My love affair with maps began when I was still in school. I think it’s something to do with the way my brain works, probably the same for many navigators. I’m fascinated by abstract ideas, and after all, a map is an abstraction, however inaccurate, of reality. I’m also fascinated by puzzles of various kinds and reading a map on the ground is a kind of puzzle that involves a combination of pattern matching and logic. Planning a route, whether as a rally director or a competitor (or these days, a bike rider) is also a puzzle, working within a variety of constraints. Anyway, by the time I started my HSC year at age 16 I had already purchased a reasonable collection of maps and had been out on events with my brother both spectating and helping navigate the service vehicle a few times. And of course, whenever I was on holidays with my parents I insisted on planning the route and then navigating, however simple that might sound. On one occasion I navigated them across Sydney using a not-so-obvious route.
I had been attending the CCRMIT monthly meetings during 1971 and teamed up with another young guy (not as young as me), Geoff Doyle, to compete in the 1972 club championship in his fairly basically prepared Colt. There was no necessity to have a driver’s licence and back then, I would not get one until aged 18 which was not until September 1973. Geoff and I planned on doing all the CCRMIT events, which comprised three “closed” events and two “open” ones, which were the Derrick (state championship) and Presidents. We also planned on doing two or three other events including the Midyear (also state championship). This was before the advent of the state Clubman series.
The first event was the Introductory Trial, and as its name suggests, it was a simple event run in the area to the north of Melbourne on shire roads around Pyalong and Lancefield. It must have been an event where starting order was based on the order of receipt of entries because we were first car on the road, always good early in the year when dust can be a real hazard. The event used simple plotting on the Broadbents 301 “100 miles around Melbourne”, but I also had all the relevant “army survey” maps of the day which included the Pyalong 1:50,000. It was virtually impossible to get lost. Beforehand I would also have carefully measured the distances on the maps between intersections and marked up the map accordingly. Yes, we were still using miles then and didn't change to kilometres until the middle of 1974, requiring such markings on maps to be updated.
| We would have run up through Darraweit Guim, Springfield and Willomavin. Probably the third control was described, rather confusingly, as 0.1 miles East of the mapped junction immediately North of the ‘M’ in HIGH CAMP, enter to the East (this is in fact just east of the crossroads of Crawfords and Back Creek Roads although the Broadbents map did not show the road heading north from the crossroad). Seems easy and I had it firmly in my mind that we would head straight up the gravel Back Creek Road through Moranding and turn right into control, avoiding the use of the Northern Highway. But it was a trick. In almost all navigational rallies the entry of direction is stated as FROM, not TO. I was entering FROM the East, not TO the East. We had lost 30 points for a “Wrong Direction”. Well that’s the last time I would fall for that one! Anyway, we continued on, lost no other points for the event and, I think, finished second. |
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Our second event was the Autumn Midnight Trial, run substantially in the Mount Disappointment Forest (now Kinglake National Park) with some sections up through Highlands to a refuel at Seymour. We had a completely clean run until the last section, a slippery loop south-west from the 5-ways junction in Mount Disappointment. It was a damp night and Doyley understeered off a narrow plantation road not once, but twice, but didn’t hit anything. I had to get out and push on both occasions, but we still won the event.
Navigation wasn’t always so easy though. These were dinky little club events in well mapped areas. The real tests came with events that descended into the maize of roads in Victoria’s great goldfields forests. These stretch across a wide area from Nagambie to StArnaud and surround towns like Bendigo, Maryborough, Dunolly, Heathcote and Castlemaine. Only when the best 1:50,000 or 1:25,000 scale maps appeared several years later did these forests provide fair navigation, and eventually Noel Kelly and I published our MUM (Marked Up Maps) maps and gave everyone a fair go. However, back in the 1972/73 period, these areas provide some of the most perplexing navigational nightmares of my career, simply because the vast majority of roads were not on the maps of the day.
The 1972 Midyear Rally was a round of the state championship and the first event of such a level in which I competed. It was run by the jovial Chris Jessup and the first part headed up from Pyalong to Bendigo, taking in quite a bit of goldfields scrub south of Bendigo. Doyley and I managed to get through without too many hassles, despite a bout of car sickness on my part. We were fairly pleased with not having to "cut and run" (skip sections). After the Bendigo refuel we headed up through the Whipstick Scrub and Kamerooka Forest which was all a bit of a mystery but the short sections and many checkpoints meant that I couldn’t go too far wrong, although we lost a lot of time trying to get lost. We then headed through the Wellsford Forest to the next refuel at Axedale. This was to be the first of several unsuccessful encounters with the Wellsford Forest, and a year or so later I went back there and surveyed it thoroughly in daylight in order to unravel the mystery. On this occasion, what looked like a straightforward run from north to south ended up being a major nightmare, taking us an hour just to find our way out of the forest. I had no idea where I had actually been!
