8 | GO CAMPING AUSTRALIA

Regular readers of this magazine will know that I generally inject some light humour into my column but today I’m going to digress on a

more serious note. During the past twelve months an alarming

amount of press and debate nationwide has been devoted to the brewing controversy of free camping. Not only banning backpacker bongo vans on the esplanades of popular seaside towns, but the just-out-of-town roadside rest areas favoured by grey nomad caravanners and, most worrying, free camping sites in national parks and forest reserves, most notably in Victoria.

Bill Garner, author of Born in a Tent, how camping makes us Australian, strongly advocates that camping is part of our culture, our national heritage and the most profound way we interact with our environment. His view, and one that I compound, is that a certain amount of opportunity to free camp is, more or less, an Australian entitlement.

While Garner, through a recent article in The Age, (link on Go Camping Australia Facebook page) explained the ‘sneaky’ rationale the Victorian Government is using to introduce or increase camping fees to apparently recover maintenance costs, I come at the issue from a different perspective – albeit crudely put as: s---t in your own nest and bugger the consequences. Notice no exclamation mark. Deliberately omitted as I’m not aiming to be frivolous.

Campers of Australia hear this: if you continue to use campsites as toilets and waste dumping areas and have little or no regard for either the

land managers, environment, wildlife or fellow campers, the next generation will have very few places to bush camp and next to nowhere that’s free to camp.

During our recent extended Victorian trip TOH and I were appalled at the amount of pristine bush camps that filthy low-life scum had enjoyed and left little better than a sewerage dump site. At one spot in the Buckland Valley, someone had gone to the trouble to take a portable toilet with them and before vacating the site had tipped the entire contents on the ground. For God’s sake – would they want to camp next to someone else’s pile of s---t?

This is what governments, local and state, contend with. This costs taxpayer’s money. This results in fees and registrations and inspections and rangers and locked gates and rules and signs …

Collectively, we as the outdoor-loving camping public must come up with a way to educate campsite users, self-regulate, and effectively police and punish those that refuse to do the right thing.

No, I don’t have any answers, despite spending an inordinate amount of sleepless nights contemplating the issue. A certain percentage of people are grubs and will remain

grubs, of that I know. Perhaps we need to concentrate on educating the school-age kids in some way. Maybe there should be a national awareness campaign. Possibly campers should ‘spy’ on other campers – it’s not hard in the digital age – and report littering online, which is available in most states. How about volunteer ‘rangers’ or ‘caretakers’ (but that needs administration and would therefore attract a cost). Would you be prepared to contribute to an awareness campaign via an annual camping permit system? Could the bongo van campers and grey nomads receive a free camping voucher, to be displayed on the dashboard, when they spend money in a town?

If I was queen of Australia I’d have a database of DNA on every person so that samples could be taken from litter and toilet waste and the perpetrators put in stocks in city squares to be flogged. The Dark Ages meets the technology age. Radical if not practical, but surely effective!

Don your collective thinking hats campers and lobby your government representatives. They will react to well-thought out initiatives and proposals. Join a club, contribute to a petition – just don’t sit on your hands and be apathetic, or our way of life will be forsaken.

Andrea Ferris, Editor andrea@vinkpub.comwww.gocampingaustralia.com.au

Words: Andrea Ferris

FREE CAMPING – GOING, GOING …

Image: Megan Willis Photography Image: Andrea Ferris