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Abstract
Freedom camping is fuelling nationwide political debate in Australia as a rapidly expanding recreational vehicle (RV) market impresses upon regional and urban communities its strong desire to avoid traditional caravan parks and the features that they present/represent. Community leaders are being lobbied to consider the needs of all types of caravanning visitors to their communities. Conflict and positional power struggles are thus surfacing within national caravanning communities and within national, state and local community governance arenas. This paper provides an overview and an assessment of the history and status quo of the issues. It is structured to first set the broader political contest within a local context, and this informs a working definition of freedom camping. We then review the growing, but limited and fragmented, international literature concerning freedom camping; discuss the phenomenon of freedom camping with reference to supply and demand issues, including the oversimplified descriptions of freedom campers' motivations; and finally, highlight the complex nature of stakeholder engagement and influences on policies as they relate to freedom camping through policy dialogues. The planning and management of spaces and places as limited resources are inherently political activities and are valued for a variety of competing uses by users with diverse perceptions and motivations across time. Through this exploratory analysis, we identify the perspectives of key stakeholders in the policy process, provide a baseline for future discourse on issues relating to freedom camping and conclude with a call for further critical analysis on this subject to inform rational debate on policy-making, planning and management implications for regional and urban communities.
Notes
1. For the purposes of this paper a RV is any motorized or towable caravan used as a mode of accommodation. The term ‘caravan’, interchangeable with RV, includes pop-tops, campervans, camper-trailers, tent-trailers, motorhomes, slide-ons and fifth wheelers.
2. ABS Survey of Tourism Accommodation ceased to report caravanning and holiday park industry statistics in June 2010. The Caravan Industry Association of Australia (CIAA), formed in July 2014, is committed to filling this void.
3. Van-packers are generally considered as the 18–30 year-old demographic, both domestic and international, that prefers the freedom of independent transport for their backpacking experience in Australia. They tend to use hired rental vans with high brand recognition such as Wicked, Jucy, Spaceship and Hippy Camper. The latter providing a direct link back to the nostalgia of freedom hippies of the 1960s and the ubiquitous Kombi camper-van (Associated Press Citation2013).
4. Dump-Ezy products have evolved out of a need to provide a mechanism for dealing with waste from portable toilets in all sorts of mobile vehicles and boats. The more sophisticated off-road-type trailers and vehicles available now are allowing large numbers of people to venture into remote areas that have little or no supporting infrastructure. Additionally, large numbers of people are moving around in privately owned or rented vehicles with their waste on-board, requiring to dump it somewhere, appropriately or not (Dump-Ezy Citation2014).
5. To gain the status of RV friendly town, councils agree to provide a number of services or facilities, including access to land for camping (often a showground, but not a caravan park) with access to a dump point at no charge, or for a nominal fee (CMCA Citation2011). There are currently 206 RV friendly towns across Australia (Allen Citation2014).
6. From 12 July 2014, CRVA formally merged with RV Manufacturers Australia (RVMA) to form a new entity, Caravan Industry Association Australia (CIAA). The new organization will adopt a whole-of-industry approach which will include industry accreditation and compliance activities, greater resources and marketing capacity, and the creation of a single and powerful national industry voice to government and media (CRVA Citation2014b).
7. From 2010, the ABS collection scope was reduced to caravan parks with 40 sites or more (ABS Citation2011).
8. Note emphasis on language – ‘illegal’ being the operative of the era.
9. The cyclical nature of the resources sector continues to play a significant role in the evolution of the caravanning industry (Caldicott and Scherrer Citation2013a, Citation2013b). At this time, the impact is on caravan park site mix rather than on caravan manufacturing. Some parks situated in resource-rich areas such as Port Headland and Geraldton (WA) and Mackay and Roma (Qld) have removed caravan sites to accommodate greater number of park cabins to meet the demand for Fly-in Fly-out (FIFO) mining and construction workers (Brighthouse and Starfish Business Solutions Citation2012; Mackay Tourism Citation2010).
10. ‘Long-paddock’ is an Australian colloquial term for roads and highways. It has its origin in the travelling stock routes that criss-cross the nation where drovers shepherd their stock and ‘camp-out’ along the rural travelling stock reserves. Freedom camping is deeply rooted in this tradition (Hawkins Citation2014).
