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AS - CAV 1 to 47 - AS-CAV 48-A to 91 - AS-CAV 92 to 127 - AS-CAV 128 to 180 - AS-CAV 181 to 233 - AS-CAV 234 to 281 - AS-CAV 282 to 323 - AS-CAV 324-A to 420 - AS-CAV 421 to 469 - AS-CAV 470 to 486 - AS-CAV 488-A to 494-E AS-CAV 495 to 541 -AS-CAV 542 to 588 - AS-CAV 589 to 647 - AS-CAV 648 to 700 -  CAV Exhibits 701 to 756 AS-CAV 765-A to 789 - AS-CAV 790 to 818 - AS-CAV 819 to 843 - AS-CAV-923 to 946  AS-CAV 1150 to 1169 - AS-CAV 1069 to 1102 - AS-CAV 1103 to 1132 AS-CAV-1002 to 1019 - AS-CAV-996 to 1001

Here was my dream overlooking the southern ocean  

The Hut That Broke the Dream: A Sad Story of Hope, Loss, and Silence

What began as a hopeful dream—a retreat into nature, a new venture built on decades of hospitality experience—swiftly unravelled into a thirty-year nightmare. It started with one critical misstep: I failed to scrutinise the reliability of the phone service that coursed through a dilapidated, unmanned hut at Cape Bridgewater. This ageing switching station, tethered to a crumbling telephone exchange 20 kilometres away, cast a long, invisible shadow over my plans.

In a moment of bold optimism, I sold our cherished Melbourne home—a place rich with memories and warmth. With the proceeds, I accessed my early retirement benefits and set out to build something meaningful: a children’s holiday camp. My background in hospitality, forged over decades at sea and in elite kitchens, gave me confidence. I believed this new chapter would be transformative.

At just 15, I had stepped aboard English passenger-cargo ships as a steward. The salty air, the camaraderie, the rhythm of ship life—it shaped me. In 1963, I jumped ship in Melbourne and began my culinary journey. From assistant chef in prestigious hotels to private butler in Brighton, Kew, and Toorak, I learned the art of service. I worked with the founders of Spotless Catering, managed Rob’s Carousel Restaurant at Albert Park Lake, and revived a licensed motel hotel from receivership. I knew hospitality. I knew hard work.
By 1987, at age 44, I was ready. I transformed a modest school camp into a vibrant enterprise. I visited nearly 150 schools, distributed 2,000 full-color brochures, and launched a promotional tour across South Australia. I poured my heart into it. But the phone didn’t ring.

We waited. We hoped. But the response rate was less than 1%. Parents and educators reported hearing a recorded voice announcement: “The number you have called is not connected or has been changed…” Confused, frustrated, they gave up. We replaced the answering machines, checked the lines, and still the complaints continued. Many callers reported encountering an engaged signal. Others believed we didn’t care.

The silence was deafening. It wasn’t just a technical failure—it was the slow erosion of a dream. My marriage, already strained by the pressures of the venture, collapsed within eighteen months. The camp faltered. The joy I had hoped to create for children turned into a quiet, aching void.

And yet, I had endured worse. I had walked the wharves of Red China in 1967, flanked by two stoic Red Guards, accused of espionage. I had served drinks in elegant homes while dodging metaphorical bullets. I had worked through quiet weeks and chaotic nights. But nothing prepared me for the silence of a phone that should have rung.
Two years later, I returned to the sea, joining the Australian Merchant Navy as a chef. I cooked aboard cargo ships, expanding my repertoire, finding solace in the rhythm of waves. But the pain of Cape Bridgewater lingered.

In 1969, I married Faye. We built a life together. I juggled freelance catering, tugboat work, and studies in hotel management. I guided a distressed motel out of receivership. I believed in second chances. But Cape Bridgewater offered none.

The unanswered calls, the broken line, the unmanned hut—they weren’t just technical faults. They were the silent assassins of a dream. They stole my business, my marriage, and years of peace. And Telstra, whose infrastructure failed me, would later become the focus of a national scandal. But in 1988, I was just a man trying to build something good.
This is not just a story of failure. It is a story of resilience. Of a life lived in service, undone by silence, of a man who gave everything, only to be met with a disconnected line.

