About Us

We are Australia's most popular publisher of maps, apps, and online travel information for 4WD and caravan tourists in Australia. We produce EOTopo offline maps; a Navigation app called ExplorOz Traveller; plus a tracking service called EOTrackMe. To use this website, please Sign-Up or Login, using the links at the top of the page.

You can also connect with other like-minded people to ask questions related to your vehicle, trip planning or on-the-road logistics or just share stories, ideas, get opinions. There is a strong community spirit on ExplorOz with site users enjoying the live, vibrant discussions in the Forum and many joining up for trips away together, coordinated in the Members Trips & Gatherings section.

We use the term Visitor to refer to those people who register a free account, whilst Member refers to those people who purchase a Membership subscription (annual or lifetime).

The reason for Membership, is to provide extra features/services on a user-pay basis. We reserve our specialist services to subscribers (Members). We refer you to our Membership page to find out exactly what we offer with Membership.

ExplorOz is owned and published by I.T. Beyond Pty Ltd. Whilst we are a very small company we have over 35 years experience in the I.T industry with clients throughout Australia.

We created ExplorOz.com in 2000 as an online information resource & community for 4WD & RV enthusiasts. Throughout the first 13 years we also operated an online retail shop (map & bookshop) but did not produce any products under our own brand however we offered various web-based services to Members-only (including EOTrackMe tracking). In 2013 we released our first product into the market, which was the long awaited topographic mapset EOTopo200K. In 2016 we then launched our first app ExplorOz Traveller in the Playstore & Apple App Store. In 2017 ExplorOz Traveller was also released to the Window Store. In 2018 we launched a new raster map product being EOTopo 2018 Premium (144K) at the same time as releasing a major map update to the product set.

ExplorOz is its own business, and is a subsidiary of I.T. Beyond.

The desire to create ExplorOz evolved from the passion of the company's owners, David and Michelle Martin, who have been passionate outdoor enthusiasts all their lives.

When they made the decision in 1998 to leave Sydney and travel around Australia, it was made with the ultimate goal to never go back to the life they left behind. To set the goal in action they had to review their financial situation and make some tough choices; they also had to plan their mode of accommodation and self-sufficiency, and of course decide and agree on where to go. The preparations involved extensive research, intensive conversations, endless leg-work visiting camping stores, 4WD shows, joining a 4WD club, undergoing driver training etc. But it also involved selling all their worldly possessions, not just their home but all the contents and clutter. What immediately struck them, was how difficult this trip was to plan. This was a time before the current caravanning boom - a decade before the baby boomers retired so outback tourism was not as popular as it is now, and the term grey nomad was not yet known. To plan their trip, they sought out information about visiting the iconic outback destinations they had seen on 1970's television documentaries (think Bill Peach, Leyland Bros etc). They turned to the internet, but Google didn't exist back then and even government tourism websites lacked substance particularly in providing information about the exciting places they had mapped out to visit. Furthermore, what they really wanted to hear was other people's stories - ideally from other young people with a similar outlook on life.

It is this first-hand experience, of struggling to gather information to plan a trip, that has forged the vision for what ExplorOz offers as an information service to the self-drive tourism market. It took almost 2 years of being on the road however before David and Michelle even recognised the need for the website and gathered the courage to put all their energies into building it into a business - but in January 2000 they settled in Perth, Western Australia. ExplorOz.com was officially launched in March of the same year and has now been in operation for 18 years. Over these years of operation the site has evolved with the times and now provides products and services that were never envisioned back in 2000, however the core purpose and model of ExplorOz has remained constant.