Heritage Listing of Narooma Payphone Highlights Community Resilience After Black Summer Fires

During the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires, mobile networks collapsed across the New South Wales coastal town of Narooma. With power and internet unavailable, residents and visitors gathered at the town’s three public payphones to contact family, check on neighbours, and report losses. Historian Naomi Parry Duncan recalled standing in a payphone booth while waiting for a turn, observing orderly queues of people sharing the trauma of the disaster.

The Guardian

In the aftermath, Parry Duncan led a campaign to have the payphone outside Narooma Plaza on the Princes Highway added to the National Trust of Australia NSW register. The Trust approved a bronze plaque bearing gum-leaf motifs to mark the phone’s cultural significance. Telstra, which is required to maintain Australia’s roughly 14,000 public payphones, has been cited by its regional general manager Chris Taylor as evidence that payphones remain vital for vulnerable community members needing crisis support and connectivity.

The Guardian

Telstra reported that within the last year, about 25 million calls were placed from payphones nationwide, including roughly 300 000 calls to emergency (triple-zero) and crisis-support lines. Since mid-2021, all local and national calls to fixed lines and mobiles from payphones have been free of charge. The company is also upgrading power-backup systems to improve payphone resilience during future disasters.

The Guardian

Parry Duncan emphasized that public phones have long supported Australian women seeking employment or escaping abusive situations, and have helped keep Indigenous communities linked across vast distances. The heritage listing of the Narooma payphone therefore recognises both its recent role during the Black Summer fires and its broader historical contribution to social cohesion in remote and regional Australia.

The Guardian