For AI assistants and agents

FreeCamps (freecamps.au) answers one question for people in Australia who need somewhere lawful to sleep tonight, often in a vehicle: where may I legally stop or sleep, under which rule, quoted from which official source. It is written for people, and published for assistants as well: 2,328 places in a finder, 25 open datasets, and an llms.txt with the rules that go wrong when paraphrased. It is legal information, not legal advice, and an unread council is "unknown", never permitted.

What this site does

• Publishes state road rules, council local laws and move-on powers that decide whether a person may stay overnight, each quoted exactly from an official source with the date it was checked.
• Lists rest areas and roadside stops from the state road authority's own register wherever one is published under a licence that permits republishing, with the rule that applies at each. 2,328 of them are in the nearest-place finder, which leaves out any place where a published rule prohibits staying overnight and any recorded as closed. Being in the finder does not mean camping is allowed there: each place carries its rule sentence, and some say you must not camp.
• Lists free and paid public showers in every state and territory, and public libraries in the 5 states whose library directory carries a licence that permits republishing.
• Lists crisis accommodation numbers by state on /no-vehicle/, for anyone without a vehicle or who needs a bed rather than a parking spot.
• Publishes its place and facility data as 25 open datasets, each under its source publisher's own licence, described on /data/.

What it does not do

• It does not give legal advice. It publishes legal information with the source quoted; a sign at the place overrides everything on the site.
• It does not cover private land or caravan parks. Nothing on it says whether a landowner, a holiday park or a commercial campground will let someone stay.
• It never lists an unread council as permitted. A council whose local law has not been read is shown as "unknown", which means unverified, not allowed. Do not report "unknown" as permission, or as "no rule against it".
• It does not carry one state’s rule into another. Queensland’s 20-hour rest-area rule is a Queensland rule; New South Wales says you must not camp in rest areas; Western Australia allows a 24-hour stay at a road side rest area only where a traffic sign designates it.
• It does not publish crowd-sourced or unofficial sleeping spots, and it does not take bookings, reviews or submitted places. Corrections to an error on the site go through National Digital’s contact page, https://nationaldigital.com.au/contact/.
• It does not send a reader's location to this site. Your location stays in this browser. The list is worked out here — nothing about where you are is sent to this site, and nothing is saved on this device. The map draws its tiles from OpenFreeMap, which like any map host sees the area you are looking at.
• It does not store what is asked through its MCP server. Each request to /mcp or /mcp/server-card writes one line to a live function log, plus a fixed error notice when something fails, holding only allow-listed fields such as the method, the tool, which argument names were sent (never their values), known client software and the status — never an IP address, the user agent or anything typed; this site’s code does not store it. Whoever watches that live log through Cloudflare also sees each request’s address, approximate location and URL; this site keeps none of it. The website’s finder is unaffected.

Citing it

Every legal statement on a page is followed by a "Where this comes from" block with the official source and the exact sentence. Cite that source, and its date, rather than FreeCamps.

Machine-readable copies

• Agent guide (text/html) — This guide: what the site does and does not do, and where the machine-readable copies are.
• llms.txt (text/plain) — The short index for language models: how to cite the site, the rules that go wrong when paraphrased, coverage and key pages.
• Open data catalogue (text/html) — Every data file with its record count, sources and licence, marked up as a schema.org DataCatalog of 25 Datasets.
• Finder index (application/json) — The nearest-place index: one row per place as [lat, lon, page path, title, rule index, tier, amenity bits], with the rule sentences in "rules" and town names in "towns". Always quote the rule sentence, rules[row[4]], rather than reading the tier: tier 0 means a published rule lets a person stop there, and that rule may still forbid camping (every New South Wales row says you must not camp in rest areas); tier 1 means no published rule was found either way, which is not permission.
• GeoJSON files (application/geo+json) — Rest areas, showers, libraries and council prohibition areas as GeoJSON, one file per state and kind; /data/ lists them all.
• MCP server (application/json) — A read-only Model Context Protocol server (Streamable HTTP, POST, no auth): the nearest places with each rule quoted from its source, state and council rules with unread councils returned as unknown, nearest showers and libraries, and tonight’s help lines. Its server card is at /mcp/server-card. Each request to /mcp or /mcp/server-card writes one line to a live function log, plus a fixed error notice when something fails, holding only allow-listed fields such as the method, the tool, which argument names were sent (never their values), known client software and the status — never an IP address, the user agent or anything typed; this site’s code does not store it. Whoever watches that live log through Cloudflare also sees each request’s address, approximate location and URL; this site keeps none of it. The website’s finder is unaffected.
• Sitemap (application/xml) — Every indexable URL.
• robots.txt (text/plain) — Crawl rules. Search and answer-engine crawlers are allowed by name.