Early days of camping in Australia

Although I now 'camp' using my Fleetwood Meridien 480-2 caravan, it wasn't always this luxurious, and when I sit on the step of my van watching the world go by on the lovely Caravan Club campsites, I reflect on just how lucky I now am.

In the 1950s, my mother and father used to take me and my two sisters camping for our summer holidays. Summer is at Christmas in Australia, so inevitably early December would be 'lists' - lists of clothes, lists of food, lists of equipment, all of which had to packed into large cardboard boxes which my father would then load into our large (and very heavy) box trailer, and away we'd go in our car (a 1929 Ford Model A tourer) for three weeks, driving thousands of miles from the southern state of Victoria, throughout New South Wales (my home state), and the southern half of Queensland. We visited virtually EVERY town in New South Wales over the ten or so years of camping we had (until I began work).

The roads were mainly extremely corrugated dirt or gravel, all of them so bad that we (literally!) could see the screws in the dashboard of our car undoing themselves due to the vibrations. I had to keep a screwdriver handy so I could tighten them up again!

Of course, campsites were nothing like they are these days! If we camped in a 'proper' campsite, there would be a cold water tap provided, and if the site was really luxurious, it might even have toilets (not flush toilets, just tin 'dunnies'!). There were no such things as showers, veg. prep. areas, or any of the vital services we expect today.

Washing was a dip in the local river, if there was one nearby (often as not, there was no water for about two hundred miles in any direction!). We used to carry water with us in ex-Army jerrycans, so the water always faintly tasted of petrol, but you get used to it! Cooking was done on a single-burner Primus stove which Dad would carefully prepare with methylated spirits in a little pan below the burner. He'd then light the methylated spirits and a few minutes later, when the burner had begun to get hot, he'd pump like mad to get the kerosene in the main tank of the stove to flow to the burner, vaporising in the hot part of the burner on the way. Often the burner wouldn't have got hot enough, so jets of hot kerosene would shoot out everywhere!

We would almost always have a fire, on which we'd boil our billy can of tea (with condensed milk, and yes, it was awful!), and Mum would cook our dinner for that evening, usually a rabbit which Dad had shot that morning. We ate a LOT of rabbit, and I won't touch that meat at all these days.

The tent was just a square 'box' of canvas, and the front could be propped open to let a breeze in. There was no groundsheet. At night my sisters would sleep in their mummy-style sleeping bags in the car, but I just slept under the front of the tent. Mum and Dad slept within the tent, together with food, water, clothing, etc. I used to dig a little hole so that my hip would fit into it to give me a more comfortable bed.

Although camping like this seems tough these days, we saw an awful lot of Australia and its plains and mountains. We visited museums, dams, walked the one-street towns (inevitasbly trying to find a tea-shop!), and although it was always hot (well over 40 degrees C almost all the time), we enjoyed our holidays.

Would I like to go camping like that again? Not on your life! I'll stick to Caravan Club campsites, thank you!

The photo of our tent was taken in 1959 at Wilson's Promentory, Victoria, the most southern point of the Australian continent. Although we then had a new car (a Morris Isis, a 6-cylinder version of the Morris Oxford still seen in India these days!), and our box trailer can also be seen.

The second photo shows Dad's car, complete with large drum of petrol attached to the back bumper bar - service stations were almost unknown in those days. Dad was a car mechanic, so if the car broke down (which it did far too often for my liking!), he would get out his huge box of tools and fix it beside the road. That included a complete rebuild of the gearbox when a bearing collapsed within it. That took him three days, including a half-day hike to the nearest town to telegraph a message to send the required spares to the town (Dubbo, I think it was!).