Cooks Mill Campground

If you’re planning a weekend away to camping and fit in some day hikes, Cooks Mill Campground in the Cathedral Range State Park is well worth considering.

Cooks Mill Campground is only a little more than a two hour drive from the Melbourne CBD. It’s has a beautiful camping area that gets a lot of visits from Australian native wildlife, including Kangaroos, Kookaburras and Wombats.

Choose between day hikes and longer multi-day hiking trails that leave from the campsite. Cooks Mill has it all – it offers hiking, camping, fishing, bird-watching and isn’t far from the big smoke.

Even if you’re not into hiking, just like plenty of the people we’ve taken here, then just relax and spend some time surrounded by the forest or down by the river – even thrown in the line and try catch some dinner!

Each site has a lot of space and weave around big Eucalyptus trees.

Most of the individual campsites have a single or double car space right next to them making Cooks Mill more popular than Neds Gully Campground where there’s a short walk from over a foot bridge from the car park to the camping area.

Last time we were here, it was after getting home from work on a Friday evening and making a last-minute and spontaneous decision to go camping – we only had our hiking tents and a few items with us, which wasn’t ideal.

We arrived to Cooks Mill in the pitch black of the night with no light from the moon as it was bucketing  down with rain.

There’s loads of gum trees which made it easy to get a tarp up. We built a small moat around the camping area and lit a fire under the tarp.

Other than the few images below, we don’t have anything else to share with you, although we’ll be heading back here soon and make sure to then update this page with plenty more images and info – so, be sure to come back and take another look in the future at Cooks Mill Campground!

You’ll need to book your campsite. It’s easy to do, just go to the Parks Victoria website, choose your campsite & dates, then pay online. 

We think this is a good thing – it allows you to reserve a campsite and the money you pay goes towards maintaining Cooks Mill Campground and the wider Cathedral Range State Park.