Remembering The Speaking Clock (The Naked City)

‘Remembering the Speaking Clock’ is the latest column (December 16, 2024) from Coffin Ed‘s The Naked City column – featured exclusively on City Hub.

The National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) do a wonderful job in preserving a vital part of Australia’s history and cultural identity. Their vast audiovisual archive runs from the late 1800s to the present day and is constantly being updated.

Today, the collection has expanded to include contextual materials such as costumes, scripts, props, photographs and various promotional materials. Each year the archive inducts a number of historically and culturally significant sounds into their ‘Sounds Of Australia’ collection.

In previous years they have anointed a heap of pop songs including Daddy Cool’s ‘Eagle Rock’, the Saints ‘I’m Stranded’ and who could forget Sister Janet Mead’s ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ (I still own the 12” disco remix!). It’s not all top forty of course and there is a sizeable collection of everything from animal sounds to parliamentary speeches (the two often indistinguishable).

This year Sounds Of Australia added the very atmospheric ‘Dr Who Theme’, composed by Rod Grainer, Tina Arena’s ‘Chains’ and the 1968 Victoria Bitter advert with the voice of John Meillon. It seems like it’s taken years for an acknowledgement but the NFSA has finally included the legendary ‘speaking clock’ and its long time voice over George Gow.

These days you can wait up to twenty minutes to speak to some government departments and financial institutions over the phone.

Australia’s beloved Speaking Clock

Yet prior to 1953 you could actually ring a number and be connected almost immediately to a live operator who would tell you the correct time of day or night, read off a standard large clock.

In what sounds almost Pythonesque a team of operators, mainly women, would take shifts to fulfil this service – possibly the most intense form of psychological job boredom known to womenkind!

That all changed when the PMG at the time introduced an automated recorded service with the voice of George Gow who announced the time “at the third stroke” with a series of beeps that followed.

The service was immensely popular with millions of calls a year, with some Australians still believing it was a live human reading the clock like the poor women beforehand. George’s dulcet tones were replaced in 1990 by ABC broadcaster Richard Peach and spoilsports Telstra finally pulled the plug on the service in September of 2019.

Think of all the lonely people who just wanted to hear the comfort of a human voice and rang up to get the time. It was George, albeit a recording, who held the gig for some 36 years and we salute you.

Can you still ring the speaking clock, to hear the time (and George) today?

Well yes, thanks to musician Ryan Munro from the Cat Empire who saw the need to preserve the remarkable speaking clock and managed to record the voice of George, just before the service was cut off.

Now thanks to another good guy Shaune Wing you can actually ring 8403 1194 in Sydney and Melbourne and hear the beautiful voice of George reading the time. Who needs a smart watch?

There are of course many classic Australian sounds that the NFSA would no doubt love to add to their extensive archive. Here are just a couple of suggestions, albeit slightly offbeat, that the NFSA might consider for next year’s induction.

THE FIRST F-BOMB ON AUSTRALIAN RADIO

These days the potty mouthed Gordon Ramsay racks up more F-bombs on a TV program than the Japanese dropped on Pearl Harbor – if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor.

Just who first muttered the once forbidden four letter word on Australian radio is open to conjecture but my records show it was the ABC’s Double J, back in 1975 when it originally commenced broadcasting.

The first track they ever played was Skyhooks’ ‘You Only Love Me Cos I’m Good In Bed’, banned at the time on most commercial stations.

Not long after an announcer supposedly knocked the pick up arm off the record being played and after a horrible distorted squeak, came back with “with “Gee, I f”***d that up, didn’t I?”.

THE IMMORTAL WORDS OF MARYANNE – CONCIERGE AT THE ADMIRAL BENBOW INN

In 1986 former Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser wandered into the foyer of the Admiral Benbow Inn in Memphis in the USA, wearing nothing but a towel.

It was a hotel frequented by drug dealers and prostitutes and Fraser had no recollection whatsoever as to how he had arrived there.

A concierge at the time, known only as Maryanne received considerable coverage on both US, world and Australian media with her reference to Mal’s cladding at the time.

“They’re not real big,’ she said of the towels. ‘And I do remember he was fairly big man.”

Forget about Fraser telling everybody that “life wasn’t meant to be easy”, Maryanne’s comment is a helluva lot sexier and needs to be archived forever!

MEATLOAF AT THE 2011 AFL GRAND FINAL

‘Meatloaf’ you exclaim, ‘he’s not an Aussie so why include him?’

His disastrous, out of tune, performance at the MCG was at a time when Australia still pandered heavily to American culture.

Rather than engage a local singer or band, we just had to have the big name US entertainers to make the event special – a has-been or not.

With a little research the NFSA could even include the sound of the crowd groaning at this shameful cultural cringe.