Naked Threat

Australia

Last week a stern-faced delegation of unemployed women let it be known that unless the Hon. H. E. Sizer, Minister for Labor and Industry in Queensland, consented to meet them and discuss a definite program of unemployment relief they would take off all their clothes and parade through the main streets of Brisbane, naked.

This was viewed as an impending calamity. Special orders were flashed to police stations to "take every precaution." State police officers in despair replied that so many women were unemployed that not all the police could keep all their clothes on should a concerted movement get under way. Cabled a worried Brisbane correspondent: "These women have already participated in some extraordinary demonstrations."*

* Brisbane police might have taken a lesson from their brothers-in-arms, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. For years Doukhobors, men and women, insisted on parading naked through Saskatchewan villages. Last year Doukhobor women enraged the Mounties by sitting naked on their fences and jeering. Police officers corrected this by issuing to their men spray guns filled with itching powder.

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