“The street where you don’t go”

Tits out for the boys was the rallying cry, leaving no-one who visited Summernats in Canberra last week in any doubt that a number of Australian men cannot wean themselves off boobs.

“Every year everyone says it wasn’t as wild as the previous year,” Fairfax photographer Rohan Thomson said after covering this year’s show through the clouds of burning rubber. “But I think it’s stayed pretty consistent. If you go to the right spots, there’s still the same wild things going on.”

Although the last wet T-shirt competition took place in 2010 and the last organised nude show was in 2012, the hangover after more than two decades of catering explicitly to the male bonding market is understandably hard to shake. And nowhere is that hangover more searingly apparent than on the stretch of road dubbed “Tuff Street”.

The infamous 100 metres-or-so is lined with concrete barriers and hundreds of intoxicated men who are there to see burnouts. It’s also the section of the festival that women know to avoid if they don’t want to be relentlessly harassed by the male-dominated crowd.

Although he’s been attending Summernats since age 10 and covering it for the Canberra Times for a few years now, Thomson was shocked by the extent of the “personal intimidation” he saw on Tuff Street this year.

Summernats co-owner Andy Lopez denied there is a cultural problem in the precinct, describing it as “the poor behaviour of a pretty small minority”. He told Fairfax Media that if women are harassed, security staff are “proactive in terms of addressing that behaviour at the time.”

But Thomson believes the organisers are turning a blind eye to the problem. “They know what's going on. If they wanted to eliminate it, surely they could. They have security every like, 15 metres along the stretch of road.”

The one noticeable difference on Tuff Street this year, Thomson said, was that organisers had banned people riding in the back of utes after the death of 30-year-old Luke Newsome, who fell from a ute tray while doing laps inside the park on Thursday.

“Generally, what happens at Summernats is that people are doing laps, and there are girls in the back of utes, and they get yelled at to ‘show us your tits’,” Thomson said. Without the show from the utes, he said, “it seemed to me that more girls who were in the crowd were getting targeted”.

Even if the Tuff Street crowd turned their attention more to individual women this year, Thomson says he thinks few who went there would have been taken by surprise: “Lots of women say they go to Summernats and it’s fine, but you just need to be careful about where you go. And Tuff Street is where you don’t go.”