might still be sitting somewhere in the shire's planning pipeline. What had changed, concretely, was that paid parking arrived at the carpark that same year. The council found the political win it needed. The infrastructure that was supposed to come with it did not, at least not by the last date this record covers.
The honest summary is that Sunnyside North Beach survived a genuine threat to a nearly four-decade-old legal status, on the strength of one of the largest community consultations the shire says it has ever run. What it has not visibly survived is the specific set of complaints — drugs, syringes, an unmaintained access track — that put its status at risk in the first place. Those were named as carpark and bushland problems, not beach problems, by the people defending the beach. As of the last reporting available, they were still just problems.
