On Aussie beaches, burqa plus bikini equals burqini

It's a sweltering day, and the beach is packed with suntanned bodies. Girls in swimsuits lounge on the sand while their boyfriends cradle surfboards.

Mecca Laalaa is the lone exception. Instead of a barely there bikini, she's in a burqini – a top-to-toe two-piece lycra suit complete with hijab, or Islamic head covering.

Loose enough to preserve Muslim modesty, but light enough to enable swimming, the burqini, taking its name from the burqa, is at the forefront of a dramatic shift within Australia's iconic surf lifesaving clubs.

No longer wanting to be associated only with bronzed, blue-eyed action men, Surf Life Saving Australia is attempting to better reflect the country's multicultural mix.

Ms. Laalaa is one of 24 young people of Arab descent who signed up for a 10-week surf lifesaving-training course.

"Normally, I'd wear cotton trousers and a top but they get very heavy in the water. This meets our cultural requirements," she says, preparing to go out on a beach patrol. The burqini that she wears was specially designed to allow Muslim women like her to join one of the surf lifesavers clubs.

For a century, surf lifesavers have been the embodiment of Australian beach culture, as quintessential an icon as the Anzac soldier and the outback jackaroo, or cowboy. With 115,000 lifesavers patrolling the continent's beaches and more than 300 clubs, Surf Life Saving Australia is the nation's largest volunteer movement, its unpaid members responsible for saving more than half a million lives in the past 100 years.

But the movement has also been deeply conservative, built on a stern, militaristic tradition fostered by soldiers returning from the world wars. Until 1980, women were banned from joining.

The overhaul coincides with the 100th anniversary of the first surf club, at Sydney's famous Bondi Beach, as well as the Year of the Lifesaver.

This initiative, aimed at diversifying the clubs, is also in response to events that shocked Australia and the world just over a year ago.

A few days before Christmas 2005, gangs of whites and ethnically Middle Eastern young people clashed around Cronulla Beach.

The fighting revealed a deep gulf between the white Australians of mainly British and Irish heritage and recent immigrants from Lebanon and other Middle Eastern countries.

The lifesaving program is a small step intended to help heal the wounds left by the Cronulla violence.

"I was shocked by the magnitude of it, so to have a group like this training as lifesavers is of tremendous importance," says Jamal Rifi, the president of the community sports club from which most of the trainees were recruited. "It's about counteracting the negative stereotyping of Muslims, which has been very bad over the last five years. Our greatest enemy is ignorance."

The campaign to recruit Australians of Middle Eastern heritage has been funded by a grant of AU $600,000 (US $ 467,000) from the federal government.

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