This is a 1923 booklet containing information on the Telephone Exchanges and the lists of subscribers in the areas of Geelong, Camperdown, Casterton, Hamilton, Mortlake, Portland and Warrnambool. Telephones were in use in Victoria as early as the 1870s with the first Telephone Exchange facility established in Melbourne in 1880. In 1890 the first Telephone Exchange in Warrnambool was established with 35 subscribers. In 1912 the first automatic Telephone Exchange for public use was established in Geelong. This was the second established in the British Empire. This booklet is of considerable importance as it lists all the telephone subscribers in the Warrnambool area in 1923. It is a great research tool as it gives not only the addresses of the subscribers but also in many instances their occupations and business names and in the areas around Warrnambool the names of the properties at that time. This is a soft-cover booklet of 104 pages. It has a dark grey cover with printed information on both sides. It was published in 1923. The pages are stapled together and contain lists of Telephone Exchanges, information on the distances from one Exchange to another in the area and the rates of charges for telephone trunk lines. It also has a list of subscribers in the Camperdown, Geelong, Hamilton and Warrnambool areas. The front cover has a small piece missing at the right hand side edge. There are some rubbing and dirt marks on the cover.Front Cover: ‘Victoria Country Telephone Exchanges, List of Subscribers And Other Information’warrnambool telephone exchange, 1923 telephone book, warrnambool

Australia's first telephone exchange was opened in Melbourne in August 1880. It was operated by the Melbourne Telephone Exchange Company. Owned by W. H. Masters and T. T. Draper, the Manager of the Company was H. Byron Moore. This was only two years after the world's first exchange in the United States, and just four years after Bell first spoke on a telephone. The exchange was located in the old Stock Exchange building at 367 Collins Street, a site now occupied by the Commonwealth Bank. In 1884, the operations of the Company, by then known as the Victorian Telephone Exchange Company, had grown considerably and were transferred to Wills Street, Melbourne. Private ownership of this company continued until 1887 when it was bought out by the Victorian Colonial Government. Other colonial governments followed this example. By 1910, the growth in telephone services made additional accommodation necessary. This could not be provided in the existing building in Wills Street and arrangements were made for a new exchange in Lonsdale Street. Alexander Graham Bell visited Australia in 1910 to advise the Federal Government's Postal Commission. Telephone exchanges were established in Adelaide with (48 subscribers), Hobart (10 subscribers) and Launceston (35 subscribers). The first exchange in Western Australia was established in 1887 and located in a small three-room cottage in Wellington Street, Perth with 17 subscribers. The year 1888 marked the opening of the Fremantle exchange in a small room at the rear of the Town Hall. There were nine subscribers. Australia's first automatic exchange was installed in the GPO in Sydney, in 1911, for internal use. But the first automatic exchange for public use was opened at Geelong in Victoria in the next year July 1912 with 800 subscribers. Melbourne's first automatic exchange was opened in the suburb of Brighton in 1914; the first public automatic exchange in NSW began operating at Newtown, Sydney in 1915; and Queensland's first was installed at South Brisbane in 1925. 1929 saw the opening of Tasmania's first automatic exchange in Hobart. an automatic telephone service. In June 1977, the manual telephone exchange at Swansea was replaced with an automatic service and made Tasmania the first State in Australia to have a fully automatic network. The half-century following Federation saw the growth of the automatic operation; a great extension of trunk line services; The automatic telephone contributed greatly to the early popularity of telephones in Australia. It was a quicker and more convenient way of communicating with another person on the same exchange — instead of having to go through tedious processes with the operator. From its introduction, the number of automatic telephones in operation grew to a remarkable extent. In 1886, the first trunk link of 16 km was connected to the exchanges of Adelaide and Port Adelaide in South Australia. Then, in 1907, the first inter-capital telephone trunk line was opened between Sydney and Melbourne. It was followed by a line between Melbourne and Adelaide in 1914. Sydney and Brisbane were linked in 1923, and Perth and Adelaide in 1930. In 1930, the first overseas calls from Australia came possible with the introduction of a radiotelephone service to England, and through there to Europe and America. A similar service opened to New Zealand in the same year. Initially, trunk channels linked different manual trunk exchanges. It was necessary for a succession of trunk operators to connect the appropriate channels, one after the other until the connection was made. As trunk traffic grew. the system became increasingly unsuitable. More trunk operators had to be employed and so labour costs increased. It was a tedious and slow way of making a long-distance call, and it was sometimes hard to hear, particularly when several exchanges were linked With technical advances, trunk switching moved from manual operation through a partly automatic phase. Automatic transit switching equipment was used and only a single operator was required to connect a trunk call to a wanted automatic subscriber. Until well beyond the middle of this century, the majority of trunk traffic went through this single telephonist control. In 1953, the number of telephones in use in Australia passed the one million mark. By then, the need for improvement in the automatic exchanges was becoming well recognised. The need was for a telephone switching system which would do a better job more economically than the conventional step-by-step ex-change. This led to the adoption of the Crossbar system as the standard in automatic telephone exchanges in 1960. The introduction of Crossbar switching was a big step forward in the automation of trunk calls. It substituted automatic switching and charging equipment for the originating trunk operator, and improved the quality of the system radically. Before the introduction of the Crossbar system there were often very long delays in obtaining a booked trunk call, and the quality of sound was often very poor. With Crossbar, Subscriber Trunk Dialing (STD) became a reality. A trunk call by STD was as easy to make and almost as fast to connect as a local call.The item was made around the 1940s and used up until the 1970s in manual cord telephone exchanges as a way to time and charge users for trunk calls made over the telecom system of the time. Post Master General dept. - Trunk Call Timer.Inscribed PMG, C. of A, 37. Bell chimes at 3 min increments.flagstaff hill, warrnambool, shipwrecked-coast, flagstaff-hill, flagstaff-hill-maritime-museum, maritime-museum, shipwreck-coast, flagstaff-hill-maritime-village, timer, trunk call, telephone, cord exchange

