For a country stereotyped as one endless summer, in which everyone is chronically topless and impossibly fit, flat stomachs and surfer’s biceps are the prevailing qualities of attractiveness. It becomes hard for anybody who doesn’t look like a Home and Away cast member to feel comfortable taking their kit off.

The months leading up to summer are stuffed with Instagram ads and gym membership discounts, promising six-week fitness programs to burn away those winter kilos. It propagates shame toward flat bums and soft bellies, enforcing the notion that only those at the peak of fitness deserve to be seen without their top on.

Another reason is the broadly shameful attitude toward nakedness in Australia. Save for a handful of exclusive beaches and the odd nudist colony, there are few places here where public nakedness is acceptable, let alone celebrated.

A solution to this collective prudishness around our own bodies would be to consider German attitudes about public nudity. The nationwide social movement known as FKK – Freikoerperkultur, or “free body culture” – has been practiced in Germany for nearly 130 years, and no part of it is contingent on how shredded your stomach is.

I remember my first experience of Germany’s attitude to nudity when living in Cologne in 2018, walking my bike through a park to find an elderly couple reclining in the sun. There were uni students, small children and sky-facing daydreamers all sitting nearby and none of them cast a sideward glance.

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FKK culture is about connecting to nature and being comfortable within yourself as a rejection of the growing industrialism of modern society. It’s a way of being that strives to dismantle the restrictive standards of body beauty in popular culture, in which round-tummy retirees are granted equal entry to broad-shoulder postgrads with bulging pectorals.

It isn’t just restricted to specific cities, either – whether you’re walking through a park in Munich or swimming in a lake on the outskirts of Berlin, you’ll see locals comfortably sunbathing without a thread of clothing.

This universal attitude of openness to bodies of all ages and sizes definitely has a place in the exclusionary beach-body culture of Australia.

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I think us Aussies would do well to take the lead from our German neighbours and strip without shame this summer, regardless of whether you’re “summer-ready”. The only downside is that if being naked in public were no longer that remarkable, I’d be out of a job as a life model.

It’s a price worth paying, I think.

Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier is a freelance writer and reviewer based in Melbourne.

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