Would you like this formatted as a chapter in your memoir, paired with archival photos or audio narration? I can also help you build a visual exhibit showing the camp brochures, school outreach records, and the haunting RVA messages that defined this tragedy.

Disconnected: A Sad Story of Dreams Undone by Telstra’s Silence

In 1994, I undertook a meticulous investigation into the complex web of paperwork surrounding the persistent phone service failures that had plagued our business. Armed with the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, I unearthed a trove of documents—each one a thread in the unravelling tapestry of our dream. Among them, one internal Telstra memo struck me like a blow to the chest. It read: “This message tends to give the caller the impression that the business they are calling has ceased trading, and they should try another trader.”

That single sentence explained everything. Our phones weren’t just faulty—they were actively sabotaging our livelihood. Potential customers were being turned away by misleading Recorded Voice Announcements (RVAs), left to assume we had shut down. The damage was incalculable.

Another document revealed Telstra’s own acknowledgement that our RVA messages required urgent review. But the review never came. Instead, I uncovered a pattern of inappropriate, misleading messages that had been allowed to persist—messages that strangled our ability to communicate, to grow, to survive.

As I pieced together the evidence, I learned that the camp’s previous owner had fought the same battle. He had lodged countless complaints about Telstra’s subpar service, only to be met with silence. His struggle had been buried, just like ours was being buried now.

My pursuit of justice had begun in 1988, but it was the FOI process that gave me the ammunition to fight back. One document stood out above all: Telstra Confidential: Difficult Network Faults — PCM Multiplex Report. Under section 5.5, it names our business directly—Portland – Cape Bridgewater Holiday Camp. Telstra had been aware of the faults since 1987. They had done nothing.

The impact rippled beyond our camp. Our neighbour Harry often spoke of his daughter’s frustration trying to call from Colac. Fred, a longtime local and former owner of Tom the Cheap grocery chain, shared his own tales of Telstra’s failures. “But what can you expect from Telstra when we’re in the bush?” he said, resignation in his voice. I had expected better. I had built a dream on the promise of better.

We rallied the community. We asked neighbours and fellow business owners to write to Telstra to share their stories. But the habit of relying on phone calls for immediate answers was hard to break. And our phones were still broken.

Bookings dwindled. Hope faded. I stood at a crossroads, staring down the decision to move permanently to Cape Bridgewater. I had sold our family home to pursue this dream with Faye. What was meant to be a joyful new chapter had become a slow descent into frustration and despair.

Doubt crept in. I questioned everything. I had envisioned a thriving camp, with laughter echoing through the trees, as children discovered nature and families reconnected. Instead, I found myself channelling a bitter, bewildered Basil Fawlty—trapped in a farce, shouting into a void, waiting for a phone to ring that never would.

This wasn’t just a technical failure. It was a betrayal. A dream undone by silence. A life rerouted by a system that refused to listen.

But it didn’t listen. It grew.

People trying to reach us kept hearing that same dead message, as if the phone system itself had decided we no longer existed. I didn’t know then that inside Telstra’s files — the ones I wouldn’t see until 1994 — someone had already written the truth in a single chilling sentence: this message tends to give the caller the impression that the business they are calling has ceased trading, and they should try another trader.

If I’d read that line in 1989, I think something inside me would have snapped clean through.

Back then, all I had were questions. Why were callers being told we were disconnected? Why did the faults always happen when we needed the phones most? Why did every technician who came out to the camp look at me with that same weary expression, as if I were the problem, not the line?

“No fault found.” I heard it so many times it became a kind of mantra — a chant used to keep me in my place.

Meanwhile, the business was slipping through my fingers. We were selling shares just to keep the lights on. Fifteen months after taking over, we were already liquidating assets. I felt like a man watching his own house burn down while the fire brigade stood on the lawn, insisting they couldn’t see any flames.

