Heritage significance and executive director recommendation to the
ASSESSMENT OF CULTURAL HERITAGE SIGNIFICANCE
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- DESCRIPTION
- RELEVANT INFORMATION
- HISTORY
- The invention of Telephone Exchanges
- Manual telephone exchanges in Victoria
- Introduction of automatic telephone exchanges
ASSESSMENT OF CULTURAL HERITAGE SIGNIFICANCEEXECUTIVE DIRECTOR’S ASSESSMENT OF CULTURAL HERITAGE SIGNIFICANCE [s.34A(2)(d)] The Collingwood Telephone Exchange is a good and intact example of a ‘nodal point’ telephone exchange building but does not possess the qualities, significance or rarity that would elevate this place to a threshold of State significance. DESCRIPTIONThe Collingwood Telephone Exchange reflects four building phases (1922, 1920s/30s, 1950s/60s and 1970s). It is a complex of adjoining one and two storey buildings on a site of approximately 3,100 square metres with frontages to Wellington, Glasgow and Northumberland Streets. It is currently a functioning Telstra Corporation nodal point telephone exchange. The Exchange’s buildings were completed in a number of separate stages. Open areas of ground level carparking are situated at the site’s eastern side and along the central portion of its Northumberland Street boundary The gable-roofed earliest stage was completed in 1922 and is built to the Wellington and Glasgow Street boundaries at the site’s northwest corner. It features walls of English Bond red brick containing soldier-course bands, and exhibits many characteristics of the Commonwealth Government Department of Works and Railways’ ‘Early Commonwealth Vernacular Style’. The Wellington Street façade of this stage is a single-storey parapeted gable with flanking flat-parapeted ends and angled caps, and contains three large arched window openings. The steel framed multi-paned windows are capped by a continuous cement-rendered and painted horizontal lintel which extends across each arched opening’s springing points. The gable roof of the single-storey 1922 building is clad with painted corrugated steel sheeting. The long Glasgow Street façade of this stage also features brick walls adorned by soldier coursing, slightly-projecting pilasters and regular recesses containing windows and plinth-brick bases that step in response to the street’s gradual west-to-east gentle downhill gradient. Wide eave overhangs offer some protection to the large north-facing windows, the openings of which are also fitted with modern fixed heat-control external steel louvres. A later two-storey red brick gable-roofed extension abuts the 1922 exchange building’s eastern side. Its roof is clad with terracotta tiles with pitch and eave overhangs similar to those of the 1922 building’s original roofs. The Glasgow Street façade of this extension continues the original building’s architectural language of English Bond brickwork with bands of soldier coursing, slightly-projecting pilasters and recesses containing windows and plinth-brick bases. It is likely that this extension dates from the late 1920s to the late 1930s. The fixed heat-control external steel louvres that have been installed in this extension’s north-facing window openings match those added to the original 1922 building. Additional and more simplistically detailed single-storey adjoining red face brick extensions cluster along the south side of these buildings. It is likely that these date from the late 1950s to the early 1960s. A single-storey standalone garage building with three separate roller-shutter doors facing Northumberland Street occupies the site’s south-west corner. All of these extensions feature stretcher-bond red face brickwork and low-pitched painted corrugated steel sheet roofs. Underground communications-cable tunnels with floors approximately 6m below ground extend away from the site to the south and west of this collection of red brick buildings. To the east of the red brick buildings is an adjoining two storey unpainted-concrete building, constructed in two separate stages during the 1970s. Its facades feature expressed structural columns and beams of smooth-faced off-form concrete, and large wall areas of concrete imprinted with timber-board formwork patterns. The second stage’s upper-storey west-facing facade contains three panels of unpainted concrete block infill walls which indicate the portion of the building intended to connect with the exchange’s planned future eastwards expansion. Its roofs are of galvanised and unpainted clip-fixed steel decking, concealed from street level by concrete parapets to the exterior walls. The Collingwood Telephone Exchange contains many features that are typical of nodal point exchanges, including staff facilities, nodal and local phone switching equipment arranged in vertical racks separated by aisles for access by staff, the underground cable chamber tunnels leading to distribution frames, a State mobile radio room, banks of large lead-acid batteries, an externally-flued automatic diesel generator, external and internal diesel fuel tanks. There is extensive roof-mounted ventilation and air-conditioning equipment and ductwork. Internally, the walls, fixtures and finishes of the Exchange’s 1922 building and its initial two-storey extension have been substantially altered, although much of the original fabric of these buildings is also evident. No original 1922-era exchange equipment remains at the place. RELEVANT INFORMATION
HISTORYTelephony arrives in VictoriaIn 1876 Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated a practical telephone, and published details of it in the Scientific American on 6 October 1877. Enthusiasts in many countries – including Australia – immediately made their own versions of telephone instruments based on Bell’s description in this journal article. As early as 1877, W J Thomas of the Geelong Customs House experimented with home-made telephones and successfully linked houses in his locality. By means of his telephones and wire, Thomas arranged for the transmission from one house to another of music as well as conversation. Later, Thomas transmitted over longer distances, using a telegraph line between Geelong and Melbourne and on 9 January 1878 between Geelong and Queenscliff. What appears to have been the first installation of a regular commercial telephone service in Australia came into operation in Melbourne on 2 January 1878. Using locally-made telephones, it linked the head office of hardware importers Messrs McLean Bros & Rigg in Elizabeth Street with their Spencer Street store about 1.2km away. In February 1878 successful experiments were carried out between Melbourne and Ballarat (115km) using telephones made by Mr Challon of the Central Telegraph Office in Melbourne. However, these early telephones were used for communication between two fixed points, generally also using two telephones – one receiving and the other transmitting. The invention of Telephone ExchangesJanuary 1878 saw another substantial advance in the technology of telephones – the opening of the first commercial telephone exchange, in New Haven, Connecticut. The development of the exchange was a logical step. If the existing point-to-point connections had just been extended, then it would mean that each user would need lines running from their own telephone directly to those of all other users they wanted to be able to talk to – a system of mind-boggling impracticality. For instance, although five telephones could be connected to each other with just ten wires, 1,000 telephones would require nearly half a million criss-crossing wires. Instead, a telephone exchange required only one single set of connections between each subscriber’s own instrument and the exchange – a central switching office through which they could be connected with any other ‘subscriber’ to that exchange. All early exchanges were ‘manual’, employing operators – mostly young women – who, on request, connected the caller’s line to another line and noted the call for later billing. Manual telephone exchanges in VictoriaAustralia’s first manual telephone exchange was opened in Melbourne in August 1880. It was located in the old Stock Exchange building at 367 Collins Street, now the site of a 33-storey office tower. It was privately owned and operated by the Melbourne Telephone Exchange Company. In 1884, the operations of the Company, by then known as the Victorian Telephone Exchange Company, had grown considerably and were transferred to a new ‘Central’ exchange at 25-29 Wills Street, Melbourne. Private ownership of this company continued until 1887 when it was bought out by the Victorian Colonial Government. At the time of the Government take-over in September 1887, there were 887 subscribers and the Company had 21 employees. The following year the number of subscribers was 1,462. When the six Australian colonies federated in 1901, there were 32,767 telephones in use. Each of the colonies had, until then, built up its own telephone services. But Federation brought all telecommunications and postal services under the control of the Postmaster-General’s Department of Australia (often colloquially referred to as ‘the PMG’). Following the Commonwealth takeover, a 1901 report to the Postmaster General in the first Australian Parliament on the colonial telephone and telegraph systems recorded that Melbourne had 3,057 subscribers connected to the Central exchange and a further 1,747 connected to twelve separate suburban exchanges. Many of these suburban exchanges were located in or adjacent to post offices. Three of the suburban exchanges accounted for 1,273 of these lines. The largest of these was Windsor with 623 subscribers, followed in size by the exchanges at Malvern and Hawthorn. By 1910, the growth in telephone services had made additional accommodation for exchange switching equipment necessary. This could not be provided in the existing Wills Street building and arrangements were made for a new ‘Central’ manual exchange at 447-457 Lonsdale Street, which opened in August 1911. The Wills Street exchange subsequently continued to operate until closing in 1916. The 1913 Victorian State Telephone Directories ‘List of Exchanges, Situation, and Particulars of Service’ contains 57 country telephone exchanges (all but one of which was in a post office), the Wills Street and Lonsdale Street ‘Central’ exchanges, and 13 metropolitan suburban exchanges (also all in post offices: at ‘Ascot’ (Ascot Vale), Brighton, Brunswick, Canterbury, Cheltenham, Footscray, Hawthorn, Heidelberg, Malvern, Northcote, Oakleigh, Williamstown, and Windsor).
Australia’s first automatic exchange was installed in the GPO in Sydney in 1911 for internal use only within that building. But Australia’s first automatic telephone exchange for public use began operation at Geelong in July 1912. It was located in the Post Office building on the corner of Ryrie and Gheringhap Streets, in a room at the northeast corner of its first floor. This 800-line Geelong exchange was the first automatic telephone exchange in the Southern Hemisphere. The first automatic exchange in England had been opened at Epsom just two months earlier, on 14 May 1912. The Geelong and the 500-line Epsom installations both used equipment manufactured by the Automatic Electric Company of Chicago. A number of automatic exchanges had also commenced operation in Canada prior to 1912. Australia was thus also the third country in the then British Empire to have an automatic telephone exchange. By 1914, 85% of Melbourne subscribers were connected to manual exchanges that were less than four years old, but the popularity of telephone use meant that the lines were becoming congested, particularly in the areas served by the Brighton exchange. Melbourne’s first automatic telephone exchange was duly opened in the suburb of Brighton in June 1914, becoming Victoria’s second. The next three metropolitan automatic exchanges to be commissioned were at the former Sandringham post office in April 1918, in a new purpose-built exchange at Malvern in July 1919, and then in another purpose-built exchange at Collingwood in October 1922. Two additional metropolitan automatic exchanges were established by 1925. In that same year it appears that Victoria’s first Rural Automatic Exchange (‘RAX’) was built by the PMG Department and installed at Barep (about 180km north of Melbourne). The next RAX to commence operation was then at Springvale (about 23km south-east of Melbourne) on 7 May 1927. As the ‘Central’ exchange reached capacity in the second half of the 1920s, relief was provided by establishing a network of new automatic exchanges in the inner suburbs. The city centre continued to be served by the manual Central exchange until 1938 when the ‘City West’ Exchange at 434-436 Little Bourke Street was established as an extension of the Central building and took over some of the city area. By 1939 over 75% of Melbourne metropolitan exchange lines were automatic. 
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