LETTERS

The Australian Orienteer welcomes letters. Preference will be given to letters which are concise and which make positive points. The editor reserves the right to edit letters, particularly ones which are longer than 300 words.

JWOC selections

Foot O ‑ in the individual events this year only 6 times out of 36 runs did Australian runners finish in the top half of their fields. Results were: Sprint ‑ 1 girl and 2 boys; Middle ‑ none; Long ‑ 3 boys. Nor did we hit the top half in the Relays, with our girls placing 24th and 29th out of 40 teams, and the boys were 43rd & 48th out of 58 entries. Hidden in these statistics were some outstanding runs but overall it reflected a need for greater consistency. Perhaps the juniors should be racing more often against the Kiwis, so they have more pressure of unknown opponents and terrain. However it does raise the question of whether we should automatically select 12 team members each year. Do we need some quality control? Too often our runners “make” the JWOC team and then start training in earnest, rather than training hard at least 9 months beforehand. MTBO ‑ this year at least two hugely talented Aussie U21’s watched the MTB JWOC in Denmark from their lounge rooms. Orienteering Australia suggests we need to wait until there is great depth in the junior ranks here before sending any juniors. That is backward thinking and discriminatory against those with talent NOW. If our Olympic team was picked the same way we would certainly have fewer medals. Some people have short memories ‑ in Foot O our first JWOC “team” in 1989 was just Clare Hawthorne (Tas). Foot O and MTBO have many similarities but also many differences and both should be embraced. MTBO will always have fewer events but those riders who are extremely able must be allowed to test themselves at the highest level. This is not a question of funding but of opportunity.

Kay Haarsma

The first event

The dispute over which State was the first to put on an Orienteering event has been running for many years: though South Australians appreciate and acknowledge the roles played by Victorians such as Tom Andrews ‑ as well as people like the ACT’s David Hogg ‑ in getting a modern version of our sport up and running, some of us here feel miffed by repeated Victorian claims of its event being the first. According to The Australian Orienteer, June 2009 issue, “It all started 40 years ago”, with interesting pieces from Tom Andrews and Ron Frederick. However, 50 Golden Years: The History of Orienteering in South Australia, 1955 – 2005, (which you and David received from me in December 2005), tells a different story. Its first chapter, The South Australian Orienteering Club, was researched and written by Jeffa Lyon: it ran from 1956 to 1961, while David Hogg refers to the SA “Association”, and gives its life‑span as 1955‑1957. He describes what occurred in the late 1950s as “orienteering ‘pre‑history’”: we beg to differ. Chapter 1, page 1: “On Sunday afternoon, July 9th 1955 the first orienteering event was held at Lobethal in the Adelaide Hills.” The map used was a 1:63,360 Military Survey dated 1928, there were four controls over 6.5km and a stagger of 3 minutes; and each control marker was made of red crepe paper. Six figure grid references were used and the winner, in 64:30, was a Western Districts AC runner, Carl Cederblad, who also won the first State championship at Mt Crawford in 1956, at which there were 43 participants. The SAOC formed late in 1956, and the whole thing was the brainchild of the late Lembit ‘Jess’ Jarver OAM, an athletics coach of international standing, later the founder editor of a respected coaching magazine, Modern Athlete and Coach, who’d remembered enjoying a kind of relay orienteering as a child in Estonia during the 1930s. Teams would line up on the oval, and in turn they had to run into the forest, find 2 controls and return – sounds idyllic and a lot of fun, and Jess (a nickname given him after the 1936 successes of Jesse Owen), was mighty quick (11.4sec was his best time for the 100m). We acknowledge that, in the evolution of our sport, what was offered in SA as Orienteering was an unwieldy, out‑of‑date version, one prone to errors from incorrect grid references, ancient and unsuitable maps (brought along, pencilled, erased, then re‑used) and, by 1961 it was being run by and for a dozen or so people who had careers, young families and other sporting interests, especially running/athletics: it simply ran out of steam. However it was called Orienteering, it did have five State championships and the first night event (at O’Sullivan Beach on 14/7/1957), though it failed to evolve, and was far too much an off‑shoot of Adelaide’s cross‑county running fraternity (originally intended by Jarver as a form of cross‑training for athletes he coached). In 1971‑72, word emanating from the VOA and/or the OFA and probably from Tom reached the National Fitness Council in Adelaide, the same organisation that had helped promote it in 1955, and Jarver, a NFC field officer and sports scientist, along with its long‑serving director, Albert Simpson, were again on hand to help find interested people, give admin assistance with map production, and cajole those who would run events in 1973, some of whom would help form OASA in 1974, (omitted from David Hogg’s chronology on pages 18/19). Jess was our version of Tom Andrews (another ‘Balt’, but from Lithuania), but his first love was track & field coaching, one of the factors which led to the SAOC’s demise. The only other state Orienteering history published, as far as I know, is Map & Compass: The Story of Orienteering in Queensland, by Barbara Pope and Pam Cox (Orienteering Queensland, 2008), and on page 1, under “Orienteering Reaches Australia”, it acknowledges that which I’ve outlined above, though the authors did have access to and clearly used Fifty Golden Years material. (On another navigational front, the first SA 24 Hour Open Bush Walk, eventually known as 24 Hour Walks, held each year by the Adelaide University Mountain Club, was run from Tanunda to the Morialta Conservation Pk in 1963. It was won by A Ward, G Ward and T Lothian of the Adelaide Bushwalkers, with every control on its course, eg Mt

