Inbound Calls Now Allowed to Australia’s Telstra Payphones

Telstra, the Australian telco,  announced this week that all of its 1,800 publicly accessible payphones nationwide now allow incoming calls. Telstra provides a map of its payphone locations, including a Streetview snapshot of each location and the payphone’s dialin number. Telstra’s most isolated phones show no Streetview imagery, and finding the phone in some of the imagery proves difficult at times, possibly because the phones are located indoors.

This creates a lot of possibilities. For one, the hunt is on to find a live webcam in Australia in which one of these phones appears. Over the years I’ve received repeated inquiries from people asking if such a webcam view existed, so that one could call in to the phone and see live video of whoever answered. As far as I know no such webcam location exists anymore, and I do not expect to find anything new in that realm, but I’ll give it a go.

This ability to call public phones across Australia reminded me of Alan Dein’s “Don’t Hang Up“, a BBC radio series to which I contributed some years ago. Dein called random payphones throughout the UK and attempted to engage whoever answered in conversation, sometimes successfully other times not so much. It was an extremely time-consuming and grueling process for Mr. Dein and Mark Burman, the show’s co-producer.

For the show’s only call to a payphone outside the UK I supplied the number of a payphone near me, and we arranged a time for me to be present and answer the phone. Listen here.

The official website for “Don’t Hang Up” is a mess, but I have heard much of the program’s audio and found it surprisingly engaging. It’s too bad none of it seems to be available online. A promising-looking BBC Radio 4 page fails to deliver.

My interests in calling phone booths across the outback (or anywhere else) focus not so much on contacting individuals and exploring their life and times, as Alan Dein’s programs did. Instead I intend to revisit a project I did years ago, in which I called a dozen or more U.S. payphones all at once, patched them into a conference call, then listened to what happened when people started answering. I chose payphones located in pubs and restaurants, thinking that whoever answered at such locations would be more inclined to socialize.

It worked. I would describe the mood of these connections as initially chaotic, even a little hostile, followed by curious questions from those who answered the calls about how, exactly, it came to pass that this connection happened. The unsettled feelings seldom took very long to calm down, as some observed the weirdness of it all but hung up the phone, while others stood by to make conversation with these total strangers.

I found it beautiful and exciting. With Australia’s phones now allowing incoming calls I intend to attempt this project again across that country. I never get tired of this stuff.