A busted phone in a tropical death alley

There was a time when I felt telephone booths were among the friendliest sights in the world, bestowing a sort of freedom on the wandering spirit.

So how has it come to the point when a phone that travels everywhere with me has become a sort of burden?

Do any of us answer our mobile phones any more when an unknown number pops up on the screen?

If it’s not the automated voice of a crook wanting your personal details to help them fix up your account at Amazon or your bank, it’s some underpaid kid trying to persuade you to buy a ticket in a charity lottery.

Let them leave a message if they’re legitimate, we mutter. And it better be a text, because we don’t listen to voice messages any more, either.

Younger generations are even more ruthless. Many rarely answer a voice call on their phones at all. An unheralded call can get you tagged as uncivilised. It’s an unwelcome intrusion into lives that consider the spoken word on a phone to be altogether last-century.

These days a phone isn’t about lending someone your ear. When it comes to conversation, we’re all thumbs.Credit: Alamy

Conversing on the phone, studies have found over the past decade, induces anxiety in many young people. Texting has become the new conversation.

It seems a travesty to those of us for whom a motionless phone was the great escape when we were young.

In 1971, I hitchhiked the length of the east coast of Australia alone. The appearance of a phone box - and there almost always was one not too far away - meant I could drag my contact book out of my backpack and a coin from a pocket and call ahead to some friend of a friend and beg a spot on their couch for the night.

It also meant I could dial 013 and ask the operator to place a call to my family, reversing the charges (naturally). Sometimes I did.

They were comforting little worlds, those old booths, complete with a door for privacy, even if they often stank of urine.

You needed coins to dial. You could amuse yourself perusing messages scrawled into the paintwork, suggesting you call Mandy or Rex if you were in search of an interesting time.

There, anyway, is the answer to that regular question: “What did we do before mobile phones?”

My solo trip was a very long time before Ivan Milat consigned hitchhiking in Australia to a hideously dangerous period of history, of course. Still, an uncle in Rockhampton tried unsuccessfully to persuade me to carry his old service revolver on my travels north.

I didn’t know then that a 130-kilometre stretch of the Bruce Highway between the North Queensland towns of Marlborough and Sarina was known as “death alley”, owing to frequent shootings and murders.

In the ’60s and ’70s, one stretch of road in northern Queensland became notorious.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

In 1967, a Queensland Labor MP, Rex Patterson - later a minister in the Whitlam government - told Parliament he carried a loaded rifle in his car when travelling that spooky road. Just in case.

In the previous 18 months, two men had been shot and their bodies thrown into a creek on the Marlborough-Sarina stretch, another man was shot dead while camped in a car, and four other people, including a woman, had been ambushed and wounded.

Four years after I hitched through, two more travellers, Sophia and Noel Weckert, were killed on that same road. Two drifters were later found guilty of murder and a woman was convicted of manslaughter.

On my way back, after I’d finally got as north as I could go, I got stuck in Sarina. By then I knew a bit about the reputation of the area, and wasn’t entirely happy about being dropped off in the little sugar-milling town.

Sugar cane country in northern Queensland.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

No one would pick me up. For two days.

The annual show and rodeo was on. The local cowboys thought it was fine sport to give me a hard time as I tried to sleep on the town’s creek bank. I woke to discover someone had shoved a cane toad in my sleeping bag. Beery voices cackled across the creek.

There was a phone booth down the street. In the absence of that pistol I’d refused to carry, I needed to hear a friendly voice.

The phone was busted. No voice, friendly or otherwise, would come down the line. And I lost a precious 20 cents in the slot.

These days phone boxes are free for the public.Credit: Glenn Campbell

When a fellow in a Morris Minor finally pulled up well into the second day, I leapt in and refused to leave the tiny vehicle until we reached Rockhampton, 300 kilometres down the track.

All the way back to Victoria, I obsessively checked booths to see if their phones were in working order.

Up to the early 1990s, there were about 80,000 public phone boxes around Australia.

Now, with mobile phones in just about every hand, there are - surprisingly perhaps - still about 15,000.

Domestic calls on them have been free since late 2021, when Telstra reported more than 230,000 of the 11 million public-phone calls in the previous year were for emergency services like triple zero, people trying to escape domestic violence, homeless people seeking support and those facing other forms of disaster.

It is a fine public service for those in need. I could have done with one of those phones, friendless in a little Queensland town 52 years ago.

If it was working.