​I went for a walk this morning. Part of it went past some high-rise buildings within the University of Auckland. And as I looked up I could see a naked female sitting on a window ledge inside her apartment. She was a beautiful sight; very Venus de Milo. I thought about waving because I could see she was looking down at me. She stayed put resolutely, not seeming to care about who could see her pale nakedness. And it got me to thinking about all the times I was naked in public.
I reckon I was New Zealand’s first female streaker – well, my accomplice, whose name I’ve forgotten, and I. It was in the middle of winter and we had mates in a band who got a gig in Fairlie, in South Canterbury, NZ, circa 1972, and we went along because we had nothing better to do on a Saturday night. There was definitely alcohol involved. We were a little bored standing in the wings of the stage, watching our mates play to a fairly typical South Canterbury crowd – bit rowdy, bit drunk, but having raucous fun, waving their arms around and drinking, probably out of large bottles of beer. I said to my friend words to the effect of ‘Let’s take off all our clothes and run across the stage.’ Within seconds I was naked except for a colourful pair of rugby socks that came up nearly to my knees. I led the charge. We tore  across the stage in front of the band, and looking down, seeing the astonished faces of people at the front of the crowd. Like those clowns at the shows of the time, mouth open and turning as we went by. It felt just a little bit scary. Talk about vulnerable. I’m sure I would never have done it sober. We got to the other side, and realised our clothes were still where we’d left them, so, back we went again, and giggling helplessly, put our clothes on again. I felt exhilarated and a little bit proud of myself.
The Great Ngaruawahia music festival the following year, 1973, was the scene of another very public naked incident which actually went on to have far-reaching repercussions. I'm not saying the picture of me naked in the Sunday News changed the law, but it was part of a court case. The police, in their wisdom, decided to press charges against the paper for publishing indecent documents.
Anyway, there we were, a bunch of us camping in a crowded tent. It was extremely hot and loads of people had got their kit off. We had just smoked a joint in the stifling tent and decided to go for a swim in the nearby Waikato River. The wide, sprawling body of water was cool and inviting. A few willow trees draped over the shallows gave us a nice shaded spot to splash about in. We were feeling fine and I was practicing my diving technique off a partially submerged tree trunk when a photographer appeared on the bank. He was fully clothed and had a decent stills camera draped around his neck.
‘Hello, I’m from the Sunday News. OK if I take a photo of you?’ he politely asked. At that stage I was standing waist deep in the water.
‘Only if you get naked too,’ I shot back.
He stripped to his Jockeys and waded into the water. The man was clearly prepared to suffer for his art, I thought, and went back to diving off the submerged log, backlit by the fierce sun. When the paper came out a couple of days later it published pages of pictures of naked people, including one of a gorgeous hippy girl walking toward the camera completely naked. She had long blonde hair and a great pair of breasts. But for some strange reason the editor had placed a big X over her pubic region. The main pic on the front page was of Corben Simpson, the lead singer for Blerta, seated on a stool with his guitar over his genitalia, grinning at the camera.
The pic of me turned out to be quite an arty shot, diving into the water, side on to the camera. Because the sun was behind me, I was nearly in silhouette – but you could tell I was in the nick. The photographer asked for my details, which I happily provided because he’d been such a good sport and worked hard to get his pic. His caption read something like: Wellington journalist Bridget Wilson cools off in the Waikato River.
Months later when I turned up for work on my first day at the New Zealand Press Association in Wellington, there was my picture pinned to the newsroom noticeboard. A couple of my new colleagues gently ribbed me about the pic, but they all acknowledged it was a good shot.
A couple of months went by and one day I got a call from a lawyer who was representing the Sunday News. It wasn’t hard to track me down, given the caption. My colleagues and I were outraged that the police could have such a conservative attitude to nudity.
The lawyer asked me if I would be willing to be a witness in the case. It was coming to court in a couple of months’ time. I said I’d think about it and rang an older journalist friend.
He said: ‘Don’t be silly. You don’t want to be a martyr to the cause of nudity. But write something instead.’
So I spent an evening writing out what I thought was a well-reasoned piece about my thoughts on nudity. I talked about how I’d grown up in a family where being naked was fine. I wrote about the sheer heat of that day back on the banks of the Wanganui River. And I typed it out on my trusty Remington typewriter on copy paper and handed it over to the lawyer.
When the case came to court, I went along and sat in the back of the room and was chuffed to hear the lawyer read my words to the magistrate. I was even more chuffed when the police lost the case – something about the X over the hippy girl’s pudendum, mainly – and the law was able to be changed.
The other day my erstwhile husband Peter, an acclaimed cinematographer, sent me a 20-second clip of some footage he’d shot of me some time in the mid-70s. He’d set it to that classic striptease music. There I am, all full of joy and probably quite a lot of alcohol, standing front on to Peter’s film camera, somewhere on the Otago Peninsular. All of a sudden I rip off my sundress to reveal a naked body, and making like a stripper, I start to wiggle and fling my arms up in the air like I just don’t care. It’s a joyful 20 seconds of pure, unadulterated glee and no sign of any sense of inhibition at all. I laughed out loud and emailed Peter telling him it had made my day. I didn’t remember the occasion at all. I’m considering showing it at my funeral.
