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.
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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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