The National Communication Museum in Melbourne offers a fascinating exploration of Australia's technological evolution, from manual phone exchanges to smartphones, showcasing a trove of interactive exhibits and artifacts.
Tucked away in a unassuming brick building in Melbourne 's inner east, a collection of ancient machines hum, tick, chatter, rattle, and ring. While 'ancient' might be a stretch, for the children about to explore these room-sized relics during the school holidays, a telephone switchboard might as well be a thousand years old. The newly opened National Communication Museum , launched in September, is more than just a repository of phones and curiosities.
It's a chance to witness superseded technology in action. It's a treasure trove of formerly ordinary objects representing every Australian generation, woven together to tell the story of our evolution from manual exchanges to smartphones, from Indigenous songlines to fiber optic networks, and offering glimpses into our technological future.The museum itself occupies a repurposed 1930s telephone exchange building—the kind of place where technicians left notes for each other scribbled on the walls and where different workers could be identified by their unique cable braiding styles. These artifacts, preserved from the building's previous life, are partially on display. The museum currently hosts the 'Instruments of Surveillance' exhibition, running until March, which delves into the protracted history of spying. It features an original Enigma Machine, the type used by Germany to encode messages during World War II, alongside hand-crafted audio bugs believed to have been illegally deployed by police in the 1980s, leading to the infamous 'tapes' scandal. You'll find a glove designed to hack into dreams and a coat engineered to evade cameras. There's also a massive, explorable art installation evoking the flashing LEDs and intricate cabling of data centers, accompanied by artifacts and explanations of undersea cables, satellite constellations, and other hidden technologies that power the modern internet's delicate yet seemingly effortless hyper-connectivity.Upstairs, the collection is sure to be a hit with visitors as a vast central space lays out layers of nostalgia from manual phone exchanges and typewriters to Walkmans and early computers. Some artifacts have been transformed into interactive exhibits, allowing visitors to touch and feel them, while rows of touchscreen information kiosks deliver a wealth of information, stories, interviews, and supplementary visual materials. A screen-free kids' area features colored cables connecting nodes with activities focusing on various types of messages and old phones that connect to units elsewhere in the museum.The museum explores future technologies like generative AI and probes current anxieties like misinformation or computer consciousness. Digital experiences come to life as you approach, demonstrating how to message in Morse code or perform the non-verbal gestures of Samoan culture.However, there are also objects that every generation will recognize from their childhood, mostly set up to be experienced and shared. On large monitors, you'll find a pair of 2000s-era Windows machines displaying MSN Messenger chats and a Commodore Amiga hooked up to a recreation of an early Australian internet service. But nearby, there's also a meticulously restored electromechanical talking clock featuring the original voice recordings of Gordon Gow, a service people once used to check the time. You can no longer call this talking clock, but pressing a button allows you to watch it assemble the various recordings to form an accurate time.It's surprising how much of the collection you can touch and use, but this isn't your typical art museum. While there are some precious and fragile objects, many are work tools or consumer products designed to be handled and manipulated daily. Many still bear dents and wear from their previous lives, adding another layer of context.The experience isn't solely about witnessing objects as they were. In one hallway, an old Telstra payphone serves as part of an interactive narrative, encouraging visitors to dial numbers and listen to scripted conversations. Elsewhere, an old switchboard has been repurposed as a kind of synthesizer, allowing you to create your own tunes composed of phone sounds.Beneath the surface of this shrine to technology and communication tools, it's evident that an immense amount of work has gone into making it all functional. Cleaning and maintaining these objects is a complex undertaking, and the march of progress means many aren't truly operational anymore (for example, the frequencies used by old TVs no longer carry broadcasts). Much of the museum's display requires meticulous simulation.Curator Jemimah Widdicombe explained that the goal wasn't merely to arrange a collection of individually interesting objects but to create meaning out of collections that had been a vital part of our culture
History Culture National Communication Museum Melbourne Technology History Communication Telephone Internet Surveillance AI Interactive Exhibits
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