Free Camping. Cheap Camping. The Best Budget Campsites in Australia.

Free camping is the "cheap travel" idea which saves us thousands. Accommodation costs can really add up over the course of a holiday, so camping free as often as possible really helps the budget.

It is not unusual for a family of 5 to be charged around $50 for a caravan site at a caravan park ($25 for the site + $8 per child), and of course cabins, motels or hotels will be much more expensive than that.

There are many spots like these waiting for you, but to enjoy most of these places, a fair degree of self-sufficiency is needed when it comes to things like power and water. See our Off-Road Caravan page for more.

We've found free camping preferable to staying in caravan parks for other reasons too:

• You can freely choose your own site
• As close to or far away from others as you want.
• With the amount of space that you require for your set-up.
• Away from the road (especially highways).
• Under a tree, on a grassy site, angled away from the sun, near the water etc (whatever is important to you).


• Except for National Parks, your pets can usually come with you.
• Campfires are usually allowed. (But do carry your own firewood, as many campsites have a ban on collecting timber, or are barren due to the campers who have been before you).
• There is usually much less noise and artificial light - these things can put a dampener on the camping atmosphere!
• It usually enables closer proximity to the natural environment - rivers and beaches for boating, fishing and all sorts of water sports, mountains for climbing and trails for bushwalking.

Our purpose on this website is not to list every available free or cheap campsite Australia wide. There are plenty of wonderfully researched books available which already do a great job of that. What we hope to do is to highlight only the best.

We often find ourselves asking others, and being asked ourselves, "Out of all the hundreds of free or cheap campsites listed, which ones really stand out or shouldn't be missed?"

So that's the question we are answering here - Out of all the campsites we have stayed in around Australia, which ones are the best?

We have separated these favourites into several categories for each state:

• Free Camping
• Cheap Camping (less than $10 per site/family)
• Good Value-for-Money Camping.
• Unique Camping
• Good Roadside Camping
• Capital City Camping

Free Camping or Cheap Campsites by State

• New South Wales
• Queensland
• Victoria
• South Australia
• Western Australia
• Tasmania
• Northern Territory
• Australia Capital Territory

Guides to Free Camping in Australia.

If you are planning to travel in more than one or two states, there are two comprehensive guides to free camping which we can recommend. Each has some campsites and information which the other lacks, and we found ourselves regularly referring to both.

1. Camps Australia Wide 4 - The Ultimate Guide for The Budget Conscious Traveller
In our experience, Camps 4 (as it is commonly referred to), is the most widely used comprehensive free camping guide. A new edition is released every 2 years, the next edition, Camps 5, being due for release on 1st March 2009.

Camps Australia Wide 4 promotes itself as a comprehensive travel guide to the best camping spots, rest areas, cheap caravan and tourist holiday parks, National Parks and State Forests.

It contains 3,165 listings, and is a great guide for campers, motorhomers, caravanners and also very useful for visitors to Australia who are travelling by rental campervan or motor home.

The guide is similar to an accommodation directory with camping / caravan sites, and tourist park listings and informative symbols representing the site features such as holiday parks with disabled access, caravan parks with a pool, camping grounds in national parks or near beaches, etc.

Camps 4 also comes in the "Camps Snaps" format which in addition to a location description, includes over 1,800 photos of campsites. This enables you to see what camp sites are like in advance. (But is bulkier and more expensive).

Camping facilities at each site are depicted by symbols, including the standard ones for toilets, showers, power etc, and also those applicable to mobile homes and RVs, such as big rigs, maximum stay allowed, dump points, pets allowed, fees applicable etc.

There are also more descriptive icons such as: close to road; pleasant outlook or vista; mobile phone coverage; dry weather access and author recommended sites. Many listings include GPS co-ordinates and site access details.

The book is broken up into States or Territories, each colour-coded for easy navigation.

There is a list of over 600 dump point locations. It includes addresses and contact phone numbers, as well as symbols to show suitability for cassettes, holding tanks, use for non-guests (and whether a fee is applicable), together with accessibility for big rigs.

Being able to plan a trip with stopovers that are free or low cost, knowing if a pet is welcome and seeing at a glance what facilities are available, has proven to be a hit with travellers across Australia.

The only criticisms we had of this extremely useful guide, was its bulky size, and lack of accurate pricing details for each campsite (only a very rough indication is given).

2. Camping in Australia (Cathy Savage and Craig Lewis).

This comprehensive camping guide describes itself as "Australia's most comprehensive camping directory for families, bushwalkers and travellers". It lists over 2,300 campsites (both free and low-cost camping), and provides maps of every camping region.

Most of the features listed for the Camps 4 guide above could also be listed here.







Some things we liked about this guide over Camps 4 were:

• Accurate pricing for each listing. As we travel for months at a time, it makes a big difference to us if we were paying $20 or $5 per night for camping fees, so this feature was invaluable in deciding on where to stay.
• Lots of large, clear photos.
• More comprehensive word descriptions of sites.
• Indicates whether available showers are hot or cold. (In cold weather this can be very important!)
• Cheaper than Camps 4.

Criticisms (when compared to Camps 4):

• Lacks dump point information.
• Fewer listings than Camps 4 - means missing out on some available free campsites.

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