By Lee Tulloch
In the past, pitching a tent in the bush or on a beach was the only way many could afford overnight accommodation.Credit:
When I was a child, no one had heard of "glamping".
We had good old camping and that was pretty exciting in itself.
Holidays meant packing up the car and heading for Lake Tyers, where we'd sleep in huge khaki army tents in a camping ground managed by the Methodist Church. (We weren't Methodists and my father and his friends had to invent ways to sneak in beer.)
There was enough room in the tent for a place to cook on a portable stove, a kitchen table, lounge chairs, and two bedrooms, separated by curtains. I would lie on my stretcher at night and marvel at the stars through the hole in the top of the tent. It was magical, even if we had to walk down a bush track in the dark to go to the toilet in the middle of the night.
The posh people had aluminium caravans with breakfast nooks, ovens and what they called "cafe curtains". Tent people and caravan people would all meet up in the evenings in a shed made out of strips of bark. We'd devise concerts, contributing comedy acts and music. I had my first crush on a boy who wore a black mohair jumper to the beach.
We kids ran free-range most of the time and the only concern was that we didn't play with brown snakes (as I did on one occasion). Sometimes someone would fall in a ditch or get a tick, but there weren't many "helicopter" parents then. And we didn't have any kind of electronic devices, although I did own an Etch A Sketch. No one worried about Wi-Fi or 4G signals.
This is not a rave about how such devices are ruining our lives (they have their place) but I'm glad I was a child at a time when I was mostly left to my own resources, where I created my own kingdoms in the bush and the sand dunes.
In those days, glamorous camping ("glamping") was the provenance of the very rich or the romantically adventurous.
In the Netflix series The Crown, a memorable episode showed Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip enjoying one of the original glamping experiences at Treetops, Kenya's oldest safari lodge, during the royal tour of Kenya in 1952.
For my parents, who were of that generation, there weren't any elephants in Gippsland, but there were kangaroos and plenty of koalas. Pitching a tent in the bush or on a beach was the only way to afford overnight accommodation. Hotels and motels were beyond their reach.
We kids complained when dad set out all the tent pegs and we had to hammer them into the ground, but overall it was more fun than staying in any luxury hotel I've experienced.
Would I find it fun these days? Having grown soft, I admit that I have ambitions to sleep on a proper bed, rather than a canvas stretcher.
There are those glamps that take the word "eco" seriously (we were eco at Lake Tyers without knowing it) and also offer a way to go off the grid, with no phone signal or Wi-Fi. The idea is to replicate, with a little more comfort, those halcyon days when our minds weren't a frayed fabric of digital images and constant outrage.
But it's not camping if your accommodation is really a hotel suite with open sides.
Many glamps offer air conditioning, private pools, Persian carpets, fine linens and even Nespresso machines.
Years ago, I stayed at Longitude 131 near Uluru, one of the great glamping experiences. The tented suites with their uninterrupted views of the great rock were a far cry from our humble army tent. And yet, it wasn't really camping at all, in the way I fondly remembered it. No tent pegs to trip over in the dark.
There's an old-fashioned camping ground on a beach near where I live. There's only room for a dozen or so camps, tucked behind the low sand dunes, and there is no children's playground, in-ground pool, or shop selling fast food. In fact, it's a bit of a hike to the corner store, and there's not much to do except play on the beach.
Between Christmas and new year it rained quite a bit. This brought back memories of "summer" holidays past when we were stuck inside the tent, rained in, with books, Scrabble boards and card games.
It might have been simple, but seems like a real luxury now.
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