Central Exchange
From Engineering Heritage Western Australia
Central Exchange in Murray St Perth was the first automatic telephone exchange in Western Australia. It replaced a manual exchange which was housed in the GPO (Treasury Buildings), and the exchange was cut over on 26 September 1914 with 3200 subscribers.
At the time, the Perth Central Exchange was the biggest in Australia, the first to service a central business district and installed only two years after Geelong (the first public automatic exchange in Australia).
Central continued to serve a substantial part of the Perth CBD for over seventy years. It was finally decommissioned in 1987 and the building eventually on-sold. It is now used as business offices but externally appears almost the same as it did a century ago.
