A new game is encouraging Australians to rediscover forgotten payphones by turning them into digital treasure hunts, rewarding users with points and voicemail messages simply for making a call. The project, called PayphoneGo, has already drawn 40 players across the country since its launch in April, with one participant – known only as GippslandGuardian – having visited 106 payphones and left poetic descriptions of the scenes around them.
The game: how PayphoneGo works
PayphoneGo was created by Kris Norris, a 19-year-old student based in Brisbane. The premise is straightforward: each player is assigned a nine-digit identification number, which they enter after calling the website’s number from a payphone. Norris has connected the numbers of every payphone in Australia on her backend, so when a player calls in with their ID, the system automatically awards points.
The first person to call from a given payphone receives 20 points and can leave a voicemail that is uploaded to the website and played to subsequent visitors. The second caller gets ten points, after which the reward drops to five and then one. The voicemails, which can be heard by later players, often capture the atmosphere of the moment – a bird, a passer‑by, a stray observation. “There are people talking about their favourite local areas, people talking about what they can see. Sometimes people are venting. People are singing,” Norris said.
Norris said she created the game to encourage people to “go out into the community, out into the world and explore”. She added: “It’s based on the idea of going back to [the] old internet: no ads, no tracking, so few cookies. I hate how commercialised and corporate the internet has become. I want to be able to make things just for the sake of having things for people to play. And payphones are a vital public service, but most people will just pass them, and ignore them.”
A forgotten network: the state of Australia’s payphones
Australia still has about 14,000 payphones, spread from the Oodnadatta Track to Lord Howe Island. That number is a fraction of the peak of 80,000 in the 1990s. Since mid‑2021, all standard national and mobile calls from Telstra payphones have been free – a move the telecommunications giant said would help protect vulnerable Australians. Telstra’s payphone product owner, Pete Manwaring, said more than 100 million calls had been made since fees were scrapped and that usage had tripled. In Sydney alone, which has 1,918 payphones, 4 million calls were made in the past year. About 37% of those calls go to emergency services, helplines and government support numbers – including triple zero or crisis lines – while another 33% go to utilities.
Telstra is required under Australia’s universal service guarantee (USG) to provide reasonable access to public payphones, regardless of profitability. About 4,000 of the remaining booths also offer free wifi, which the company funds through advertising revenue. The USG also allows Telstra to place phones in high‑traffic areas without normal planning controls, a practice that sparked a backlash from some councils. In 2019, a coalition successfully took Telstra to court over a proposal for nearly three‑metre‑tall phone booths.
Associate Professor Mark Gregory, from RMIT’s school of engineering, noted that a few years ago there were 20,000 payphones – 40% more than today. He argued that the lost 6,000 should be reinstalled and that all payphones should offer free wifi. “The cost for the upkeep of payphones isn’t huge, and there is a trade‑off because, of course, there’s the advertising and marketing opportunity,” he said. “The universal service guarantee is one of the few things that sets Australia aside from other nations in terms of telecommunications. We need to stand up and fight for it.” Gregory warned that there are now “black spots” without access to a payphone, which “ultimately means that people can’t contact triple zero when they need to. To me, a payphone means safety. They’re so important for people of low socioeconomic means and for people with disabilities, children and the elderly.”
Payphones have also attracted a cult following online beyond PayphoneGo. More than 1,000 users are registered to play Payphone Tag, a “real‑world territory capture game” created by independent developer Alex Allchin that allows players to build competitive maps. Separately, an Australian cybersecurity expert has created an interactive map of every payphone in the country, complete with features and jurisdictional breakdowns.
One player’s journey: 50 payphones in a day
The experience of playing PayphoneGo reveals a hidden side of urban life. One journalist, attempting to visit 50 payphones across Sydney in a single day, described the routine vividly. The first payphone was around the corner from her house – on a walk she took every day with her dog – yet she had never noticed it. Another was covered in curious rubbish: an old vape, a half‑drunk Dare iced coffee, a crushed Coke can. At a third she found a dirty high chair, a broken‑off manicured nail and a cigarette butt. “Each payphone is an Easter egg: what will it hold? What condition will it be in? What hidden stairwell will it be tucked behind?” she wrote. One payphone had its cord dangling off the hook and a large splatter of vomit being eaten by pigeons on the ground.
At one point she had to wait because someone was using the payphone to talk to an actual person – a first she had never queued for a payphone before. She was disappointed when she reached a string of payphones in Marrickville that had already been visited, making it impossible to leave a message, and found herself sighing dramatically when a payphone was out of order.
After eight and a half hours and 22,000 steps, she reached payphone number 50 – and it was in order. “That beautiful dial tone,” she muttered, beaming. Into the receiver she said: “I don’t really know what to do with my life now. Thank you so much for this opportunity.”
Norris understands the obsession. “My favourite thing to do is just sit on the website and refresh and listen to the new messages coming in,” she said.
