The Telephone

The copper telephone lines are gone, but the past refuses to hang up.

In the centre of the long hallway of an old Queensland farmhouse, a black Bakelite telephone sits on a purpose-built timber table, a silent witness to seventy years of family history.

It is more than a communication device; it is the “keeper of family stories,” a vessel that has carried the echoes of new births, wedding plans, and the desperate warnings of approaching bushfires.

But the phone has been disconnected for decades, its copper service long removed.

Yet, in the eerie stillness of the moonlit hallway, the heavy brass bells begin a sharp, insistent trill that refuses to be ignored. When 92-year-old Matilda Simmons reaches for the heavy handset, she doesn’t hear a dial tone. Against every law of reason, she hears voices from another lifetime calling from the void.

Through the crackling silence of a dead line, the past begins to bleed into the present:

The calm, professional voice of a police officer delivering news from forty-eight years ago.

The urgent, desperate cries of her son, Lindsay, who was lost to the sea decades earlier.

The shattering ring that once announced her daughter Alison would never return from Thailand.

As her sister Kathleen descends into the fog of Alzheimer’s, she becomes obsessed with the instrument, whispering that the telephone is “trying to tell her something”.

Is the device a bridge to the ghosts of Girraween, or is it a witness finally ready to surrender the truth about the murders and espionage buried beneath the floorboards?.

The past is on the line. Will you answer the call?

THIS IS A REAL SAGA!