After Axedale we had to skip some sections and we re-joined proceedings over near Redcastle and headed across into the Whroo Forest. It was about 5 am and we seemed to be under control until it got light. We were way over to the east of the old town of Whroo and once again I became completely bamboozled. What was really disconcerting was how straightforward a particular section looked on the map and all seemed to be on track until we suddenly appeared in completely the wrong spot. Indeed it took us a bit of driving around before I realised that we weren’t even on the right side of the forest! I think we kind of gave up then and headed to the finish. I was left in awe at how the top navigators could deal with this stuff, but in time, I realised it was partly experience, but mostly having surveyed the areas and drawn one’s own maps.
The next visit to many of these areas was the George Derrick Memorial Trial – also a round of the state championship as well as a round of the club championship which Geoff and I were going for (and won). It started badly for us, as well as a number of other competitors and will be remembered as "the night they left the gate open to the Puckapunyal Range Area." The first section started east of Tooborac (about here) and headed up the boundary of the Range Area before heading north-west. A particular turn was hard to find and many, including me, stumbled through into the Range Area and took a wrong turn heading more northwards (about here). It didn’t look right and in the end I realised we were lost. Trouble was that we couldn’t find our way back again. The maize of roads in the Range Area was impossible to decipher, especially considering we weren’t even on the right map! It took several hours of scrambling around before we managed to find our way out via the main Puckapunyal township. Fortunately we had not hit any unexploded shells! In retrospect it was a stupid mistake. We must have gone through an unmarked gate and proper reading of the compass should have alerted me to the error. I did not react quickly enough and by the time I did, we were so far into a maze that it was impossible to retrace our steps. But we weren’t alone as we found quite a few other competitors milling about as well.
Having not even reached Control One, we cut and run across to the Axedale area to what must have been about Control Five or Six. Just one section remained in the first Division before the refuel in Bendigo and it was through the dreaded Wellsford Forest. I tried really hard, but sure enough, just near the end of the section (around here) I became totally confused and we spent another hour trying to locate the end control, including thoroughly exploring the fence around the ammunition dump. We did eventually find the control, but suffice to say we were running stone motherless last in the event.
Things didn’t improve much on the second Division. Sections ran across through Kingower and Wehla to St Arnaud and while we didn’t become totally lost, we were losing plenty of time. On the first section after StArnaud we got lost within a few kilometres of the start and never really recovered. We "cut and ran" from there down to Maryborough. It was just about dawn by then - these events were real long. Once again, we headed off on a section through the Paddy Ranges and got instantly lost again, so cut and ran across towards the Daylesford area and completed the remaining sections to the finish, which was way over near Gisborne (probably somewhere here). We had probably only completed less than half the sections and I was once again in complete awe at the navigation abilities of the "big guys".
| The following year I joined with David Bond in the Cortina. Our performances were variable, to say the least. In the first round of the state championship we made everyone sit up and take notice by coming in second. The navigation was straightforward enough but others seemed to just be making silly mistakes. It proved to me that with the right knowledge, concentration and dedication, I could be just as good as the rest. Lack of knowledge caught us out in a few other events. The Experts Trial, in particular, saw us get lost for a while on several occasions, although in the end, it was getting bogged that brought us undone.
It was a confidence builder later that year when we managed a second place in the George Derrick Memorial Trial, which ran through similar areas to those used the previous year when Doyley and I had barely done half the sections without getting lost. David and I did some serious surveying before the event and we had a very clean run. I guess the navigation was also getting a bit less tricky. The point was that provided I had the basic knowledge of those areas, I could mix it with the best. I spent a lot of time surveying forests at weekends and holidays over the next few years and I think I can honestly say that I never really got lost again! |
Article in the Melbourne Age |
On the 1973 Derrick [photo: Ken Cusack]
The exception was Tasmania! I ran in at least five different events in Tasmania over a period of three years. Two were with Lin Gigney, two with David Rose and one with Janiene Kilfoyle. The first couple of Tasmanian events tended to have navigational tricks that were no longer being used in Victoria, but I managed to do reasonably well, as described elsewhere. I eventually won a Tasmanian state championship event with Lin and a SA event with Brenton Maidment, both involving fairly demanding navigation.
Navigation in Victoria was becoming much simpler by 1977 and there were few real navigational tests. That was the year that Dicko and I had the clutch fail on the 120Y on the daylight stages on the Experts Trial. We had to skip sections and get it repaired but we did very well on the difficult night navigation stages which were mostly in the tight forests north of Graytown. It was particularly rewarding because when they put the gearbox back on, the speedo cable wouldn’t work and so I didn’t have a Halda (accurate odometer) so I had to guess all the distances. It wasn’t so hard because of the tightness of the route - most distances between turns were less than a kilometre.
Once I started to drive more competitively in 1978, I didn’t do much navigating. In fact I kind of lost my nerve and got very particular about who I would ride with! Certain drivers were just not to my liking. After the 1979 Round Australia my only two subsequent events were the Ye Olde BP and the 1980 Experts.
