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 It’s a chance to see superseded technology up and running.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.

You can place a very short distance call using a working phone exchange at the museum.Credit: Casey Horsfield

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.

The downstairs of the museum contains largely hands-off collections, including the Instruments of Surveillance exhibition that’s running until March, which unpacks a protracted history of spying. It includes an original Enigma Machine, of the type Germany used to encode messages in World War II, as well as hand-made audio bugs believed to have been deployed illegally by police in the 1980s in a scandal that would become known as The Age tapes. There’s a glove designed to hack into your dreams, and a coat designed to hide you from cameras.

Current exhibits downstairs include Hyperthread, which is about hidden infrastructure.Credit: Casey Horsfield

There’s also a massive explorable art installation that evokes the flashing LEDs and snaking cables of data centres, alongside artifacts and explanations of undersea cables, satellite constellations and other hidden technologies that power the modern internet’s fragile but seemingly effortless hyper-connectivity.

But it’s the upstairs collection that’s bound to be most popular, as a huge central space lays out layers of nostalgia from manual phone exchanges and typewriters to Walkmans and cathode ray tube TVs. Some have been fashioned into interactive exhibits you can touch and feel, while rows of touchscreen information kiosks deliver huge amounts of information, stories, interviews and supplemental visual material. A screen-free kids area has coloured cables connecting nodes with activities around different types of messages, and old phones that connect to units elsewhere in the museum.

Upstairs rows of objects and dual-screen kiosks cover centuries of communication technology.Credit: Casey Horsfield

There are works that explore future technologies like generative AI, or interrogate current anxieties like misinformation or computer consciousness, and digital experiences that spring to life as you approach to show you how to message in Morse code, or perform the non-verbal gestures of Samoan culture. But there are also objects that every generation will recognise from their childhood, and most are set up to be experienced and shared.

For me, it was the cybercafe room containing old beige towers running Doom on big hulking monitors, a pair of 2000s-era Windows machines with MSN Messenger chats going, and a Commodore Amiga hooked up to a recreation of an early Australian internet service. But nearby there’s also a carefully restored electromechanical talking clock featuring the original voice recordings of Gordon Gow, which people used to call to find out the time, which is something I’ve heard about from my mum.

You can no longer call this talking clock, but you can press a button and watch how it puts the various recordings together to form an accurate time.Credit: Casey Horsfield

It’s surprising how much of the collection you can touch and use, but then this isn’t the usual kind of art museum. While there are some precious and fragile objects, a lot of them are work tools or consumer products designed to be battered and manipulated day after day. Many objects still carry dents and wear from their former lives of active service, which adds context of its own.

It’s not all about experiencing the objects as they were, either. In one hallway, an old Telstra payphone is used to deliver an interactive narrative that encourages you to dial numbers and listen to scripted conversations. Elsewhere, an old switchboard has been repurposed as a kind of synthesiser you can manipulate to create your own tunes composed of phone sounds.

The cybercafé will appeal to kids of the 80s and 90s.Credit: Casey Horsfield

Beneath the surface of this shrine to technology and communication tools, it’s clear that an incredible amount of work has gone into making it all function. Cleaning and caring for all these objects is a complicated business, not to mention that the march of progress means a lot of them aren’t really fit for purpose (for example, the frequencies used by old TVs don’t carry broadcasts any more), so a lot of it has to be meticulously simulated.

Curator Jemimah Widdicombe said the idea wasn’t to arrange a collection of individual interesting objects, but to create meaning out of collections of these things that had been a vital part of our culture.

Playing tunes on a switchboard synthesiser.Credit: Casey Horsfield

“No two people will see an object in the same way; an object doesn’t have a fixed inherent meaning. So someone coming in will bring some of their experiences, their culture, their background and their preconceptions as well,” she said.

“You don’t just learn about technology through reading a book or intellectualising. This [museum] gives you a chance to learn in an embodied way. If you take an object, what are the stories or ideas, or sense of time and place, that you can leap from and between objects?”

Something that really stands out when considering the objects of the pre-2000s and earlier is how much more tactile and decipherable everything is. Whether dialling a phone and watching the mechanical response of the switchboard, or even examining the magnetic plates and moving hands of an old PC hard drive, there’s something comforting about technology that’s functioning so visibly. And it’s also easy to see how people who grew up with this, and who now live in a world where most technology is completely opaque or literally invisible, might feel like their life’s experience doesn’t feed in to the story of modern communications. But the connections are there.

Emily Siddons, the museum’s co-CEO and artistic director, said it had been gratifying to see parents and grandparents win some cred back by explaining to their family members how floppy disks work, or displaying their skills with telephone exchange plugs.

“Those conversation starters and bridging those gaps and making this technology have relevance again for people has been a really great part of this experience”, she said.

“It speaks to everyone’s shared history, their own personal experience of childhood and growing up. That intergenerational learning piece has been really lovely to see with this museum.”

The National Communication Museum in Hawthorn is open Wednesday to Sunday 10am to 5pm. School holiday workshops begin on January 15.

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