How we verify

Every legal statement here is a structured record with a source, an exact quote, a retrieval date and a re-verification deadline. If a claim doesn't meet that bar, the build fails and the page never ships.

The rules

Official sources only. Legislation sites, government departments and councils' own publications. Never forums, never other camping apps, never news summaries.
Exact quotes. Each verified claim carries the sentence it rests on, so you can check our reading against the source in one click.
Unknown means unknown. A council we haven't verified is labelled unknown — pages never fill gaps with guesses.
Signs override everything. Signage on the ground can narrow or remove any general rule. Every place page says so.
Rules, not spots. No crowd-sourced sleeping locations, ever. A list of "quiet places" puts the people who use it at risk and goes stale instantly. Published law does neither.
Your location stays yours. The finder works in your browser. Nothing about where you are is sent anywhere or saved on your device.

What the badge colours mean

Every place and every council area carries a coloured badge. The colour is this site's reading; the words on it are the source's, which is why they differ from state to state.

Green	A published rule lets you stay, or the state has no law against it. Conditions almost always apply — a time limit, a purpose, a sign.
Grey	Nothing has been read that permits or prohibits it here. Silence is not permission, and grey is never an invitation.
Purple	Two instruments point different ways — a state rest area inside a council ban area is the common case. Both are shown and neither is resolved for you.
Red	A published instrument prohibits it, either outright or wherever a sign says so.

Wording examples, all of them real — every badge below is rendered by the same function that renders it on the place page, so this cannot drift from what the site actually says: Queensland Permitted by rule · up to 20 h, New South Wales Open 24 h · stopping, not camping, South Australia No State law against camping here, and Western Australia No 24-hour stay recorded — which is a different thing again, because there camping in a vehicle is an offence unless a sign permits it. Four sentences, four different laws. Flattening them into one vocabulary would be tidier and would lose the part that decides your night.

Freshness

Every claim shows its retrieval date and carries an internal re-verification deadline. Facility data (rest areas, showers, libraries) is refreshed from the source datasets on a schedule; each page credits its dataset and snapshot date. The monthly refresh fails on purpose sixty days before a claim's deadline, so a rule that has been amended is chased rather than quietly carried.