​

I’ve been thinking a lot about vulnerability lately. A while ago I learned that it was a Good Thing. This was in direct contrast to my upbringing; I was raised by pretty strict parents who in turn had been raised by their Victorian parents. The Victorians weren’t really known for being touchy feely and in fact disavowed showing feelings or emotions of any kind. Feelings were actively discouraged as a sign of weakness. To be strong and in control at any given time was a must. When I went to my first tangi or hung out with Europeans in Europe, I felt a faint tinge of envy at seeing a complete lack of inhibition. These people seemed to lack the embarrassment gene, I thought. Same with Americans: they didn’t seem to show any sign of self-consciousness at all and would blurt out quite intimate things to perfect strangers.
So coming to learn that vulnerability was good was somewhat counter-intuitive to me. US researcher Brene Brown talks about vulnerability in one of her Ted talks. She’s bigtime so she knows what she’s talking about (https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability).
And so there I was this morning wearing a not-very-fetching blue polyester V-neck T-Shirt with nothing on underneath (I got to keep my long pants and knickers on, luckily) i.e. bra-less in the radiography department of Ascot Hospital, here in Auckland, New Zealand, pretending that everything was normal while a male radiographer told me all about the procedure I was about to undergo. I noticed I was vulnerable because I was holding my hands, with elbows bent, in front of me, protecting the nipple region. Usually there’s another layer, i.e. the fabric of my bra, between me and a total stranger. So in the absence of that layer my slightly nervous hands did the job. Sort of. Feeling exposed like that in strange surroundings – ie a CT scan room – was very odd and slightly unnerving. The radiographer, a nice, 40-something chap, with greying hair and a rather bushy moustache, was doing all the talking. Then he asked me if I’d had a CT scan before.
‘Is it the noisy one?’ I ventured, having a stab at it, really, because I was pretty sure I hadn’t had a CT scan in the past.
‘No’, he replied, gently, in a way that didn’t leave me feeling ashamed of not having the Right Answer.
‘That’s an MRI.’
Which I kind of knew, having had an MRI about a year ago for a dodgy knee. However, having been a journo for years and years, I am not the slightest bit afraid of asking silly questions. Then he went into quite a long explanation of what the scan was about. Something about finding if I have some kind of crusty build-up in my arteries which can lead to heart disease. Of which my family, on both sides, has much experience. Probably the reason I’m here in the first place. And to see if I need to keep taking a medication called statins, which I don’t care about much because I don’t seem to get all the yucky side effects that others complain about. Then it occurred to me that his spiel was to justify the $330 I would be stung with afterwards. Poor bastard probably gives this spiel 20 times a day, I thought. And the least I could do was listen even though I wished he’d just get on with the job so I could get out of there and home for a cup of tea; tea being the only stimulant I ingest these day, and I had missed my first of the day because it contained caffeine, something I’d been told to avoid 24 hours before the scan (god knows why).
If the scans shows that I don’t have the artery-clogging stuff I’m at less risk of heart disease and I can stop taking the statins. The nice radiographer said it was important to have this ‘warrant of fitness’. Nice analogy, I thought.
I got up on the bed thing and lay down and he asked me what kind of work I did. ‘Addictions counsellor,’ says me. ‘Oh, that’s important work,’ he said and then launched into a story about a mate of his who had a drinking problem, who had died at the tender age of 50-something. At least it distracted me from the anxiety of not really knowing what was about to happen. I still had no idea, although it looked as if the bed was going to slide through an X-ray-looking type of contraption. He asked me to reach my hands above my head and hold them there, presumably so the scanning device could get a clear shot at my heart and its environs. This definitely brought on more vulnerability – i.e. there was now only one layer of layer in front of my breasts, but at least he wasn’t standing in front of me; just a huge curve of steel, a piece of machinery labelled Phillips that arched over me, lying powerless, waiting for the invisible CT rays to zap my arteries, probing for the deadly crusty substance while a computer-speak voice told me when to hold my breath and when to breathe again. I did as I was told and kept perfectly still, as instructed.
I didn’t tell the radiographer about my sense of vulnerability today, but I thought I’d just jot down some notes and see if I could figure something out in the process. If I had been truly authentic, I might’ve said something about feeling a bit anxious, but perhaps my slightly fidgety hands-as-barrier-over-naked-breasts carry-on was a clue. That’s not the point, though, is it? The point of vulnerability is to actually name it. But it’d be a bit daft, right? to say something like: ‘I feel anxious when I’m with a man I’ve just met [albeit a professional, in this case], standing half naked at arm’s length, because I can’t control this situation and I’m not sure whether I can trust you’. But that’s about the length and breadth of it. And even though I hate wearing bras, there’s something inherently trustworthy about encasing one’s breasts in a bra because societal norm dictates the shape of a bosom. And swinging proud and free ain’t it . . .
Brene Brown says the purpose of vulnerability is that we feel closer to one another when we get vulnerable. But that’s when boundaries come into play (something else I’ve been investigating recently and perhaps the subject of another blog). Maybe if the radiographer had been a woman, I would’ve felt more inclined to open up. But then again I wouldn’t have felt so vulnerable with a female radiographer doing the scan.
Anyway, I felt much better striding off to the carpark with my bra on again, the requisite two layers of defence against the elements, while giving me a secure feeling, wearing my best black woollen jumper which almost kept out the chills of a particularly chilly spring day.
11/9/17