Albury Showgrounds Host Displaced Victorians In Pop-Up Tent City

Dozens of displaced Victorians unable to return home from NSW have taken over the Albury Showgrounds with their caravans and tents, as a means of quarantining inside the 'border bubble'.

As a result, the Showgrounds Trust have put aside their usual five-day limit for campers, in wake of the stringent border restrictions.

The Showgrounds have once before been the refuge for Victorians during the Spanish Flu epidemic when a quarantine camp was erected with row upon row of tends filled with people unable to cross the border.

Keeping to their own, to get home as quickly as possible, some of the travellers have tried for exemption, but been denied.

A burden on cross-border communities, the pop-up camp, and its congregation of isolating grey nomads, are just a few of the 12,000 applications for people from NSW wanting to enter Victoria.

Victorian Health Minister Martin Foley said there is a very solid reason for the strict border restrictions. 

“As tough and personally disturbing as it is to see some of the really heartbreaking cases being declined, it’s sadly for a good reason — we do not want to be where New South Wales is”

Meantime, the Liberal member for Benambra Bill Tille said it the border restrictions place a heavy burden on locals.

“Our border should be a COVID-19 bubble for those who live around it, not a wall. This is not Berlin or Belfast”

- MP Bill Tille

Albury councilor Henk van de Ven told the Herald Sun that the Albury-Wodonga border is “problematic", but they are trying to be as accommodating as possible.

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