The pressure seeped into everything — the marriage, the finances, the way I slept, the way I breathed. When I drove to Melbourne for a marketing push, desperate to pull in bookings, I checked the camp’s messages from a payphone, hoping for a spark of good news. Instead, that same cold voice told me the number was not connected. On the way home, I tried again from a phone box outside Geelong. This time, the line was engaged. I clung to that tiny flicker of hope — maybe someone was leaving a message — only to find the answering machine empty when I walked through the door.

How many calls had we lost? How many chances to survive had been quietly erased by a machine?

The strain finally broke something in me. By late October 1989, my twenty-year marriage ended. I was already on medication for stress, and that afternoon I added Scotch to the mix and retreated to a cabin, trying to shut out the world. Faye, frightened for me, called the police. They broke down the door and hauled me to the hospital. I’ll always be grateful to the doctors who looked me in the eye and told me I wasn’t losing my mind. They sent me home the next day, but the damage was done. Margaret and Jack, dear friends from Melbourne, stepped in, and Margaret came to stay with me. I didn’t know it then, but I was about to need her more than ever.

When we returned to the camp, the place felt abandoned. Doors left open. Food is thawing on the counters. Items missing. And the diary sitting on the desk, calmly informing me that seventy students from Monivae Catholic College were arriving in two days. I stood there, hollowed out, wondering how much more could possibly go wrong. If Margaret hadn’t been there, I would have collapsed under the weight of it.

The week that followed was a blur of exhaustion, broken hot water systems, frantic shopping, and the quiet terror of knowing I was barely holding myself together. Yet somehow, the Monivae group returned year after year, as if they sensed the battle I was fighting beneath the surface.

But the phones — always the phones — continued their quiet sabotage. I began keeping a log, writing down every fault, every complaint, every name and number. It was the only way to stay sane. One day, the office phone was dead, so I tested it from the coin phone in the dining room. The RVA message played. The machine swallowed my coins. Five minutes later, I tried again. This time, the office phone was “engaged.” It wasn’t. I was standing right beside it.

It felt personal by then. As if the system itself were toying with me.

By 1990, I was paying staff with money I didn’t have, sinking deeper into debt, and fighting legal battles I couldn’t afford. When Karen entered my life, she brought a kind of light I hadn’t felt in years. She believed in me — believed in the camp — enough to mortgage her house to keep us afloat. For a moment, it felt like the tide might finally turn.

And then, in August 1991, a Telstra employee quietly admitted the truth: the faults were real. He wouldn’t give his name. Wouldn’t say more than a few sentences. But it was enough to keep me standing. The new exchange was coming. The nightmare might finally end.

Except it didn’t. The new exchange went in, and the faults got worse.

More RVAs. More deadlines. More customers are hearing that we didn’t exist.

And Telstra’s answer never changed: “No fault found.”

By 1992, even charity work was being strangled by the phone faults. Sister Maureen Burke tried for a week to reach us to organise a camp for underprivileged children. After seven days of deadlines and false signals, she drove 3½ hours to speak to us in person. When she arrived, Karen was in tears after yet another abusive call from someone who couldn’t get through.

The system wasn’t just failing us — it was turning people against us.

And that was when I understood, deep in my bones, that this wasn’t random. It wasn’t rural neglect. It wasn’t incompetence.

It was something far more deliberate, far more insidious — a slow erasure carried out by machines, protected by silence, and paid for with the pieces of my life.

As time went on, call 'drop-outs' added to our problems when the line just went dead in the middle of a call. If the caller hadn't yet given us contact information and didn't ring back, we lost that contact. Between 19 April 1988 and 10 January 1989, Telstra logged nine separate complaints from me about the phone service plus several letters of complaint. A typical response to my 1100 call (the number you called when there was a problem) was a promise to check the line. A technician was sent out on rare occasions, whose response was inevitable 'No fault found' while my problems continued unabated.

Eventually, we discovered that the business's previous owner had endured the same problems and had complained equally unsuccessfully about them. In 1988, when I was beginning to marshal my case against Telstra, I obtained several documents through the Freedom of Information Act (FOI). According to a document headed 'Telstra Confidential: Difficult Network Faults — PCM Multiplex Report', with a sub-heading '5.5 Portland — Cape Bridgewater Holiday Camp', Telstra was aware of the faults in early 1987.

