Free camping sites in Queensland: Covid exodus takes over caravan parks amid lockdowns

As countless travellers make their way north amid southern Covid lockdowns, caravan parks are being overrun, prompting councils to consider expanding free camping sites.

When the Morning Bulletin arrived at the Kershaw Garden free van parking site last week, Lenore Williamson thought we were from the council.

She said the Rockhampton Regional Council regularly checked travellers weren’t exceeding their two-day limit.

But the question remains whether fellow campers were Covid-tested or ‘jabbed’ before they hit the Bruce Highway to escape the lockdowns.

It has been more than a year since a Gladstone park owner warned free camping locations could become Covid breeding grounds.

Last year’s “great southern invasion”, though, pales in comparison to the numbers of people who have left the southeast corner during the latest Queensland lockdown.

Ms Williamson and her husband are regular ‘grey nomads’ who left their Swansea, NSW, home well before the lockdowns.

“We’re not pushing our luck trying to beat the government,” they said.

The couple had their second jab in Bowen, at the local chemist.

Ms Williamson will keep pushing north as her family goes into a snap seven-day lockdown in Newcastle.

She said the van parks she stayed at, out west as far as Lightning Ridge, had not yet been inundated with what had been called the ‘Covid Exodus’.

There are reports of people parking their vans illegally along the Capricorn Coast as they learn there are no bookings available at the caravan parks.

A Livingstone Shire Council spokesperson said council had been approached to allow some form of overflow camping at certain locations within the Shire.

“That request and the broader implications for the community of free or overflow camping are being considered,” they said.

Meanwhile, the only thing to destroy the peaceful setting by the Kershaw Gardens was a car doing burnouts on the High Street roundabout around 4am, the night after last week’s crime spree.

“We heard screeching tyres and gravel flying.”