Place Review: Big Valley Campsite

Just noticed this review while doing my daily validation of Place updates, and it made me wonder: how often are people running into the same issue — campgrounds expanding to meet demand, but at the cost of the actual camping experience?

Since 2022 we’ve been travelling extensively, almost full-time, right across Australia, and the pattern is impossible to ignore. The landscape of “how Australians camp” has shifted dramatically since COVID. Unless you’re out in the truly remote regions, the camper trailers, swags, and old-school tent setups have all but vanished except for the locals visiting their fav spots on a long weekend holiday. In their place: massive caravans. Entire towns now revolve around them.

And heaven help you if you turn up in a tent. In many coastal and regional areas, tent-campers are treated like second-class citizens — as though you’re an inconvenience to both the park operators and the caravanners themselves. The new wave of families and young couples doing the “Big Lap” has merged with the long-established grey nomad crowd, and together they dominate the campground demographics. They expect powered sites, level pads, water on tap, easy access, and consistency.

Meanwhile, the 4WDers and more adventurous travellers have quietly retreated to state forests, remote tracks, and desert country — anywhere the caravans can’t or won’t go. But they too need to stay in towns sometimes and that's where the trouble lies.

The impact? Country towns, coastal holiday spots, and formerly quiet regional campgrounds have become playgrounds for caravans. Even if you want to camp — actually camp — in a nice, natural setting, you’ll often find the campground has been re-engineered to cater for the caravan influx. What used to be a campground is now a grid of marked, levelled, drive-through “self-contained” pads: efficient, profitable, and utterly devoid of the charm that made camping appealing in the first place.

And while all of this might be practical from a management point of view, it’s not what many of us expect — or want — from a campground. It raises a genuine question: how have your expectations been challenged lately when you’ve rolled into a campground?

Have you found yourself shifting from a camper to a caravanner just to keep up with what parks now cater for? Or maybe you’ve still got a camper trailer and feel the pinch of being lumped into the “camper” category — struggling to fit the newly imposed “self-contained only” rules that seem designed with big vans in mind.

It feels like a Pandora’s box, but it’s a conversation worth having. How are others experiencing this new landscape of camping in Australia?

Michelle

Similar discussion is held regarding "remote"hiking tracks/trails.
National Park campsites are changing from cleared patches of ground near a creek to sites with composting loos with rain water tank and hiker platforms, with associated increased charges.
The purists bemoan the evolution, however the changes are getting a lot more people "out there".
As I've aged wd have gone from family canvas tents to soft floor camper trailer to a hard floor CT, to now in my mid 60s now a hybrid camper. But I still do multi day remote hiking.