As smartphones swallow childhood, a growing movement of parents is reinstalling landlines, hoping an old-school corded rotary phone can restore patience and connection.
The phone rings. Who might be calling? Will it be for me? In the age of personal devices, it's a redundant question — but not at Sally Faughey's house. Sally's children jump up excitedly when the phone rings.
"They're diving for it like we did in the '90s," Sally says.
When Sally and her husband moved into their house in Sydney, they found an old green rotary dial phone in the garage. They joked about installing it. Three children and one iPad addiction later they did.
For Sally, the phone is more than a means to communicate with the world outside. It has become a symbol of what it means to be a family: "We want the kids to know that's the central family line. We all don't need to have our own phone numbers and be sitting across from each other not connecting."
Sally is one of six siblings who grew up arguing over who needed the phone. "We used to fight to the death over who could answer it," she says. "Then you'd pick it up and it wouldn't even be for you." In hindsight, the landline was beautiful, she adds. "It was like having a pet, you've got a reason to connect. You're all circling around the same port of communication, not just coming home and everyone just goes to their own space on their own."
In Australia, the most recent data shows around a third of the population has a landline. A decade ago, it was two-thirds. As we slide further into the digital age, Sally isn't the only one questioning what was lost when we said goodbye to the landline. A Telstra executive recently penned an ode to the landline, a US company is now selling wi-fi "landlines" for children, and one mother’s post about installing a landline went viral.
In the wake of the Optus outages, growing concern about the impact of smartphones and the internet on children and Gen Z analogue nostalgia, the landline, which turns 150 next year, is having a moment.
A cord-twirling comeback
The phone rings. Sally's 10-year-old runs into the hallway to where the phone sits on a slim table, pulls up a stool that's been placed there for long, cord-twirling chats, and answers: "Hi… just one sec, I'll ask mum."
Hearing that simple conversation brings so much joy, Sally says. "That is pure organic childhood right there."
It's also a relief. Her children contacting their friends without needing Sally to be the conduit is one less thing to worry about: "In school holidays where parents are trying to work, organise play dates, then all of a sudden that kid wants to FaceTime their friend or Nana wants to FaceTime. It's so overwhelming."
Sally's journey back to the landline began when her eldest child received an iPad in Year 3 at their school's request. "Within six months we completely saw our child change personality and become obsessed with Messenger Kids and Roblox," she says.
Since then, Sally has limited her children's access to screens: no smartphones, no iPads outside of school, no television. Sally believes "smartphones are stealing our kids' childhood". (Although she compromised and her eldest was given a smartwatch at the start of high school to communicate with friends.)
As Sally's two younger children grew, she looked for screen-free ways for them to contact their friends. So, in August her husband connected a landline. (Not the dusty one from the garage — turns out it didn't work.)
But in 2025 convincing people to call a landline isn't easy. We're knee-deep in mobile phones and have been for decades. There are now more mobile phone subscriptions in use than people on the planet.
Two mothers from regional Victoria who installed landlines so their children could easily phone triple-0 in emergencies say they'd like the phone to be used day-to-day, but it hasn't happened. Tizzie Hall installed a landline years ago after her toddler went missing on their property. When Tizzie and her husband went to call for help, they realised their mobiles were flat (luckily, they found him safe and sound).
Tizzie's children don't have smartphones, and she would like them to use the landline but rebuilding the habit hasn't worked for her family. Her children prefer to text their friends because it's quicker, and they can organise social events by running group polls, she says.
Sally says grandparents love calling the landline, but it's taken a lot of coordinating with other parents to get their children to call in. She's even used her own smartphone to contact another parent to organise a call: "I've said to another mum, 'Ohh, can you get so-and-so to call my child if they're available, they just want to have a quick chat'."
Sally is a member of the Heads Up Alliance, an advocacy group with the motto "childhood is precious" that supports parents who want to delay their children's access to social media and smartphones. The group played a big part in lobbying the NSW government for a public-school phone ban. Sally has told her local Heads Up network that if anyone would like to install a landline for their children her tech-savvy electrician husband will help them install it. So far, there haven't been any takers.
The 'retro bubble' in a digital childhood
In the US, one Portland mother managed to convince enough families to install landlines that they created a "retro bubble" for their children. Parents in the network told The Atlantic their children were not only smartphone free, they were becoming confident communicators. According to these parents: "The dumbest phone is parenting genius."
