A decade of growth

While the 1950s had been dominated by a variety of one off events at the club, state and national levels, including the BP Rally and several around Australia events, the 1960s saw the establishment of championship series both at the state and national levels. NSW established the NSW Trial Championship in 1960, later renamed the NSW Rally Championship. Victoria and South Australia followed in 1961, Queensland in 1963 and Tasmania in 1964. WA appeared to have a state series dating from 1959 but its true state championship also began in 1964. The Australian Championship began in 1968 and has continued to this day.

A major boost to rallying also came at the end of 1968 with the attention grabbing “race across the world” that was the London to Sydney Marathon. The Australian leg of this great adventure travelled from Perth to Sydney in three days.

Many of the one off events that developed in the 1950s continued, including the annual BP Rally and the Alpine Rally, although the Alpine was sometimes a state championship round and later became a round of the newly formed ARC. There was also a “Round Australia” trial in 1964, the Ampol Trial, although it stuck to the eastern states, not visiting WA or NT. The first annual Southern Cross Rally was conducted in 1966 and would continue until 1980. 

It was perhaps the arrival of the Southern Cross Rally that awakened trialist to what was was first developed in NSW where most rallies were fully route charted “driver oriented” events, while in the other states most events required a considerable degree of navigational prowess. Towards the end of the 1960s there was already some unrest among entrants and drivers as discussed in this 1967 article by Roger Bonhomme in Racing Car News. While the navigational difficulty of the championship events in the other states gradually declined, it would be another decade before all all state championship events were fully route charted.