NSW pay phone given heritage listing

Under furious orange skies and plumes of bushfire smoke, locals and tourists lined up at a payphone to talk to family and friends or check in on neighbours.

Some used the public phone in Narooma to tell loved ones they were safe, while others revealed they had lost everything in the catastrophic Black Summer bushfires that razed much of the NSW far south coast.

Historian Naomi Parry Duncan was holidaying in Narooma on New Year’s Day in 2020, among those who had to shelter at an evacuation centre as the fires loomed.

There was no mobile reception or power during that “bewildering and frightening” time, sending many to wait at three public phones in town, Duncan recalled.

“At all of the pay phones there were queues of people politely waiting,” she said.

“It was quite an intimate space in the queue.”

The pay phone outside Narooma Plaza on the Princes Highway has been heritage listed for its cultural and social role in the Black Summer fires, with almost 1000 calls made over two months during and after the disaster.

Duncan led the nomination to the National Trust of Australia NSW register.

The pay phone is now marked with the trust’s bronze plaque, emblazoned with gum leaves, to denote its significance.

The quiet empathy displayed by people waiting for the phones as they carried shared trauma was a particularly moving sight, Duncan said.

“The instinctive thing to help each other was really quite amazing,” she said.

Her New Zealand-born partner saw how people waited patiently for the phone and felt a deeper understanding of Australia, she said.

The landmark status was being sought for other phones, including one in remote Queensland and another in Melbourne.

Telstra is mandated to maintain Australia’s 14,000 pay phones, with all local and national calls to standard fixed lines and mobiles free since mid-2021.

Within the last year, 25 million calls have been made from pay phones, including 300,000 to triple zero and crisis support lines.

“Where we’ve got vulnerable people in the community out there who need crisis support and to stay connected, they’re showing us these pay phones are absolutely critical,” Telstra regional general manager Chris Taylor said.

Telstra has been working to ensure better resilience during disasters, such as power back-ups to help restore connectivity more quickly, Taylor said.

Duncan said public phones have a long history in Australian culture, playing a particularly important part in women’s lives.

The phones were used to help women find employment and leave abusive relationships throughout the last century, as well as keeping Indigenous communities connected, she said.

“They are so important for keeping us together, especially when you’ve got a country that is spread over such vast distances as Australia.”

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