Dany Elachi, the founder of Heads Up Alliance, says the Atlantic article has inspired Australian parents. One mother in his network said she'd gifted landlines to her children's friends to start a hub. And Dany says Santa might be bringing his children one this Christmas.
"We see it as a wonderful alternative to the smartphone," he says. "Children are speaking, it's not just communicating through emojis and huge group chats. It's a bit more personal. They get the opportunity to develop their communication skills."
As writer Julia Cho describes, her landline was a shared family space that required carefully honed communication skills: "With practice, I was capable of addressing everyone from a telemarketer to my mother's boss to my older brother's friend — not to mention any relative who happened to call. Beyond developing conversational skills, the family phone asked its users to be patient and participate in one another's lives."
Parents aren't the only ones embracing landlines. So are Gen Zs longing for respite from their smartphones. Maybe they want to talk in one place, or maybe they just love the aesthetic. "It's so cute and romantic," one 27-year-old landline owner told The Guardian. "It's very Sex and the City, which is why we started doing it. I really loathe cell phones, because everyone cancels at the last minute these days through text, which I find so absurd."
Groups like Heads Up Alliance usually recommend providing children with "dumb" or "retro" phones which limit functionality to calls and texts (like the old flip phones). But landlines remove the temptation to send a text — something historian Barbara Keys has argued is robbing us of our humanity: "The voice is one of our most powerful instruments, designed not only to communicate but also to build intimacy." (Although others might argue our humanity can also be found in an eggplant emoji or a gif of Homer Simpson backing into a hedge.) But landlines are tethered to the wall, usually in communal parts of the home, and this makes them unique.
A little more conversation
Outside her office, Bronwyn File can see what she calls "the resurrection of play and interaction". The assistant principal at The Armidale School in regional NSW has overseen a smartphone-free trial in the school's junior boarding house. The school had banned smartphones during school hours, but this year it trialled only permitting junior boarders "dumb phones" after hours. "It's remarkable, the change, the students have a far greater depth of understanding of each other, the staff feel like they know the kids better and the house is full of conversation, more creative and there's constant play." Next year, the school will extend the ban into Year 8.
The school hasn't taken the leap of returning landlines to the boarding house. Bronwyn remembers the chaos that existed when she was a boarder in the time before mobile phones when 80 girls shared two landlines. "You would have to line up, you got five minutes to ring your parents and everybody listened," she laughs.
But she sees the appeal of landlines in the home. "I would be on the phone as a young person, and my mum would say 'I can't believe you said that', or 'what are you talking about?'," she says. "You would actually then have a follow up [with your parents]. It would bring up really rich conversations."
With mobiles, even "dumb phones", children can speak to anyone, anytime without supervision. (Although children aged six to 13 were most likely to use their mobile phones to play games, according to research by the Australian Media and Communications Authority.)
Of course, other parents and children say smartphones and social media have improved their lives, enhanced their ability to connect with others and express themselves creatively. And many parents give their children phones to help keep them safe or to use in emergencies. One mother, who "doesn't love" her teenage daughter having social media, says she does like to be able to check her whereabouts when she's out. "She has inattentive ADHD, so I just like to be able to make sure she's safe," she told ABC.
The myth of emergency backup
The phone rings. Nobody answers. There's no other way to connect to the world that exists beyond the vast, blue horizon.
From her farm near Coonamble in north-central NSW Sharon Single says when connectivity fails the feeling of isolation is daunting. In regional and remote Australia, the landline is seen as so vital its existence is guaranteed under federal legislation. (Writer Helen Townsend calls it "a sacred object" in her story about a homesick girl calling her family in regional Australia at Christmas.)
But even in the bush, times have changed.
Sharon doesn't have a landline. Her family relies on Sky Muster — satellite internet service — mobile coverage and UFS radio for communicating across their 4000-hectare mixed-cropping farm. However, she's considering installing a landline now that she's a mother to three young children. "If something were to happen to me while I'm home with the kids alone, it would be quite difficult unless I was able to explain to my 5-year-old how to actually get through the locks on my phone to ring 000 on a mobile," she says. "That's assuming it's accessible to her because we're all leaving mobile phones all over the shop." Unlike most Australians, Sharon's children can't run out into the street and flag a neighbour or a passing car to ask for help.
