Scroll through any tourism campaign and you’ll see it: a couple sipping coffee as the sun rises over a misty valley or a quiet beach, children laughing barefoot in the grass, a perfectly contained campfire glowing just enough to feel rustic but not enough to be inconvenient.
We are a camping nation. Australians make with more than 15 million camping trips a year, spending 57 million nights under canvas and more than $10 billion, according to the Caravan Industry Association of Australia’s 2025 report.
It’s all framed as the ultimate reset, a chance to reconnect with nature, slow down, and unwind. Picture perfect. Maybe even a little birdie chirping in the background.
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But if we are honest, stripped of its glossy marketing and carefully curated Instagram angles, camping is essentially discomfort with a positive spin: cold, awkward, mildly painful, inconvenient, noisy, gross.
Of course, camping enthusiasts will insist it stands for something far more wholesome: campfires, adventure, memories, peace, inspiration, nature, gratitude. And they’re not entirely wrong. They’re just … selective.
It starts long before you ‘relax’
The first myth worth unpacking is that camping begins when you arrive. It doesn’t.
It begins at home, usually several days earlier when someone suggests “let’s just go away for the weekend” as if this were a simple, low-effort idea.
A hotel stay simply takes a suitcase. Camping takes project management. So, it starts with a list.
Food alone becomes a strategic exercise: not just what you’ll eat, but when you’ll eat it, how you’ll store it, and whether it will survive a weekend in an esky.
Spontaneous cooking is quietly replaced with meal scheduling. Goodbye fresh, healthy choices, hello to whatever is easiest to transport and least likely to go off.
Enter snacks. Lots of them.
Not so much for nutrition, but for morale — which is about as hard to keep up as a tent in a Queensland storm.
Then comes the equipment.
Air mattresses, pillows, sleeping bags, folding chairs, a folding table, a gas cooker, plates, cutlery, pots (which someone will forget), lanterns, batteries, sunscreen, insect repellent, a first aid kit, water containers, firewood, marshmallows — and that’s just the “basics”.
Packing the car quickly escalates into a high-pressure game of Tetris. Every available space is filled, rearranged, and negotiated over.
At some point, the question of whether you really need the gazebo comes up. You absolutely do.
Because without it, it’s sunburn in three, two, one or a tent that doubles as a sauna, steam included. Neither is relaxing.
Comfort is … negotiable
Attempts to pack small comforts are often met with resistance.
Suggestions such as fairy lights — a modest effort to create some atmosphere — can be dismissed in favour of more “practical” lighting solutions.
The result is a campsite lit up like a night-time roadwork zone until the battery runs out, which it inevitably does because the charger was left at home. Back to the blame game.
By the second night, you may find yourself sitting in near-darkness while neighbouring campsites glow warmly with the kind of ambience you wanted to bring but which didn’t survive the packing negotiations, something that might have made the otherwise uncomfortable trip feel at least a little more warm and relaxing.
At that point, it’s less camping and more learning from other people’s better decisions while quietly, or not so quietly, blaming someone for not listening to you.
The illusion of simplicity
Arriving at a campsite does not, as advertised, simplify life. It complicates it.
You attempt to pitch the tent, realising no one is actually in charge.
Someone insists they “did it last time”, another tries to google instructions with no internet reception, and a crucial piece is nowhere to be found. Cue the blame game.
From there, things don’t exactly settle. Nothing has a permanent place. Not your belongings, not your food, not even you.
Items are constantly moved, often for no clear reason other than being in the way, followed by the inevitable: “Has anyone seen the … ?”
It feels oddly familiar to home life, except here you’re also physically uncomfortable, which does little for the already limited patience which got you into this “reconnect with nature” idea in the first place.
You sit in a folding chair that keeps you upright but not relaxed, or retreat into the tent which, as previously discussed, has its own issues.
And then there are the neighbours.
Camping introduces a level of proximity to strangers unacceptable in any other setting.
You are separated by fabric walls that do little to block sound, meaning you become unintentionally involved in each other’s routines.
Hearing their conversations, their music, their late-night laughter, their early-morning alarms — often in the form of a toddler announcing the day at 4am.
There is no formal introduction, no polite small talk, just a shared, unspoken agreement to co-exist while knowing far too much about each other.
But it’s the shared state of mild dishevelment that really sticks people together, quite literally.
