The Adelaide Naked Bike Ride 2013

The Adelaide Naked Bike Ride 2013

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Posted 2012-08-27 by Sean Goedeckefollow
Section 23 of the 1953 Summary Offences Act prohibits "indecent behaviour and gross indecency", with a maximum penalty of three months and six months respectively. For some reason the Act specifies not just public places but police stations, perhaps indicating a general South Australian tendency to disrobe in police stations. If you're going to take the somewhat smaller risk of stripping off in a public place, there's probably safety in numbers. One nude person marching up a main street is a dangerous freak; a hundred nude people is a protest. A hundred nude people on bicycles is – well, something else entirely.

The World Naked Bike Ride started in 2001 in Spain, and quickly spread to over fifty cities in twenty countries. While the biggest enthusiasm comes from North America and Europe, with some cities getting over five thousand participants in the ride, there's a growing Australian movement to join in. Melbourne scrounges a few hundred every year for the March ride, and around twenty brave souls brave the cold weather for the Winter Wonderland naked ride two months earlier. It's kind of a hippy, save-the-environment atmosphere, and you can roughly predict the turnout based on that (high in Byron Bay, for instance, and low in Sydney) but everybody's welcome.



You don't even have to be totally naked. The motto is "as bare as you dare". Feel free to wear underwear, or pants, or a bikini, or just show up in your normal cycling gear to lend moral support. Or ride in the nude, with a flower necklace around your neck and several tubs' worth of body paint sweating off your back.

The organisers of the event have adopted a grab-bag approach to theme and purpose: like the Occupy movement, they've thrown a hundred different causes at the wall to see what sticks. They're concerned about raising the profile of nudism and naturism, protecting the environment, world peace, protesting nuclear energy, anti-consumerism, anti-capitalism, supporting good health and active lifestyles, making it safer for cyclists in cities, and so on. You might think that some of these causes contradict other causes, but that's almost the point. The World Naked Bike Ride is what you make of it – a sort of pre-packaged protest, event or rally that can fit almost any purpose.

Australians have tended to play down the more anarchic aspects of the ride, focusing instead on raising driver awareness of cyclists on the road. If you squint and hold your head just so, it makes sense: inadequate bike lanes, a hostile cultural atmosphere and insufficient legal protection are things that make cyclists feel exposed and vulnerable. Stripping down and riding naked makes that vulnerability obvious. Too obvious, according to some city police departments. Sydney cops have broken up attempts to hold a Naked Bike Ride in Sydney, even forcing participants to construct makeshift underwear out of duct tape and strips of bark. Adelaide police have let participants ride topless and body-painted in the past, but if you're looking to obey the law it's probably a good idea to leave your underwear on. Still, some previous years have seen cyclists participate in the buff (most notably 2009, where police intervened to stop it), so there's always hope.

Because of the questionably-legal (read: illegal) status of the Adelaide Naked Bike Ride, the organisation is always going to be flexible. You can check out the Australian section of the official website for general information, or the Facebook page for more info. It's a community-run thing, so there's no official Naked Bike Ride Leader – if you're interested, and nobody else is speaking up, why not step up and run it yourself? Participating in the Adelaide Naked Bike Ride could be the experience of a lifetime.

If you've got nothing on that day.

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%wnadelaide
134951 - 2023-06-13 11:07:07

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