Cracker Night at Redbanks is an annual community fireworks and live music festival in Tasmania, attracting around 2,000 attendees each year. Multiple stages, food and drink vendors, parking logistics, and all the compliance paperwork that comes with setting off fireworks in a public space. A great night out, and for a community event, a surprisingly serious amount of moving parts.
I’m one of the producers, which meant for a long time I was the person building every single map, for every single stakeholder, across a mix of Google Maps screenshots, email threads, and Adobe Illustrator.
I also work at EventLab, the platform I’m about to talk about. Biased, yes. But a genuine user who lived the problem before we had the solution. As is everyone else on the EventLab team.
Performers and artists
Cracker Night runs three stages: a main stage, a cabaret stage, and a kids village. Each one has its own performers, its own schedule, and its own area on the site. In the past, every artist and performer group got their own exported Illustrator map with their stage highlighted, their bump-in time, and their backstage access route. Three stages meant three different maps, and any time a schedule shifted or a stage layout changed, all three needed to be redone and resent.
Now each stage has its own Workbook. Performers get a link before the event with their schedule, their area on the site map, and any notes relevant to them. If the lineup changes or the stage moves, the Workbook updates. Nobody gets an outdated PDF.
Vendors and stallholders
Food and drink vendors are one of the bigger logistical pieces of Cracker Night. Everyone needs to know their site allocation, their power access, bump-in times, and what’s expected of them on the night. Previously that meant a vendor-specific map out of Illustrator, a briefing document, and a chain of emails to make sure everyone had both.
With Workbooks, vendors get one link. Their site allocation is visible on the live map, their bump-in schedule is attached, and any last minute changes update automatically. No more “just checking I’m still in the same spot” emails the week before.
Parking and traffic volunteers
Parking and traffic volunteers are one of the most important parts of Cracker Night. They’re the first people attendees interact with, and they set the tone for the whole night. Getting them properly briefed is something we take seriously, especially with the added complexity of managing crowd flow around the fireworks exclusion zone.
Volunteers get a Workbook with the full site layout, their specific zone marked, traffic flow directions, and a briefing note covering what to do if something changes on the night. It goes out during the pre-event briefing process and stays live until the event is done. Everyone arrives knowing exactly where they need to be.
Council and compliance
Cracker Night requires a stack of compliance documentation: liquor licensing maps, fire safety plans, fireworks exclusion zones, emergency access routes. Historically these all lived in separate Illustrator files, exported to PDF, formatted for council submission, and kept completely separate from the operational event documents. One change to the site map meant ten changes across ten different files, ten new exports, and a round of emails to make sure the right people had the updated versions.
Workbooks changed that. The fire safety Workbook has the exclusion zone map and the safety brief in one place. The liquor licensing Workbook has the boundary map and the license documentation together. When something changes on the master map, everything updates. One edit, not ten.
