Showground camping: the overnight stops the grey nomad grapevine swears by

Twenty-two dollars. That's what Denise and I paid to camp behind the pavilion at the Merriwagga Showground a few years back, power included, and there was a bloke from the local Lions Club who came round at dusk to collect it and have a yarn about the wheat harvest. No amenities block worth writing home about, but the dunny was clean, the grass was mowed, and we slept better than we had in a caravan park that charged us fifty-five bucks the night before for a site next to the highway.

Showground camping is one of those things nobody tells you about until you've been on the road a while, or until some other nomad at a rest area mentions it over a cuppa and you feel a bit silly for not knowing. It's not a secret exactly. It's just not spruiked, because most showgrounds don't have a marketing budget or even a website. They've got a committee, a mowing roster, and a tin box for the donation.

What a showground camp actually is

Every country town of any size in Australia has a showground. It's where the annual agricultural show happens, sometimes the rodeo, sometimes the campdraft, and for the other 350-odd days a year the ground sits there mostly empty except for a few sheep yards and a grandstand nobody's painted since the seventies. Local show societies, usually volunteer-run, often let travellers camp on the grounds for a modest fee, and that fee goes straight back into keeping the society afloat. You're not freeloading. You're basically sponsoring next year's poultry pavilion.

The facilities vary enormously. Some showgrounds have powered sites with proper 15-amp outlets, hot showers and a camp kitchen because the local CWA branch fundraised for it. Others have a tap, a long-drop, and that's your lot. I've stayed at grounds in western New South Wales with better facilities than some caravan parks, and I've stayed at one in central Queensland where the "amenities" was a single toilet with a hand-written sign asking you to bring your own paper. Both were fine. You take what you get and you don't complain, because the alternative most nights is a servo car park or nothing at all.

Why they matter for the budget

If you've read our piece on what a lap of Australia actually costs, you'll know accommodation eats a big chunk of most people's daily spend, somewhere between free and eighty bucks depending how much you mix in caravan parks. Showgrounds sit right at the cheap end without the total unpredictability of free camping. Most charge somewhere between ten and twenty-five dollars a night, sometimes with power, sometimes an honesty box, sometimes a bloke who turns up on a quad bike. Compare that to a powered site in a regional park at forty-five to sixty dollars and you can see why a run of showground stops does wonders for the weekly average, especially if you're doing the slow travel approach we've banged on about before and staying in a region for a week or two at a stretch.

I'll be blunt about one thing though: I reckon some travellers treat showgrounds as free camps with extra grass, and that attitude is exactly what gets them closed to the public. If there's a donation box, put something decent in it. If there's a caretaker's number on the gate, ring it. These arrangements survive on goodwill, and goodwill runs out fast when people rock up, camp for free, and leave the gate open for the sheep to wander.

How to actually find one

This is the bit that trips people up, because there's no single directory. The best method, and the one Denise and I have used for six years now, is simply ringing the local visitor information centre when you're a day or two out from a town and asking straight out: "Does the showground here take campers?" More often than not the answer's yes, and they'll give you a contact name and a number, sometimes the show secretary, sometimes just "ask at the pub, they'll know."

WikiCamps and CamperMate list a good number of them these days, tagged usually as "showground" under the site type, with reviews that'll tell you whether the power actually works and whether the toilets are locked overnight. Worth cross-checking with our thoughts in the caravanning and camping apps actually worth having, because relying on a single app is how you end up at a gate that's been chained shut since the council changed the policy in 2019.

The other trick, and this one's saved us more than once, is just driving past. Showgrounds are almost always signposted from the highway, usually near the town's sporting complex or racecourse, and if there's a caravan or two already parked up inside, that's your answer. Pull in, have a look, and if nobody's about, the show society's phone number is usually on a board by the gate.

What to expect once you're there

Don't expect a reception desk. Expect a paddock, a shed, maybe some cattle yards you'll want to steer well clear of if it rained recently. Ablutions, where they exist, are often shared with whatever sporting club uses the oval, so don't be surprised if the shower block smells vaguely of Deep Heat and footy boots. Power, if offered, is often a single outlet per bay rather than individual pedestals, so bring a decent length of appropriately rated extension lead and don't expect to run the aircon flat chat all night.

Noise is the other thing. Showgrounds sit on the edge of town, sometimes right next to the main road, sometimes next to a saleyard that gets going at five in the morning with a truck full of cattle. It's not a resort. If you want dead quiet, a showground on sale day is the wrong pick. Ring ahead and ask if anything's on.

Where they fit on a Big Lap route

They're most useful, in my experience, on the long transit stretches where there's not much else. The run along the Newell Highway through central New South Wales is dotted with them, Coonabarabran, Gilgandra, Narrabri, all have grounds that take travellers, and they break up what's otherwise a fairly featureless day of driving. Same story out along the Birdsville Track corridor towns and through the Queensland channel country, where the alternative is a free camp with no facilities at all or a fifty-dollar park in a town where you're only stopping the one night anyway. If you're doing the Big Lap proper, you'll find showgrounds strung along nearly every inland route, though the coastal towns tend to have fewer because the caravan park lobby, so to speak, is stronger there and some councils have quietly discouraged the showground societies from competing.

Out west, in places like Birdsville itself, the showground overlaps almost with the town's whole social calendar, and camping there during race weekend is a different proposition entirely to a quiet Tuesday in the shoulder season. If you're heading up the Birdsville Track, it's worth checking the Birdsville Caravan Park as your baseline and asking locally whether the showground's an option that week, because event weekends change everything about availability and price.

The etiquette that keeps the gate open

Pay what's asked, even if nobody's watching. Don't tip your grey water on the ground, most grounds will have a spot for it or expect you to use a proper dump point, and if you're not sure, our guide on finding and using a dump point covers the basics that apply just as much here as anywhere. Keep dogs on a lead near the yards, close every gate you open, and if there's a show or event coming up, don't be precious about being asked to shift your rig a few days early. These places exist because a handful of volunteers keep the books balanced and the grass cut, often on a shoestring, and every grumpy camper who treats the ground like they own it makes the next committee meeting a bit more likely to end with "let's just stop taking travellers."

I'll admit I got this wrong once myself, years back near Barraba, when I assumed the empty grounds meant no fee applied and drove off the next morning without leaving anything. Ran into the show secretary at the servo getting a pie an hour later and felt about as welcome as a magpie in nesting season. Lesson learned. Ring ahead, pay up, say thanks.

A few worth seeking out

I won't pretend to have a definitive list, because they change hands, close, reopen, and the fee structures shift with every AGM. But the pattern holds true across the country: inland wheat-belt and grazing towns, especially through the Riverina, the Darling Downs and the Queensland channel country, tend to have the most reliable and best-value grounds. Coastal and tourist-town showgrounds are hit and miss, often because land values make the site more valuable as a commercial park than a donation-based camp. If you're planning a run down the Eyre Peninsula loop or through the Flinders Ranges, keep an eye out through the smaller towns between the big-name stops; that's exactly where a showground fills the gap nicely.

Denise reckons we've stayed at close to sixty showgrounds over six years on the road, and she keeps a little notebook with the good ones circled twice. It's not a bad system, honestly, better than half the apps.

— Trev Sanders, Grey Nomad Correspondent