You also share facilities, which is its own experience. Timing becomes everything and you quickly learn to lower your expectations.
Showers come with time limits and unpredictable temperatures, toilets sometimes without toilet paper.
You quickly develop a reluctance to touch anything directly, while gaining unexpected insight into previous users — including their hair colour, because they’ve thoughtfully left it behind. Privacy, meanwhile, becomes more of a group concept.
Nature, up close and (too) personal
Camping is often described as a chance to reconnect with nature. What is less frequently mentioned is that nature is equally interested in reconnecting with you.
Flies, in particular, display an impressive level of commitment. Not just in number, but in variety. Large, small, fast, slow, persistent, unbothered.
At any given moment, you could conduct a fairly comprehensive field study without leaving your — uncomfortable — chair.
Any entomologist would be thrilled with the density and diversity on display.
They all share a common goal, and that is your eyes, your nose and your mouth.
Meals come with a side of flies (but hey, it’s extra protein), whether you like it or not, and even the most talkative person goes quiet, with any idea of connecting over a shared meal quickly abandoned.
And then there are the ants, essentially the mozzies of the ground. Screens are just a suggestion for those little buggers, walking right in and hijacking anything remotely resembling food.
They come with names sounding far too serious for something that small, until you realise they’re not joking around.
Bull ants, fire ants, butcher ants. Each one comes with a bite that is, at best, memorable.
And that’s just the small stuff.
In come the snakes and spiders, quietly minding their business in what is very much their territory.
Shoes are checked, bags are shaken out, and a late-night trip to the loo turns into a dreaded torch-assisted operation, provided it was packed. If not, expect the blame game to resume.
And it’s not just the obvious culprits. Kookaburras are cute but are not to be trusted either.
While we were distracted by the flies at the barbecue, they quietly took their positions in the trees around us, watching.
One second later, swoosh, one bird took the entire string of sausages, all still connected. No dinner.
It also meant no washing dishes — at least one problem solved, because even washing up is more stressful than at home where a dishwasher handles it with the press of a button, working away in the kitchen while you relax.
Out here, it’s a tub of grey water and a sponge that’s seen too much, and you try to convince yourself this counts as clean.
It somehow feels harder and less effective at the same time.
After your “relaxing camping trip connecting with nature” you come back with a sore back, too little sleep, a collection of mozzie bites, having lived off junk food and snacks, with questionable hygiene and everything smelling like smoke.
The washing machine works overtime the second you’re home.
It’s not so much a break as something you need to recover from.
The part making camping not too bad
And yet, despite all of this, there are moments presenting a compelling case in favour of camping.
Family time, children with unlimited space to run, explore, and entertain themselves without screens.
Memories built around all the less glamorous parts — the packing chaos, the heat, the insects, the neighbours, the things that didn’t feel fun at the time but somehow become the best stories later.
Like when Dad forgot the sleeping bags, allegedly.
And camping can take you places difficult to experience any other way, especially in Australia.
Trips through outback Queensland, to places like Charlotte Plains, Cunnamulla and Blackall for example, offer a lasting perspective on the scale and character of our country.
You develop an appreciation for the people and the landscape, come away with stories worth telling and learn things you wouldn’t otherwise learn.
(For example, the longest bar in the world was once in Charleville. Completely useless information, until it suddenly isn’t — if it wins you money on a TV quiz like The Chase, camping suddenly pays off, literally.)
These are the moments camping advocates point to, and they’re not wrong.
So, where does that leave camping?
Sitting there in the morning with bacon, eggs, and coffee — which looks perfect but taste bland because salt and pepper didn’t make it.
In the distance, a kookaburra is laughing at me.
That sums up camping: The set-up is all there but, without the people, the places, the experiences — the things that give it flavour — it just falls flat.
Yes, it is uncomfortable. It’s inconvenient. It’s often noisy, occasionally unhygienic, and consistently more work than advertised.
But it also creates memories — the kind that are unpredictable, slightly chaotic, and (in hindsight) often very funny.
It gives children a sense of freedom that’s increasingly rare in everyday life. It takes you to places worth exploring, even if the process of getting there is less than ideal.
Time with family, reconnecting with friends, seeing places. Those things matter.
But camping for the sake of camping, just to sleep in a tent and call it relaxing, remains a hard sell.
So, where do you pitch your tent on this?
