Who Sunnyside Actually Belongs To

Sunnyside North Beach is one of only three beaches in Victoria where nudity is legal, and for a year in 2021 and 2022 its status came closer to disappearing than most of its regulars would like to remember. What saved it was not a court ruling or a change of heart in state government. It was public pressure applied through the plainest tools available — a Facebook group, two petitions on two different platforms, and a council consultation that drew almost 4,000 submissions.

A Facebook Group and Two Petitions

The most visible organizer in the fight was a longtime regular named Michael, who has been coming to the beach for more than 25 years. He ran a Facebook group called "Keep Sunnyside Beach Clothing Optional," which had grown to more than 870 followers by May 2022. He also launched a petition on change.org, "Save Sunnyside North Clothing Optional Beach," which had gathered almost 800 signatures by that same month and kept climbing — by December 2022, past the council's decisive vote, it had crossed 1,800 signatures.

A second, separate petition existed on a different platform, gopetition.com, started by a man named Michael James. That one sat at just 11 signatures as of early May 2022. The gap between the two isn't really a contradiction — they were different petitions, on different platforms, run by people who happen to share a first name — but it's a reminder of how unevenly a cause's online support can distribute itself depending on which platform people happen to find first.

None of that organizing, on its own, decided anything. What actually mattered was the shire's own formal consultation, the one triggered by the council's November 2021 vote to seek a review. It drew almost 4,000 submissions from around the country, described by the mayor as possibly the largest response the council had ever received to a community consultation of any kind, and came back with about 92% support for keeping the beach's clothing-optional status. The online campaign built the pressure. The consultation is what the council could actually point to when it voted, on 6 December 2022, to keep things as they were.

"People Like You and I"

Part of the campaign's argument was about who actually uses the beach. Speaking to ABC News in the middle of the fight, Michael described the beach's regulars in deliberately unglamorous terms: lawyers, bankers, people working in a supermarket — "the vast majority," he said, are people like anyone else, not some fringe subculture the public should be nervous about. That framing mattered, because the council report that had put the beach's status at risk in the first place had described drug use, sexual activity and syringes in the carpark and surrounding bluffs — language that, left unanswered, could easily attach itself to the beach's entire identity rather than to the specific problem areas the report was actually describing.

The other part of the argument was about who needs the space, not just who uses it casually. Michael, who is gay, has said the beach has functioned for years as a safe gathering place for Melbourne's LGBTIQ+ community — a use of the space that predates the current fight and that he argued was itself a reason the clothing-optional status was worth keeping, separate from the general recreational case for nudism. It's not the kind of detail that shows up in a council staff report, and it's exactly the kind of detail a Facebook group and a petition campaign exist to put in front of decision-makers who might otherwise only see the complaint file.

What the Numbers Actually Show

Strip away the online noise and the numbers that mattered were smaller and more official than any petition count: almost 4,000 consultation submissions, about 92% in favour, one council vote on 6 December 2022. That is a wide margin by the standards of local government consultation, and Michael, who had spent over a year bracing for the opposite outcome, called the moment the vote landed "emotional" — a word that undersells what it means to spend a year not knowing whether a place you have visited for a quarter-century is about to become off-limits by ministerial order.

What the community campaign could not do, in the end, was make the council follow through on the safety and infrastructure commitments it made in the same breath as the status vote — the cameras, signage, and access repairs meant to answer the carpark and bushland complaints that started the whole review. Public pressure is good at winning a vote. It is a much blunter instrument for making sure a council actually installs a camera. As of October 2023, a long-time regular was reporting, on the record, that none of the promised upgrades had shown up.

The Bigger Picture

Sunnyside North's status as one of only three legal clothing-optional beaches in Victoria means its community carries a disproportionate amount of the state's entire nudist and naturist culture on one beach. There is nowhere nearby to simply relocate to if this section closed; the next-closest legally clothing-optional beach is Point Impossible, near Torquay, 176 kilometres away — a four-to-five-hour round trip, not a fallback option for a Tuesday afternoon. That scarcity is part of why the 2021-2022 fight mattered as much as it did to the people who showed up for it: for a specific, self-selecting community, this genuinely was the one place, and there was no plausible second choice within reach.

Back to the full Sunnyside North Beach guide.