Kitchener (later Kaiser Stuhl ‑ many German place names were replaced by Anglo‑Celtic ones during WW1) ‑ being trig points. A proposed history of SA’s 24 Hr Walking/Rogaining (SARA from 1987) is currently being discussed). With the 40th anniversary of the VOA and the OFA/OA coming up next year, it would be good to clear up any confusion. The Lobethal event on 9/7/1955 was the first Orienteering event held in Australia, while the one at Upper Beaconsfield on 23/8/1969 was the first Australian Orienteering event to offer a modern ‘Swedish‑style’ form of the sport, with no use of grid references or need for magnetic declinations, a specially‑ prepared large scale map (1: 15,840) and a cross‑country course with pre‑marked circles and leg lines. What happened in Lobethal was, in fact, history, not “pre‑history”, in my/our opinion.

John H. Williams

(Life and Founder Member of OASA; Founder member, Tjuringa Orienteers; co-writer (with Jeffa and John Lyon) and Editor, Fifty Golden Years).

First Event 40 Years Ago?

The section in The Australian Orienteer, June’09, under the title, ‘It all started 40 years ago’, which refers to the Victorian Beaconsfield event, 23‑8‑1969, as the ‘first event’ and ‘inaugural event’, must have come as a shock to South Aussies, who in 2005 celebrated the 50th anniversary of Orienteering in SA with the publication of a grand book entitled, ‘50 Golden Years: The History of Orienteering in South Australia, 1955 – 2005’. It’s first eleven pages, researched and written by Jeffa Lyon, details the first event at Lobethal 9‑7‑1955, initiated by a post WW2 Baltic migrant and well known SA sporting identity Jess Jarver. It goes on to detail some of the many events and five State Championships held by the South Australian Orienteering Club from 1956 to1961. The Australian Orienteer section is dismissive of these and other early attempts at Orienteering in Australia. The 24 hour walks of the university mountaineering clubs of Melbourne, 1941, and other cities in the next two decades, were a sufficiently different navigation sport that they developed into the separate sport of Rogaining. But what was started by Jess and the SA Orienteering Club, had the club survived, would surely have developed into modern Orienteering, and was in fact early Orienteering. For South Aussies the truth of the two and a half page section finally came out in its last sentence ‑ “commemorating 40 years of orienteering in Victoria”.

Paul Hoopmann (Tjuringa, SA)

David Hogg responds

The 1955 Lobethal event is believed to be the first cross‑ country navigational event held in Australia described as ‘Orienteering’, but the 1969 Upper Beaconsfield event was the one that gave rise to the current Orienteering movement and led to the establishment of Orienteering as a national sport. I consider the early navigational events held in Victoria, South Australia, the ACT and New South Wales prior to August 1969 to be orienteering ‘pre‑history’ because they did not directly form part of that movement. The most influential of these prehistory events was the Melbourne University Mountaineering Club 24 Hour Walk, first held in 1947. People associated with that event played a major role in accelerating the development of Orienteering in Victoria and the formation of the Victorian Orienteering Association and the Orienteering Federation of Australia, as well as being responsible for the introduction of public Orienteering events to the ACT and Tasmania. The 24 Hour Walk also led directly to a similar event in South Australia, the establishment of intervarsity ‘orienteering’ (now rogaining) and the formation of Rogaining as a recognised sport. If Tom Andrews and his colleagues had not organised the Upper Beaconsfield event in August 1969, the whole pattern and timing of Orienteering development in Australia would probably have been very different. Without the 24 Hour Walk, the early momentum for Orienteering development in Victoria would have been much less, and its spread to some other parts of Australia would have been slower. The South Australian events of the 1950s, on the other hand, had a minimal effect on the development of Orienteering nationally, their main long‑term benefit being in facilitating the re‑introduction of Orienteering to SA in 1973. It is for this reason that I consider the Upper Beaconsfield event to be the defining event which all present‑day orienteers should recognise as giving rise to the sport which they now enjoy.

David Hogg

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