If you and your friends have got nothing on over the new year holidays you're more than welcome at ConFest. (Trev Hemer, DTE email-group 16/10/97)ConFest is conventionally a 'clothes optional' event. The open relaxation of dress codes and prevalence of full nudity inverts the sanctioned norm of covering up (especially genitalia) outside the private sphere. The theme is reflected in workshops - such as 'nude years day', 'nude drum and dance party' and 'naked sensuality'. While many participants feel comfortable with the idea of the 'free' festival - there being many practising nudists ('naturists') present - for novices the experience may approximate the kind of 'ordeal' associated with passage rites. Apprehensiveness is common as novices entertain false expectations of obligatory nudity and confront fears of first-time public exposure. Here, public nudity (which it should be stressed is not at all obligatory) involves the temporary disclosure of the 'self' - the vulnerable, unfortified self stripped of social disguises and pretence. Thus, for Oribi, it 'gave me a chance to step out of my bra and drop all the bullshit pretences'. According to Wogoit:
People drop pretence and falsity because there's no need for it at ConFest. We are who we are here. Allowing us to be like that makes us stronger inside and reasserts our purpose to us. Because it doesn't matter who you are, you can really relax and grow.Following possible embarrassment, resolutions are often achieved as dress behaviour is modified, and as participants may adopt various styles of undress.9 As Trev explains:
There is nothing morally, religiously, or socially wrong with nudity. No one should grow up without knowing and respecting what a human body looks like ... naked is natural - we have to be taught to wear clothes. Overcoming this conditioning is often threatening but it changes lives and outlook on body image, self esteem, acceptance, respect and worth of ourselves and others. (Trev, DTE email-group 16/10/97)10 Female participants are more likely to hold reservations. Initially Saffron:
was a bit worried ... I expected everyone to be naked and thought that would be expected of me, but I found the nudity wonderful as everyone was so unselfconscious; I wish society wasn't so moralistic about such things.Similarly, for Peregrin, 'it broke down my body image - no one is "hung up" on bodies. It also made me more adventurous with my clothes'. Ambrosia had strong reservations about the whole thing at first: 'I was apprehensive because of the nudity thing. I thought I might have felt pressure to be nude all the time, because everyone else was'. Eventually she gave up a cruise she won on 'The Wheel of Fortune' to come to ConFest:
[A]nd now that I've got here I've realised, well there's a lot of people clothed and ya'know, you don't necessarily have to do that ... I also think it's an attitude. [Since people are] really comfortable with it, you start to feel really comfortable with it.Yallara inquires 'where else can people be nude without being conscious of it? Where else can someone like me, just from straight suburbia, really do that?' Recalling his first ConFest, Cedar admits a common male apprehension and revelation:
Walking around naked, I was terrified that I was going to have an erection all the time. But I didn't, which, mind you, was a bit of a struggle at first. And then I since found that underwear and bathers are much more sexually attractive cause they actually focus your attention. Well, for me they do anyway. And I actually changed my outlook.For experienced site workers, nudity is a celebration of the body. Trev says 'I don't believe there's anything imperfect, indecent, or obscene with the human body. I can't believe we are the only species that have to wear clothes and cosmetics and jewellery to increase our sex appeal. So [in reference to his gate duties] I even go on buses now. No worries'. Graham refers to his body as his 'uniform':
When I'm working I'm in uniform. Yeah, I love nudity ... I'm not an exhibitionist, I just love being naked. It's free. You can feel the breeze on your body, and the sun, and the dirt, and the dust, and what else. And I work a lot better ... when I'm naked. I don't like being naked when people object to it. That's fair enough. But this is an accepting atmosphere ... nudity is a freedom.Nudity is not as prevalent today as it has been in the past, however. Cedar notes that over the last ten years it has become more unusual to see people walking around the site naked. In the past, one third of the people were naked all the time at summer ConFests, whereas now most people only go naked when they're swimming. This is a shame as 'everybody is forced ... to confront their fears. And so the standard is set high in terms of confronting yourself through nakedness. And that standard has lowered a lot' (Cedar). People are, nevertheless, less inhibited in their choice of body covering a fact which becomes apparent over successive days of the event. Cockatoo suggests a good reason for this:
The majority of the people now are a lot younger, and they go through a cultural process of shedding their clothes, and that could take the whole festival ... For lots of young people, it's a cultural barrier to break through - very important though.Though less universal, nudity retains popular acceptance. The Art village and adjacent beach area is the principal site of concentrated nudity. In Art, bodily exposure is accompanied by group mud plastering and skin murals. Back in 1979, Claudia revealed her prime remedy for inhibitions:
[T]ake one huge mud puddle, 20 to 30 naked people, have them jump about a lot, singing to the tune of 'Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud', ensure that only the eyeballs remain uncovered, lots of spectators, bemused expressions, hearty laughter. (Claudia 1979:19)To be covered with wet earth (which one nine year old girl called 'special mud') subverts instilled rules of cleanliness and sterilisation to which novices have learned to strictly adhere. One is reminded of Turner's description of liminaries who are melted down to a generalised, anonymous 'prima materia', who become lumps of human clay, ready to be moulded anew (1977:37). By negating conventional standards, including that of the 'classical body' (Stallybrass and White 1986), participants engage in a kind of 'resistance through dirt', a celebration of the 'marginal [dirty] body' which for Hetherington (1996:43-44), is almost a requirement for 'marginal identities'. And, reminiscent of a trait common to 'fantasy island' narratives:
mud seems to signify the indulgence of an atavistic impulse - nostalgie de la boue. White people who roll on mud not only revert to an infantile relationship with excremental soil - they literally soil themselves - but also, if only temporarily, become 'primitive', which is to say black. Mud reminds them, not only of their roots in their own polymorphous perverse infancy, but also of their Darwinian origins among primitive peoples and, looking even further back into pre-history, among the primates. (Woods 1995:141)ConFesters thus possess a family resemblance to Nimbin revellers who 'coated their whole bodies with ... dark brown mud and transformed themselves into anonymous "natives"' (Newton 1988:63).
To be decorated with water based or fluorescent paints - in a combination of styles and colours on any anatomical location - engenders an almost infinite array of possibilities in refiguring and recomposing one's experience of the primitive body. The curious attraction of such integument is that participants are provided with the convenient option of being simultaneously unclothed (exposed) and totally covered (protected). Art is located on the beach, itself a liminal zone (between land and water) often constructed as a topos of pleasurable activities (cf. Shields 1990), a most 'visible site of hedonist culture ... [and] cheerful eroticism' (Booth 1997:172). Here, the undisciplined body is celebrated in a grotesque degradation to the material level of earth and flesh. The clay clad masses mingle and dance, spilling out into the festival, wandering around all day in such temporary body modifications.
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Footnotes
Maps
Chronology
Appendices
Glossary of Acronyms and Abbreviations
References: A-L
References: M-Z
Chapter Six Contents
Thesis Contents