Free camping with kids: how to pick a site that actually works for families

We pulled into a riverside free camp outside Barcaldine last winter at 4:40pm, thinking we had plenty of light left. By the time I'd walked the site with the kids to check for open drops to the water, it was dusk, the good flat spots were taken, and we ended up wedged between two rigs with our annexe half on a slope. Lesson learned again, because apparently I need to relearn it every school holidays: free camping with kids is a completely different exercise to free camping solo, and the rules that work for a couple in a Troopy don't always work when you've got a seven-year-old, a nine-year-old and a kelpie who thinks every stranger's camp chair is an invitation.

My colleague Bec's written a good piece on choosing a free camp when you're travelling solo, and a lot of her logic still applies. But solo travellers can pick a quiet, tucked-away spot with a view and not think twice about it. With kids, half of what makes a free camp good or bad has nothing to do with the view and everything to do with logistics you don't notice until you've got small people relying on you to get them right.

Arrive with daylight to spare, non-negotiably

This is the one rule I'd nail to the dashboard. Free camps fill on a first-in basis, and the good family-friendly spots (flat, away from the road, near but not next to the toilet block if there is one) go first. If you're travelling with kids, aim to be set up and settled two hours before dark, not rolling in at last light hoping something opens up. Kids need daylight to explore the site safely before dinner, and you need daylight to actually see what you're camping next to — a riverbank, an eroded drop, an unfenced dam, loose rocks, whatever it is.

We now treat 3pm as our hard cut-off for starting the hunt for a free camp, particularly in winter when the light's gone by 5:30 in a lot of the country. If we're not confident we'll find something by then, we divert to a paid site instead of gambling on the light. A $25 unpowered site beats a stressed 6pm reverse-park into a spot we haven't actually inspected.

Reading a site through a kid's eyes, not yours

When I check a free camp now, I'm not looking at the same things I looked at before we had kids. Water access is the big one — rivers, dams, tidal flats, anything with a current or a drop-off needs a very clear line of sight from the camp so I can actually see the kids from the annexe, not just hear them. Traffic is the other one. A lot of free camps sit right off a highway or a station track, and I want at least fifty metres and a bit of scrub between our camp and any road with through-traffic, because kids on bikes don't always look before they cross.

I also check the ground itself — burrs, bindis, anthills, broken glass from old campfires. None of it's a dealbreaker, but it changes whether the kids can run around barefoot or need shoes on the whole time, and that's the difference between a relaxed afternoon and me nagging for three hours straight.

The toilet and dump point reality nobody puts in the brochure

Free camps with no toilet are fine for us as adults. They're a lot less fine at 2am when a nine-year-old needs the loo and there's a communal drop toilet fifteen minutes' walk in the dark, or worse, nothing at all and you're relying on a shovel and a torch. We now factor toileting into site choice more than almost anything else. If there's a clean drop toilet within a short, well-lit walk, that's a big tick. If there isn't, we make sure our own porta-potti is set up and accessible before dark, every single night, no exceptions.

Dump points matter here too, obviously, and my colleague Marto's written the definitive rundown on finding a dump point and using one without being that person. With two kids and their questionable diets on the road, our cassette or black tank fills faster than it did when it was just my husband and me, so we plan dump stops more frequently than most solo travellers would need to, and we check the map for the next one before we've even finished setting up camp for the night.

Generator noise, quiet hours, and being honest about your own kids

Here's my mildly contrarian take: families camping for free need to be more careful about noise etiquette than anyone, not less, because kids are loud and most of us underestimate it. I've watched families set up next to quiet retirees and then let the kids run screaming laps of the camp until 9pm, generator running the whole time for a portable projector. It's not against any rule, but it's not neighbourly either.

Our approach is simple. Generator off by 8pm at the latest, earlier if we're camped near other rigs. Kids wound down and inside by dusk regardless of how much daylight-saving-fuelled energy they've still got. And if we roll into a free camp that's clearly full of grey nomads settled in for a quiet week, we'll often just keep driving rather than be the family that turns their evening upside down. State reserves and forestry camps in particular tend to have specific generator curfews written into the local rules — Free Camping in Australia: The Rules, State by State is worth a read before you assume the same hours apply everywhere, because they genuinely don't.

When a cheap powered site beats a free one

I'll say the quiet part out loud: sometimes a free camp isn't worth it with kids, even when it's gorgeous. If we're three days into a run of early starts, a hot night's coming, and the free option has no shade and no water, I'll happily pay for a powered site with a decent camp kitchen and a jumping pillow and call it money well spent on my own sanity. Places like Easts Beach Holiday Park in Kiama or Reflections Hawks Nest exist for exactly those nights — clean amenities at 7am, kids occupied, aircon running, and everybody sleeps properly. Free camping is brilliant for the budget and brilliant for the kids' sense of adventure, but it's not a competition, and there's no medal for suffering through a 38-degree night in a tin box to save twenty bucks.

Our go-to style of family free camp

The free camps that work best for us share a few traits: some tree cover for shade, a reasonably flat and grassy (not dusty) footprint, other families already camped there (kids find playmates fast, and it's genuinely reassuring at night), and enough space between sites that nobody's annexe guy-ropes are tangled with the neighbours'. Low-cost council or recreation-area style camps near the coast often tick these boxes better than deep bush sites — somewhere like Inskip Point Recreation Area in Queensland gives you that beach-camp freedom with enough infrastructure and enough other families around that it doesn't feel isolated, which matters more with kids than I expected it to before we started doing this properly.

If you're building an east coast trip around this kind of site selection, our family lap of the NSW South Coast piece has a good run of towns where free and low-cost options sit close enough together that you can bail from one to the other without much drama, which takes a lot of the pressure off the 3pm decision.

Don't forget the dog in all of this

If you're travelling with a pet as well as kids, free camp selection gets one more layer. Off-lead etiquette, other campers' dogs, ticks in long grass and proximity to farm stock all become relevant. My colleague's written a solid guide on caravanning with pets, parks and keeping them cool that's worth reading alongside this one if you're doing the full kids-plus-dog combo like we are — it genuinely changes which sites are worth the drive in.

None of this makes free camping with kids hard, just different. Get there early, read the site properly, keep the noise reasonable, and know when to just pay the twenty bucks. The kids won't remember whether the site was free. They'll remember whether there was a jumping pillow, a good swimming hole nearby, or a mate to run around with until dark.