I remember years ago wondering why there wasn’t a Melways (street directory) of the entire State of Victoria, including the bush areas.
And here’s one reason….
This is going to be just a rough calculation, so don’t get upset about decimal places and rounding off.
An A4 sheet of paper is 21×29 cm. Leave 1cm margin (each side) for bindings etc, so we’ve got 19x27cm of printable area.
A bushwalking map is usually in the scale of 1:25,000. Hence 1cm on the map is 25,000 cm in real life, or 250 m. It follows that 4cm of map = 1 km etc.
So an A4 map of this scale would be about 5km x 7km, that is 35 km²
Right, so how big is Victoria? According to the government it’s about 227,400 km². So do a simple division and you’ll need about 6,500 A4s. Printing double sided means ‘only’ 3,250 pages.
And if printed in the main Melway’s scale it would be worse. The majority of their maps are in a smaller scale, 1:20,000. So even more that 3,250 pages would be needed.