Brown Signs is a product of curiosity, a catalogue of tourist destinations across Australia, based on the roadside brown tourist signs on our roadways.
The brown tourist signs are a familiar sight to most road users. Sometimes they are to destinations in your local area, such as a popular recreation park. Other times they lead to destinations off the normal travel route and noticed while driving passed them. But where do you find a list of brown tourist signs in Australia?
Brown Signs provides a way to find out where these signs you know of will lead you, and to discover destinations you never knew were there.
Most of the destinations have been visited directly. Based in Redcliffe, the brown sign destinations are outward from South East Queensland.
How did Brown Signs start?
Driving between Sydney and Brisbane, seeing many brown tourist signs along the way, thoughts started to wonder what they may be like. All too often, there wasn’t time to have a look, so time and time again the signs were driven passed.
If you think about it beforehand you can search on the internet and find out information about many of them, assuming you can remember the names and the sign was descriptive enough to uniquely search for it. Where does the sign that simply says “Lookout” or “Farm” go to?
It was while driving from Brisbane to Sydney on Christmas Day in 2016, the idea for Brown Signs started. Without a set driving schedule, I decided to stop at some of the brown signs along the way. The first brown sign I came across was Balancing Rock in NSW.
The next brown sign was Thunderbolts Cave, one of the locations often thought about when driving by. It was while driving down the access road the idea of a website to find information about brown signs came into being.
Created by Rubidyn, the Brown Signs website started in 2017 and the list of brown signs is continually growing. In addition to brown signs, big things and visitor information centres were later included.
The 600 destinations visited milestone reached early 2022.
Finding Your Way Around
For the most recent destinations, go to the Destinations page to see the full list. The Map page displays all the destinations on a map.
Sometimes we have a video of the destinations found on our YouTube Channel .
If a link has after it, it is to a brown sign destination. If it has after it, the link will open in a new browser window on a different website.
New destinations are posted on our Facebook page and the feature image is added to our Pinterest .
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What colour are tourist information signs?
A: The tourist information signs we look for in Australia are typically brown with white text and symbols. It is these signs we look for and catalogue on our website.
Q: What do blue signs indicate?
A: Blue signs usually indicate a service or utility, such as toilets, food, rest stops, accommodation, airports, etc. Some tourist destinations have blue signs when we would have though a brown sign is more appropriate. Brown Signs may incorporate these in the future. Visitor information centres are indicated with a blue sign with a white or yellow i, these have been included in Brown Signs also.