This is a telephone directory of the telephone numbers and addresses of residents and businesses in Melbourne in 1933. There had been several early attempts in the second half of the 19th century to link places and homes in Victoria by locally-made telephone systems with a commercial telephone system in the same year successfully linking a business in Melbourne to a branch office in the same city. The first telephone exchange in Australia was established in Melbourne in 1880. This 1933 telephone directory shows the growing number of private residents and businesses to have the telephone installed but the installations were still confined mostly to the more affluent private residents and to businesses. This book is of considerable interest as a reference guide as it provides the names and addresses of those who had a telephone installed in Melbourne in 1933. This will be of great use to researchers, especially those compiling their family tree. This is a soft cover book of 364 pages. It has a buff-coloured cardboard cover with the title and other printed information on the front cover and four multi-colour advertisements for Melbourne businesses (Barnet Glass Tyres, Renown Dry Cleaners, C.O.R. Motor Spirit and Edward Dyason, Sharebrokers), also on the front cover. The back cover has a colour advertisement for Gilbey’s Gin. The pages listing the householders’ telephone numbers and addresses in alphabetical order are white with black printing and there are 20 pink pages at the back (business and professional listings). The book has been bound with glue. The cover is somewhat crumpled and the pages are dog-eared. melbourne history, telephone installation history in victoria, warrnambool, history

This notebook has been used in the Nullawarre Post Office in the mid 1900s. It lists the telephone exchange codes of places in Victoria and also the code for the telephone charges to those places. Charles and Vida Williams were the Post Master and Post Mistress at Nullawarre Post Office during the mid 20th century years. Nullawarre is a small settlement 25 kilometres south east of Warrnambool and is mainly an agricultural area. European settlement first occurred in the late 1860s. This notebook is of some interest as one used in the day-to-day business of the Nullawarre Post Office in the mid 20th century.This is a notebook which was originally set up as a Postman’s Redirection Book but has been used to list alphabetically telephone exchange areas and their codes. The book has an alphabetical index on the side of the pages and printed black lines and hand-ruled lines on the pages. The cover is light brown with blue binding on the spine and the binding is partly giving way. There is black printing and handwritten writing on the front cover. The material on the pages is handwritten in blue ink and pencil. There is a blue stamp and some pieces of paper pasted into some pages. ‘Postman’s Redirection Book’ ‘Telephone Code Dialling & Charge Book’ ‘Nullawarre’