Abstract The years of 1973 and 1974 must rank as two outstanding years of widespread activity in the advancement of cartographic education within this country. Last year, at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, fifteen cartography students initiated a new full-time associate diploma course and, in the same year, an associate diploma programme was introduced at Sydney Technical College. At the Institutes of Technology of Queensland and South Australia, cartographic certificate courses are in the process of being replaced, and an associate diploma programme is now available at Wembley Technical College in Western Australia. At the current time, close to one thousand students throughout Australia are engaged in full-time or part-time courses that provide at least a basic training in cartographic and associated techniques. In every Division of the Institute there has been an extensive reassessment and revision of both the nature and content of syllabi as a response to the increasingly more specific demands of cartographic employment. The national trend has been to discard the broadly based drafting certificates in favour of programmes which provide more relevant experience with higher entry standards.