Sharon volunteers for BIRRR (Better Internet for Rural, Regional and Remote Australia) — a group that lobbies for improvements to regional connectivity and supports people to understand their rights when it comes to rural telecommunications. BIRRR also acts as an informal tech-support hub. So, when Sharon talks about a landline, she knows more than most about the technical advancements since Alexander James Bell made history in March 1876 by calling his assistant by phone and telling him: "Mr Watson come here — I want to see you."
The landline Sharon is considering installing is a VoIP (Voice Over Internet Provider) via satellite — and that's because the old copper phone network is not what it once was. In fact, in many parts of Australia it's being decommissioned and the NBN is rolling out a predominantly fibre network.
The 'landline' is a myth
When Australia laid its copper network "the cables were rated to have a 50-year life," telecommunications expert Mark Gregory says. "So, we've ended up using other cables in some cases for more than 80 years," says Mark, an associate professor School of Engineering at RMIT University. "One of the reasons that we're decommissioning it is its age, the cost of maintenance, and of course the ability for optic fibre to carry much higher volumes of data, and data is really one of the key things that consumers want today."
Reconnecting a landline for most Australians will mean a VoIP service which operates via an NBN provider. The landline as an analogue back-up to our digital lives is mostly now a myth.
But Mark says a landline could still be useful to dial 000 in an emergency. "The best approach to providing reliability to connect to 000 is to mix and match your connectivity. So, if you have mobile with one provider, you might have NBN with a different provider and you might have your landline with a different provider again." Mark says the two ports on an NBN modem can be allocated to different providers: "You can get fibre broadband from one provider, and you can get your telephone over the NBN from a different provider." Mixing and matching connectivity would help in the case of network outages, like those experienced by Optus customers in recent years, Mark says.
Unlike the old copper network, VoIP landlines won't work in a power outage. But Mark suggests people could consider purchasing battery back-ups for their NBN service. (Mark adds that the original NBN rollout included a requirement for batteries to be installed in premises but that was cancelled by the then-Coalition government in 2013.)
You might wonder why, in a power outage, you wouldn't simply rely on a mobile phone? But in Australia most mobile phone towers are privately operated and they're not legislated to have to provide back-up power, Mark adds. A DIY battery hack wouldn't protect from an NBN outage: "Then of course your landline wouldn't work irrespective of who you're connecting to because you've got an infrastructure outage."
Nostalgia? Or something more
A confused child stares at a rotary phone at the National Communications Museum, which opened in a former telephone exchange building in Melbourne last year. Their grandparent explains to them how it's used. "It's sort of this lovely moment, they almost get a bit of their own tech cred back," says Emily Siddons, the museum's co-CEO and artistic director.
Then the child wonders: how did you go out and meet people? "I've overheard these lovely sentiments of people saying, 'well, you had to make a plan, and you had to stick with it, and you had to actually show up'," Emily says.
The museum is much more than old telephones. It aims to explore our relationship with technologies, past, present and future. But the landline phones connected to each other around the museum are a hit.
People are invited to pick them up, chose a number from a list, and dial it. Without warning a phone in a different part of the museum starts ringing. A stranger might pick it up. Or children run through the exhibits trying to find the phone that's ringing. The phones are so popular that Emily says the staff joke about why they're investing so much time and money into complex installations: "Half the time we're going 'should we just rig up more phones'."
Maybe the phones are popular because of the novelty factor, Emily says. Or maybe in an era of information overload their simplicity is joyful, she adds.
The museum is "riding a wave of Millennial/Gen X nostalgia" where people are loving the dumb technology of the '90s, Emily says.
"There's definitely an enthusiasm for it, whether it would take over or replace technologies in their lives permanently, I'm not convinced, but I definitely think that people are feeling out of control with the current pace of technological change and are looking for more meaningful ways to connect with each other," she adds.
Whether the landline is embraced by another generation remains to be seen. But for the Millennial and Gen X parents reviving it for their children, sharing a "home phone" might be one small antidote to a world that seems darker and more complex than their own childhoods.
"Childhood should be a time of play, a time of getting out in the sunshine and exercising with friends in the neighbourhood. It should be a time where you can look up at the clouds," Dany Elachi says.
If the return of the landline succeeds, childhood might also mean spending five hours on the phone to your friend until you're forced to hang up because your mother is threatening to cut the cord.
Credits
Words:
Editing: Catherine Taylor
Illustrations:
