Western Bay Museum explores NZ Post Office history with vintage phones

Carly Vevers checks out Echoes of Exchange with Geoff Willacy in the background. Photo / Rebecca Mauger

Chunky old phones with circular dials may evoke a sense of nostalgia for many visitors to Western Bay Museum’s Echoes of Exchange exhibition.

For others, it will be the first time they’ve seen a phone that can’t fit in their back pocket.

Dialling back the clock even further, some may recall the experience of sharing a phone system with neighbours.

“Can you imagine the days when you had to pick up and say “working” or “party line?” said private collector Geoff Willacy.

Willacy, who has a passion for Tauranga history, loaned some Post Office artifacts to the Echoes of Exchange exhibition which is on at Western Bay Museum until the end of the year.

The exhibition features items that shaped communications in the 20th Century and illustrates the evolution of its technology throughout the years. The exhibition is also a homage to the now-defunct Post Office of New Zealand.

“I recognised in the 1980s that the Post Office was in [a] serious state of demise so I just quietly started collecting a lot of things and it might have got a little out of hand. From the 1990s I started being asked to talk to small groups about Post Office history ... the older generation have a real rapport with it.”

The old ways of communicating surprise visiting school groups. Photo / Rebecca Mauger

The Post Office was the centre of every town, Willacy said, and it was more than just a savings bank and mail collection.

“There was so many things the Post Office did that people don’t realise such as gun licences, hunting licences, gold mining licences and home loans.”

Other services included paying bills and it was the place for birth, death, and marriage registration. It was also quite the social hub for small towns.

Willacy said if you got 20 to 30 seniors together “you’ll find at least one of them used to work at the Post Office”.

Carly Vevers, from Tauranga, is working on her museum master’s degree and curated Echoes of Exchanges. She connected with Willacy to include the Post Office element.

“Geoff loaned us a lot of the objects that we would never have been able to access and it just broadens the ability to tell a story really well,” she said.

Vevers often hosted school tours at the exhibition. It was the first time many of them had seen some of the communication artefacts and equipment from Post Office days, Vevers said.

Students loved hearing stories from the past, she said, especially about how people connected in the 20th Century.

“It just seems outrageous to them that at one stage your neighbours could listen in to your calls,” she said.

Geoff and Carly in front of the telephone exchange. Photo / Rebecca Mauger

The communication relics included various telephone styles. There’s a working telephone exchange and children could pick up and be transferred to another line. One of the switchboards had all the names of the women who used to work on it carved into the back of it, Vevers said.

Museum manager Paula Gaelic said Echoes of Exchange has been an excellent exhibition in terms of targeting and capturing the interest of all ages.