As I mentioned here, I’ve had a fascination with maps from an early age, and this continues to this day. My wife and friends sometimes even call me “map man”. The fascination perhaps stems from my interest in abstractions. Having studied physics and mathematics, and subsequently computing, I was constantly engaged in the study or development of representations of the real world in some abstract form, be it a mathematical model, computer program or a map. I started reading maps as a child and would navigate for my parents when we were on holidays. At school I had a great geography teacher and we certainly learned about maps, grid references, contour lines and all that stuff. By the time I started rally navigating in 1972 at the age of 16 I had already accumulated a reasonable collection of maps, mostly the so-called army survey maps of the time.
Rally navigating comes in a variety of formats. The “easiest” for a navigator is a so-called route chart, which is a detailed itinerary of instructions at specified distances. As fully route charted events became more common, not only did route charts include all the intermediate as well as cumulative distances, but many events came to use diagrams of intersections, known as “tulips” (they were first used in the Dutch Tulip Rally). Special stage events, where the emphasis is almost entirely on driver and car speed, use all route charts and tulips nowadays, and have done so since the mid 1970s. But these instructions are really only to allow the crew to find their way, and do not tell them much about the road. In “blind” rallies, which is all I ever competed in, the driver must read the road ahead and drive accordingly. The modern incarnation is the pace-noted event, where the crew get to drive slowly over the stages beforehand and make detailed notes of every corner and crest. This is really an entirely different kind of rallying and requires a quite different skill set for both the driver and co-driver (nowadays never called a navigator!).
But “real” navigation requires the navigator to refer to a map and to not only determine which route to take, but to actually correctly follow that route “on the ground”. Route charts still have their place, particularly if they lead the navigator into an area and “drop them off”, leaving it to their ability to find their way to the next checkpoint. But most rally navigation requires the navigator to plot a series of locations on the map, some vias and one for the end of each section. Most locations would have a required direction of entry, and sometimes a direction of exit. Unlike in an orienteering event, there is meant to be only one correct route and doing U-turns is a definite no-no. On some maps, typically commercial ones without grid lines, locations are given by reference to marked features, e.g. “The road junction 1.5 km north of Blogsville”. But most rallies in the past used army survey style maps with grid lines and locations were given by a grid reference, how far east and how far north, relative to a set location and “easily” plotted by referring to the grid lines and using a handy plotting device to measure the exact distance between the grid lines. The grids on maps vary – the older maps in the 1970s had 1000 yard or 10,000 yard grids, but during the 1970s most maps changed to metric and grids were 1000 metres or 10,000 metres. I find it interesting that even in the modern era when an historic event is going to require navigation, navigators seem terribly anxious about having to plot grid references. I’ve always found grid references logical and easy, much less subject to misinterpretation than references to some features on the map. In recent years, even in “Ye Olde BP Rallies”, navigators have been supplied with maps with the locations pre-plotted. This is actually standard practice in orienteering events.
Sample instructions taken from my 1974 Autumn Midnight Trial
There are more “tricky” ways of specifying locations and the route in navigational events, but many of these became much less common throughout the 1970s as crews demanded less “trickery”. The most feared kind of navigation was some form of “shortest mapped route”, which could be specified in a number of ways. One seemingly simple way was a “stick chart” basically allowing the navigator to plot the route directly onto the roads that appear on the map. A more complex way is to provide a set of “constraints”, with vias and “out of bounds”, and then the navigator has to determine the shortest route that complies with those constraints. But the real difficulty with shortest mapped route sections or complete rallies was not the “shortest” part but the “mapped” part, because maps invariably don’t show all the roads and therefore the navigator had to make sure they stuck to the roads on the map, ignoring other roads. This might sound easy, but a common example was where a road had been realigned but the map showed only the old alignment, so the navigator had to find the old alignment which might be overgrown and disused!
But such trickery was not really necessary to test navigators in many areas of Victoria. Certainly in the 1970s, the maps were not yet good enough in many areas to allow an inexperienced navigator to easily find their way. Nowhere was this more the case than in the infamous Victorian goldfields, a swath of scrubby forests that stretch from Nagambie, through Heathcote and Bendigo and across to Castlemaine, Maryborough, Dunolly and all the way out to St Arnaud. These forests were feared by inexperienced navigators because they were packed full of roads and tracks, many of which did not appear on the maps of the day. Finding your way required intense concentration and attention to distance and direction travelled, not dissimilar to “dead reckoning” navigation used by sailors! It was also seemingly possible to always find new tracks in these forests. As the years went by, some events such as the Experts just kept finding smaller and lesser quality tracks, and in some cases, any trafficable gap between some trees constituted a track!
These forests were the setting for some of my more forgettable navigational performances in 1972 and 1973, as described here. But as I got to know the forests a bit better, my performances improved. But the real key to doing well in these forests was to survey them ahead of the event and to mark up the maps of the day with detail annotations of all the tracks and distances. Sometimes this was done in the lead up to an event and sometimes because we were organising an event in the area, and sometimes just for fun. We were always looking for places where the map of the day, typically 1:100,000 scale, had serious errors or omissions which could be exploited by an event director to “trick” navigators into an error.
A typical marked up version of a 1:100,000 survey map
When the maps of the day proved totally inadequate, we just drew our own marked up maps. We drew these on drafting paper so they could be printed multiple times, initially just for my friend Noel Kelly and myself, but also replacements after an event. We were perhaps not the first to draw a map for all competitors to use during an event (my first recollection of this was the 1975 Penfolds Trial) but we certainly did so for the 1977 Riverland Rally for the Perricoota-Koondrook Forests along the Murray. Perhaps in about 1976 Noel Kelly and I started to sell our own marked up maps and formed a small business called, not surprisingly, Marked Up Maps. They became known as MUM maps and we even toyed with the slogan, “Let MUM take the worry out of getting lost”, a play on an advertising slogan for a deodorant of the day. It was easy to sell some of our maps – it just required us to get more printed and we sold them through rally shops such as RallyQuip and Autosport. Over time, we drew new maps and felt obliged to keep our maps as up to date and complete as possible, so many weekends were spent wandering around the countryside surveying areas looking for new tracks and making sure that everything was correct. It wasn’t long before some events were specifying our maps as the official maps for the event so that all competitors were on a more or less equal footing.
Part of one of our Marked Up Maps
Surveying was not quite as simple back then as it would be today. With the advent of GPS and Google Maps, it is now pretty simple to survey much of the countryside and produce an incredibly accurate map. Using a GPS tracing app on your phone is all you need to get an accurate plot of any road or track. There is, of course, also software to allow maps to be drawn on a computer, rather than by hand. But back in the 70s and 80s GPS was not yet conceived of and while aerial photos could be purchased for some considerable cost, we rarely did so. Instead we just drove around measuring the distances and trying to guess where roads went as best we could. We would take copious notes and decipher them all once we got home. Needless to say we would assemble as much reliable information as possible from other maps, especially forestry commission management maps which became readily available for purchase in Victoria in the mid 70s. These maps were often large scale (sometimes 1:10,000) and far too big to use effectively in a car so we would often reduce them to a manageable scale of about 1:25,000, which pretty much became the default scale for Marked Up Maps. Surveying also had its challenges if we had a breakdown or became bogged, with no easy way for anyone to find us! A few memorable such experiences are described here.
