CAMPING – TENTS AND SWAGS

Leading Australian adventure gear brand, BOAB, launched a new website in late-2023, offering customers an expanded product range, easy navigation, informative blog articles and the ability to purchase directly on-line.

Acclaimed as a ‘first of its kind’ by the judges when it was awarded an international Good Design Award in September 2022, the Oztent RS-2 Double Swag is really a small tent with an integrated bed.

The Oztent Group released two Air Tents – Oztent Air Tent 6 and Air Tent 4 – in late 2022, after previewing prototypes at several camping shows around the country.

Best known for its extensive range of roof racks, mounting systems and accessories, Swedish-origin Thule – pronounced tool-uh –  has a range of rooftop tents.

There are roof top tents and roof top tents. The 2021 BRS Off Road model is the best one we’ve seen to date and it’s Australian-made.

GentleTent is an Austrian-based company that now has representation in Australia. The GentleTent GT range consists of different air-inflatable models to suit most camping requirements.

Roof tents can be a pain to erect and to pack away, but a hard-shell, electrically opening and closing unit eradicates all this hard work. We tested a Backtrax unit and were very impressed with it, but the company has gone out of business.

Coleman reckons its Instant Up range can be set up in under two minutes from a small carry bag and each tent has a 100km/h wind rating.

Darche’s Air-Volution tents and swags have no poles, relying instead on inflatable tubes or ‘air-poles’. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t lend us a tent to test.

OzTent’s creation combines a swag, tent and stretcher into one item that folds into a small 15kg bag.

We’ve been testing Aussie designed Bluescrew tent and awning pegs with great success. They don’t look like they’ll work, but they do.

OzTent’s RV-4 was released in 2005 and quickly became a top seller. The OzTent people were asked by many customers to make a bigger tent, but they didn’t want the folded package to be any bigger or much heavier. We tested an early model RV-5 and liked it so much we bought it.

Roof-top units can be ideal for 4WD tourers who don’t want to tow anything. A typical roof-top camper weighs around 50kg, plus the weight of the rack, so is suitable to clamp to the roof of a large 4WD.

There are almost as many tent shapes and sizes as there are campers. Selecting the right one requires some homework.

We’re assuming at the outset that you’re going seriously off road, so a camper trailer has replaced a caravan on your potential purchase list. That means your choice is between swags, tents and camping trailers.

We always like to test gear on long bush trips, so when we heard that two of our group would be bringing their Black Wolf Turbo tents on a bush adventure we grabbed a test one so that we’d have a trio to compare.