The museum where grandparents can get their tech cred back
Tucked in a familiar but easily overlooked brick building in Melbourne’s inner east, ancient machines hum, tick, chatter, rattle and ring. Well, ancient might be a stretch. But for the kids about to pile in and play with these room-sized relics over the school holidays, a telephone switchboard might as well be a thousand years old.
Newly opened in September, the National Communication Museum is more than just a collection of phones and curios. It’s a chance to see superseded technology up and running. And it’s a trove of formerly ordinary objects representing every Australian generation, which can be tied together into the story of how we got from manual exchanges to smartphones, or from Indigenous song lines to fibre optic networks, and to give some insight into where we’re headed next.
The space itself is a repurposed 1930s telephone exchange building; the kind of place where technicians left notes for each other by writing on the walls, and where you can tell the different workers apart by the way they braided cables together, which were artifacts that stayed there when work on the museum commenced and that now remain, in part, on display.
