We recently decided to go away camping for the night, and looking for a site that was close to Brisbane and not expensive, we decided on Hardings Paddock Campground at Ipswich. There’s drop toilets, a camp kitchen with BBQs, and lots of space. The eight campsites are all defined spots. The website says that there’s space for tent camping in the middle but the people who were tent camping set up on grass spots next to the paved areas.

The campsite is surrounded by padddocks of trees, with green space in the middle between the camp sites. This leads to an open area with a camp kitchen and two barbeques with a sink for washing up (but no water supplied).

The camp kitchen is on the left in this photo, with lots of space and tables in the undercover area. The toilets are in the middle of the photo. There’s three drop toilets. There’s also a communal fire pit, and shower stalls (just out of the photo to the right) where there’s lots of space for hanging up a camp shower and hooks to hang clothes and bags on. We didn’t bring our camp shower though as we were only there for one night, and it was also overcast and raining so we spent a lot of time quite damp.

The firepit is quite large and well set-up. Since it was raining, we didn’t bring wood, and I even manged to forget the marshmallows for even a small toasting. Some other campers managed to build up a fire to cook their dinner on and kept it going with the help of a huge umbrella, and offered us some marshmallows to toast over the fire. “So our boys don’t eat the whole packet,” they said. Twenty minutes later when our children were running in circles around the field we were wondering if the sugar rush was going to wear off before bed time.

We washed off their sticky hands, brushed teeth and snuggled into bed. The campsite was quiet early, and I could hear owl noises.

The aerial view shows nearly half of the campsite – paved area, grass area, and picnic table. The trees and bushes have grown quite tall in between which screens off the sites from each other. There are also two other open “kickaround” sites near the camp ground.

The two adults thought it was a great set-up, the kids thought it would be much improved with a playground nearby. It only cost $12 a night for a camp site, with a limit of six people per site.