Australian Trip
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 1
Introduction
Whelmed: The state between overwhelmed and underwhelmed.
So hey, let me tell you about our trip around Australia. You see, in 2024 my wife and I did the grey nomad thing, and spent a year driving around Australia with our caravan.
Australia is a pretty exotic place for some people — we’re well known for strange animals, weird people and amazing places — so people do find our story pretty interesting.
Really, I’d have loved to do it a lot younger, but it’s a lot easier financially once your kids are all grown up. That’s why it’s called grey nomads, and it’s quite the thing — most of our friends have done it, or are planning to. Except the city squares who think camping is too uncomfortable. (It is. But it’s the only way.)
So you drive away from home with the idea that you’re going to do fifteen thousand kilometres and make it back in one piece. The whole insane thing.
It’s a good thing nothing went wrong. Right.
But none of it makes much sense until you understand a few things first — so bear with me.
The Kit
So the first question is: what kit do you take? There are roughly three answers. Four-wheel-drive plus caravan. Four-wheel-drive with a rooftop tent. Or a campervan, where you live in the vehicle. The size and the cost vary enormously, but it’s one of those three.
And the correct answer is four-wheel-drive plus caravan. People disagree. They’re idiots.
Because a rooftop tent looks fantastic right up until you try to climb out of it first thing in the morning, barely awake, desperate for a pee. Leave that one to the young kids.
And the trouble with living in your van is you never really unpack. Turn up at Uluru for three days? You’ll be packing the whole thing up and unpacking it again every single day.
Nah. Caravan it is — which, for the Americans at the table, is what you’d call a travel trailer. Not a minivan. Not a train of camels crossing the Sahara. A box you tow, set up once, and leave. You turn up somewhere, set up, unhook — and now you’ve got a base camp. You explore all day and come back to a bed that’s already made. Ninety per cent of people end up here.
And here’s the wildest thing about Australia: the best places are off the road. We’ve flatly refused to build a proper road to them. So you need the four-wheel-drive to get there at all.
If you understand that, you understand the country.
So that’s what we had. A Toyota Prado, a mid-size caravan, and a swag — loaded and ready to go.
Where it gets hard is the off-road bit. And the off-road bit matters.
We took a road van — not built for getting off the bitumen — so we threw a swag in as well. Other people take an off-road van, hardened for the rough stuff. But that weight costs you, and it still doesn’t protect what you’ve packed inside it; corrugations shake a van to bits from the inside out. So when we left the road, we left the van behind.
There’s no right answer here. But we did pass one poor soul, off-road van and all, doing five kilometres an hour down a road so corrugated it was rearranging his fillings. He had seven hundred kilometres of it left to go.
Right.
So what’s a swag? That one’s Australian, far as I know. It’s a tent shaped more or less like a coffin, that you slide yourself into to sleep. How does that make sense? It doesn’t. We do it anyway. Snug — that’s what they are. Snug as anything.
That’s enough about kit. Unless you’re actually planning to do this — in which case, drop me a line, come over for dinner, and we’ll spend the entire night talking about batteries, solar, toilet cartridges, camping stoves, and Starlink.
Starlink.
The Road
The essence of driving around Australia is Highway 1.
Officially that’s its name — Highway 1, the longest national highway in the world, the one road that laps the entire continent, near enough to fifteen thousand kilometres of it. Nobody calls it that. Half of us call the whole thing the Princes Highway, which is actually just the southern, civilised stretch — but the name’s gotten stuck to the lot, the way these things do.
And it’s a weird road, because it can’t decide what it is. For most of the way it’s sealed — split lanes, sometimes, even six lanes where it matters. And then somewhere it quietly gives up. Turns into a dirt track that sees a grader once every couple of years, runs through somebody’s private property, over cattle grids, across river crossings. Crocodiles included.
Same road. Same number on the map. Six lanes here, and a thing you’d hesitate to call a road at all up there.
I’ve done every kilometre of it. Though this trip, I’ll admit, we didn’t bother with the off-road bits.
But the thing that’s most special about Highway 1 is that, for a lot of it, it’s the only one. No alternative. No parallel route, no back way, no other road going where you’re going. Just the one.
Which is fine, right up until something happens to it.
A few years back, a cyclone came down out of the Top End, drifted into the Kimberley, and instead of blowing itself out like cyclones are supposed to, it just sat there. Dumped half a metre of rain in a week. The river at Fitzroy Crossing came up to a record it had never touched, and it took out the bridge. Not damaged. Took it out.
So now you want to get from one side to the other. How far’s the detour?
Well. There’s the Gibb River Road — except that was out from the same storm, and it’s generally out that time of year anyway. There’s the Gunbarrel Highway, if you’ve completely lost your mind and you’re not towing anything you’d like to keep. And then there’s the actual answer, the nearest thing to a sealed road around: you go south. Down through the middle of the country, near enough to the bottom of it, and back up the other side. About eight thousand kilometres. To get around one river.
I’m honestly not even sure all of that’s sealed. Out here “a real road” is a flexible idea.
But that’s the thing about this road. It runs through some of the hardest country on earth — country so empty that one broken bridge can put eight thousand kilometres between you and the other side. And that’s not the catch. That’s the reason. That’s why we do it.
And all along it, the whole way round, there’s somewhere to camp. Because driving this road is the thing you do in Australia.
Camping
Campgrounds. Oh, we love them.
All those people crammed into the one place — as many caravans packed together as the laws of physics and profit allow, everyone sharing the common toilets and the showers in the brick amenities block, at whatever the temperature happens to be. Which can be below freezing, or it can be forty. Sometimes both, same day. Buckle up.
And we will not be discussing the best part — which is the moment you discover exactly how strong your marriage is, live, in front of an audience, as you reverse the caravan into a tight block. Steering around other vans. Around trees that have been there ninety years and aren’t moving. Around children, who have absolute right of way in all respects, and know it.
A word of advice: don’t bring any marriage baggage into a campground. Your neighbours hear everything. They’ll pretend they didn’t. So will you, the next night, when it’s their turn.