What If We Had the Right to Roam?
A particular gripe of mine is how restrictive land access has become in Australia. Even in my relatively short lifetime, I’ve watched access tighten across all sorts of places — local schools locked up after hours, parks with new permits, campsites that suddenly require bookings. It feels like the default is increasingly “keep out.”
Contrast that with Sweden and Finland, where there’s a word for the opposite: allemansrätten — the “right of every man.” It means you can wander through forests, swim in lakes, pick berries, and camp almost anywhere in the countryside. The default is access, not exclusion. It’s not absolute — you can’t trample someone’s garden or damage the land — but the cultural assumption is the complete opposite of what we’ve inherited here.
Public land exists in Australia, sure, but vast tracts are locked up, fenced off, or subject to permits and permissions that make spontaneous exploration feel like you’re asking a favour rather than exercising a right. Norway takes a different approach entirely: the tomt tradition means homeowners often own the house but rent the land it sits on — a fundamentally different conception of ownership than what we take for granted. France goes even further, legally guaranteeing “gleaning” rights that let local people harvest remaining crops after the formal harvest — a specific, practical form of commons thinking baked into law.
What strikes me is how this isn’t just about recreation. It’s about the relationship itself — when people have the legal freedom to actually be on the land, something shifts. It stops being abstract property and starts being somewhere you belong. You’re not a tourist or a customer; you’re a participant. That changes how you think about stewardship. When you’ve walked through a landscape, slept under its trees, noticed its birds and waterways, you develop a stake in its protection in a way that purely legal ownership never guarantees.
But here’s where Australia gets complicated in ways Europe doesn’t quite face to the same degree.
The right to roam in Scandinavia developed within societies that had already worked out the land question centuries ago — settled populations, established commons, a relatively homogeneous legal inheritance. Australia inherited something radically different: the doctrine of terra nullius, declaring the continent “land belonging to no one” as if 60,000+ years of Indigenous custodianship didn’t exist. The Crown assumed radical title over everything, and built our property law on that fiction. We never negotiated Indigenous sovereignty or land rights into the system — we imposed colonial law and moved on.
That means the “right to roam” debate here can’t be separated from this history. The very concepts of “public land” and “private land” were imposed through dispossession. Indigenous peoples had their own complex systems of movement, custodianship, and belonging — they didn’t own Country in the Western sense, they belonged to it, with reciprocal obligations of care. That’s an entirely different ontology, where land is relationship not resource.
So the question becomes more fraught than just “should we have right to roam?” You can see why simply extending a Scandinavian-style freedom to all land would feel incomplete at best, maybe even another imposition — replacing one non-Indigenous framework with another, without addressing whose land it actually is and who gets to make those decisions.
What seems worth sitting with is the deeper question underneath: How do communities develop shared norms of caring for land? The “tragedy of the commons” assumes communal resources must be overexploited, but the Scandinavian model and right to roam traditions show alternatives are possible — when governance structures, cultural norms, and use rights create accountability rather than pure open access. The trick isn’t commons vs. private ownership; it’s building frameworks where taking and giving back are connected.
Maybe the real question isn’t whether Australia adopts allemansrätten or leasehold models, but what it would look like to develop land relationships where extraction and exclusion aren’t the only options — where land is something you’re part of, not something you own.