Beach Bums - Part 12

Perth, Australia

Perth, on the western edge of Australia, is said to be the most remote large city in the world.  It's closer to Jakarta, Indonesia (1865 miles) than to Sydney on Australia's populated east coast (2045 miles).  But see the note below for why Honolulu is a rival for this title.

Perth enjoys access to numerous beautiful beaches, some of which are nude, like the northern end of Swanbourne Beach, above.

26-year old Brent McIntyre, above, performed a "generosity experiment" where he hitchhiked across Australia from Perth's Swanbourne Beach to Sydney, relying on strangers for everything: food, shelter, transportation, and even clothing, because he started out naked.  He was like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire: "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."

The Perth Pythons hockey team used Swanbourne Beach as a location for a nude calendar photo (above).

Swanbourne Beach is also the site of a Nude Olympics (different from the Maslin Beach Nude Olympics that we saw earlier), but I'll cover that in a future post.

Another nude beach in the Perth metropolitan area is Warnbro Beach in Rockingham.

South Beach in Fremantle is not a nude beach, but it was the site of a 2015 attempt to set a Guinness world record for the largest number of people skinny-dipping (see the video above).  790 people participated, setting a record that was broken three years later by 2,505 skinny-dipping women in Ireland.  Oh well, sic transit gloria mundi.

While we're in Western Australia, I have to mention Shark Bay, although it's far north of Perth.  It's known to scientists for its stromatolites (above).  They just look like rocks, but these rocks were formed by living organisms, kind of like a coral reef, but these rocks are formed by bacteria, not coral.  Fossil stromatolites have been found in Australia dating back 3.5 billion years, constituting the oldest evidence of life on Earth.

But readers of this blog might be more interested in another Shark Bay attraction.  An unobtrusive building that used to be the Hamelin Pool Telegraph Station back in the days of the telegraph is now a museum.   On one wall is a poster-size copy of the photo above.  It shows telegraph lineman Adgee Cross repairing the lines stark naked.  The story is that he had to swim across the Murchison River to get there and didn't want to get his clothes wet.

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Note: The title for "most remote large city" depends on how you define large.  Perth's metropolitan area has a population of 2.1 million, and it is the most remote city of its size or larger.  However, as a resident of Hawaii, I have to argue for the remoteness of Honolulu.  With a metropolitan area population of 950,000, it's smaller than Perth, but it's much more remote.  The closest large city is San Francisco, 2395 miles away.  So, for cities over 1 million people, Perth wins, otherwise Honolulu wins.