Caro Ryan reckons the future of maps is in our hands.
Have map, will travel.
When I was a little kid, I would spend hours on the lounge room floor, poring over the pull-out maps that came with National Geographic. I’d carefully unfold the origami packet, like a Christmas present with special wrapping, and open it up to reveal a moon’s eye view of places I only dreamt of.
Those dreams were held in a running narrative inside my head, where as an intrepid eight-year-old I would explain to an unseen interviewer where my journey and adventure would take me. Using a pen as my pointer and a yellow highlighter as my line, I would draw routes across tracks, roads and highways that would take me across Australia, Europe, The Alps and the Middle East.
These maps, created by in-house cartographers, have been a part of NatGeo’s heritage since 1918, and I can only imagine how many millions of people, just like my eight-year-old self, have been inspired by those magical pieces of paper.
Forty years on, I still use a highlighter to plan routes and trips into wild and natural places. Although I’ve done away with the interviewer’s questions in my head, laying out the map on the ground at the start of a day, I use a stick or twig to explain the plan to my fellow bushwalkers. “This looks like a good spot for morning tea”, ‘I’m hoping to pick up water there”, “This narrow pinch is the hardest part of the day and there is our planned campsite.” It’s through maps that we can see the future, predict and plan adventures and experiences that feed our soul.
The word Topographic comes from the greek, topos, meaning place and graphein, to write. Topographic maps give us the ability to read a landscape, much like reading a book … before we see the movie. They are a 2D version of our 3D world, shrunken down to a scale that we can carry with us. Unlike a regular street map, they show much more than just roads. Topos show hills, valleys, gullies, spurs, creeks, ridges and much, much more.
For me, there’s something wonderfully tangible about paper maps. They are something I can hold in my hand, feeling the texture of the paper as I run my fingers over them and something organic about the medium of paper that connects it to their source – trees – which connect me back to the natural world I’m walking through.
Developments in GPS technology over the past 40 years and our reliance on smartphones have seen many of us (including me) turn to navigation apps for their speed and simplicity in solving navigational mysteries. Accurately navigating in the bush takes focus and time, it’s what I call ‘putting on my NavHead’. It is slowing down to the speed of nature and becoming deeply observant.
In 2024, many people got stuck into making sourdough, fermenting pickles or growing veggies. I feel as though the simplicity of map and compass navigation, (which doesn’t rely on batteries, complex systems of satellites or mountains to get in the way), has the ability to ground us and bring us back to basics.
Whilst announcements and rumours from government mapping services point to a fully digital future, the ability to print and carry paper is still firmly in our hands. We may not visit the local map shop or Lands Department offices anymore, but we can find our own methods of printing accurate maps (even on waterproof paper) from the growing online resource of valuable topographic maps.
If device addiction and technology is about dopamine hits and speeding things up, maybe turning to traditional methods of navigation whilst we seek solace, respite and slow in the embrace of nature, could become the modern hikers’ meditation.
Tips for printing your own maps
When printing out sections from a larger topo map, don’t forget to check that grid references are included. Always print more of the map than you’ll need for a particular trip, just in case you need to change plans and re-route on the day.
Include a header or footer with the full map name. Ensure you are printing at 100 per cent scale. Do a check by measuring a grid square to make sure it matches the scale (e.g. 4cm = 1km for 1:25,000). Don’t forget to print the map legend. 