School holiday free camps: how to actually find a site with kids in tow

We pulled into a riverside free camp outside Barraba three days before the last spring school holidays kicked off, and it was already at maybe a third capacity. By the Friday it was full, with vans looping through slowly, hoping someone would pack up. That gap between "arrived early, got a good spot" and "arrived on the Friday, driving in circles" is the whole game with school holiday free camping, and nobody tells you how narrow it actually is.

I've been doing this for six years now with two primary-schoolers and a kelpie cross in the back of the wagon, and free camping in school holidays is a genuinely different exercise to free camping any other week of the year. The sites are the same. The competition isn't. Grey nomads who've had a free camp to themselves for months suddenly find three other families have turned up wanting the same flat, shaded patch near the water. Nobody's wrong for wanting it. But if you're travelling with kids and don't want to spend day one of the holidays stressed and site-hunting after dark, you need a different approach to the rest of the year.

Why school holiday free camping needs its own strategy

Regular free camping etiquette assumes a fairly predictable population: retirees on flexible schedules, a scattering of workers, the odd family. During school holidays that population roughly doubles in the popular corridors — the coast north of Coffs Harbour, anywhere within three hours of Brisbane, the river systems feeding into the Murray. Sites that comfortably hold fifteen rigs on a normal Tuesday can be asked to hold thirty on the Thursday before term ends. The bigger problem for families specifically is timing. You're not driving during the week like a lot of full-timers; you're leaving after school pickup on the last day of term, in a queue of a few hundred thousand other families doing exactly the same thing. If you're relying on rocking up to a free camp at 4pm expecting the good spot under the river gums, you're behind everyone who left at lunchtime.

Scout before you're desperate

The single best thing we've changed in our own routine is scouting a fallback site a full day's drive before we need it, not on the day. If we know we want to be at a particular free camp by Thursday night, we look at what's a realistic overnight stop on Wednesday too — somewhere we'd be happy staying an extra night if Thursday's site is chocka. This matters more in school holidays because the "just push on to the next town" plan falls over when every free camp along a popular route is in the same state. We had this happen on the Bruce Highway corridor a few years back — three free camps in a row full by 2pm, and we ended up paying for a caravan park site we hadn't budgeted for, purely because we hadn't scouted a fallback. Lesson learned, expensive one.

Arrive earlier than feels reasonable

In term time we'll happily roll into a free camp at 3 or 4pm. In school holidays, if there's a specific site we want — river frontage, shade, close enough to the amenities block that a seven-year-old can get there alone at 2am without an expedition — we're aiming for late morning or straight after an early checkout somewhere else. That sometimes means a shorter driving day, which for us means the kids do schoolwork or a jigsaw in the back seat while we're still moving, not once we've stopped. It also means we've had to get more honest about how far we can actually drive with two kids and a dog before everyone's had enough. Realistically that's 2.5 to 3 hours some days, less if the roadhouse stop turns into a play at the servo. Planning shorter driving days that finish earlier is the trade-off for getting first pick of a site in peak weeks.

Read the site properly before you commit

This bit doesn't change for school holidays, but it matters more because you've got less flexibility to move on if you get it wrong. We're looking at ground firmness for the jockey wheel, whether there's actual shade for the middle of the day (non-negotiable with kids and a dog in Queensland in April), how close the nearest other rig is, and whether there's a natural buffer — a tree, a rise, a gap — between us and the next family's generator or the group that arrived towing a boat and three eskies. If the site's on a river or dam, I'm checking the bank isn't undercut and there's no sign of recent flooding debris caught in the low branches. Kids near water at a free camp is a different risk profile to kids at a caravan park with a fence and a pool gate, and that's worth being honest with yourself about before you set up sixty metres from a deep hole your six-year-old thinks looks "so good for jumping in."

Know the state rules, because they don't relax for holidays

Free camping rules don't get more lenient because it's the school holidays — if anything, rangers and council compliance officers are more active in peak periods because that's when overcrowding and rubbish complaints spike. The rules vary meaningfully state to state: some council reserves cap stays at 24 or 48 hours, national parks generally require a permit and a booked, defined site rather than "camp anywhere," and some free camps that are tolerated most of the year get actively patrolled and moved on during holiday peaks because of the volume. We've had good experiences and bad ones with this. Good, generally, in places with clear signage and a council that's invested in making the free camp work — bins emptied, a basic toilet, defined sites. Bad where there's no signage at all and everyone's just guessing at the rules, which is when you get the arguments over who was there first and whose dog is off-lead where it shouldn't be. If you want the full state-by-state rundown on what's actually allowed, we've covered that in finding free camps without an app and it's worth a proper read before the holidays, not during them.

Have a genuine backup that isn't "we'll figure it out"

The honest bit of advice here, and it's a bit contrarian for a free camping article: in the first week or two of school holidays, book one paid night in reserve. Not because free camping doesn't work in peak periods — it does, plenty of families do it successfully every single school holidays — but because the cost of getting it wrong with two tired kids and a dog at 6pm is higher than the thirty-odd dollars a powered site costs. We keep a booking-com-style app open with one caravan park bookmarked along our route as insurance, and we've used it maybe twice in six years. Cheap insurance, in my view, against a genuinely miserable evening. This is different to the rest of the year, when we'd happily push on and find something eventually. With kids who've got school the day they get back and a dog who needs a proper walk, "eventually" isn't good enough on day one of the holidays.

The etiquette still matters, maybe more

Everything in the 24-hour rule article applies double in school holidays, because you're camped closer to more people than usual and the margin for annoying your neighbours is smaller. Generator hours matter more when there are toddlers trying to nap in the van three metres away. Keeping the dog on a lead near a free camp full of other people's kids matters more too — not every family's dog-savvy, and a friendly kelpie bounding up to a nervous four-year-old isn't a great start to anyone's holiday. We've also found the families who get invited to camp near each other again — swap numbers, end up crossing paths further up the coast — are the ones who managed noise, kept kids and dogs contained to their own site, and didn't spread camp chairs and awnings into the walking track. Small stuff, but it's the difference between a free camp community that works and one that gets a ranger called on it.

Where this actually plays out well

Some of the best school holiday free camping we've done has been slightly off the absolute honeypot routes. The east coast between Sydney and Cairns during holidays is genuinely tight — if you're doing the East Coast Run in peak weeks, expect competition for every decent free camp within cooee of the beach. Inland alternatives, a bit further from the coast, tend to have more give in them, and often better shade and cheaper fuel besides. If you're chasing a longer trip and want to build the school holiday timing into the bigger picture, it's worth reading how we think about pulling kids out of school for the Big Lap — because sometimes the better move isn't finding a free camp in peak week at all, it's shifting your own travel window slightly outside it.