Harry, our next-door neighbour, sympathised; his daughter, ringing from Colac, often complained about how difficult it was to get through to her parents. Fred, another local and once the owner of Tom the Cheap grocery chain, suffered from similar problems to ours for many years. He commiserated, saying, 'But what can you expect from Telstra when we're in the bush?' Well, I expected better than this, and certainly, we were promised better than this.

We encouraged people to write, but the telephone culture was endemic. People wanted an immediate response. As bookings dwindled instead of increasing, I began to feel I hadn't properly researched the pros and cons before moving to Cape Bridgewater.  I was beginning to question what I had done, asking Faye to agree to sell the family home so that I could satisfy my ambition to run my own business. It was not the fun I had anticipated. I was operating in a state of constant anger, a very unamusing Basil Fawlty.

We went touring South Australia to sell the concept of our Camp through the Wimmera area, but responses were few. Was it the phone to blame? How could we be sure? The uncertainty itself added to the stress.

Sometimes the culprit was blindingly obvious. On a shopping expedition to Portland, 20 kilometres away, I discovered I had left the meat order list behind. I phoned home from a public phone box, only to get a recorded message telling me the number was not connected! I phoned again to hear the same message. Telstra's fault centre said they would look into the matter, so I went about the rest of the shopping, leaving the meat order to last. Finally, I phoned the Camp again, and this time the phone was engaged. I decided to buy what I could remember from the list and hope for the best; however, I was not surprised when I got home to learn the phone had not rung once while I had been out.

Anyone who uses a telephone has at some time reached a recorded voice announcement (known within the industry as RVA): 'The number you have called is not connected or has been changed. Please check the number before calling again. You have not been charged for this call.' This incorrect message was the RVA people most frequently reached when trying to ring the Camp. While Telstra never acknowledged what I later discovered among 1994 FOI documents, an internal Telstra memo stating:-

'This message tends to give the caller the impression that the business they are calling has ceased trading, and they should try another trader.'

 

Another Telstra document referred to the need for

a very basic review of all our RVA messages and how they are applied … I am sure when we start to scratch around, we will find a host of network circumstances where inappropriate RVAs are going to line.'

It seems the 'not connected' RVA came on whenever the lines in or out of Cape Bridgewater were congested, which, given how few lines there were, was often.

For a newly established business like ours, this was a major disaster. Still, despite the memo's acknowledgement that such serious faults existed, Telstra never admitted the existence of a fault in those first years. And with my continued complaints, I was treated increasingly as a nuisance caller. This was rural Australia, and I was supposed to put up with a poor phone service — not that anyone in Telstra was admitting that it was poor service. In every case, 'No fault found' was the finding by technicians and linesmen.

The frustration was immense, coupled with uncertainty. Were our problems no more than general poor rural service compounded by the congestion on too few lines going into an antiquated exchange? The Camp was, at that stage, the only accommodation business being run in Cape Bridgewater. Obviously, we relied on the phone more than most people in the area. But if there was some specific fault, why weren't the technicians finding it?

The business was in trouble, and so were we. By mid-1989 we were reduced to selling some shares for our operating costs. Here we were, a mere 15 months after taking over the business, and we were beginning to sell off our assets instead of reducing the mortgage. I felt like a total failure.  Neither of us was able to lift the other's spirits.

I decided to do another round of marketing in the city. I would give it all I had. We both went. Was it masochism that made me ring the Camp answering machine, via its remote access facility, to check for any messages so that I could respond to them promptly? Whatever it was, all I could get was the recorded message: 'The number you are calling is not connected or has been changed. Please check the number before calling again. You have not been charged for this call.' On the way home, just outside Geelong, we stopped at a phone box, and I tried again. Now the line was engaged. Perhaps somebody was leaving a message, I thought. Ever hopeful.

There were no messages on the answering machine. And nothing to be gained by asking why I had received an engaged signal. How many calls had we lost during the days that we were away? How many prospective clients had given up trying to get through because a recorded message told them the phone was not connected? Anger and frustration were very close to the surface.

Near the end of October 1989, our twenty-year marriage ended. I had already been taking prescribed drugs for stress; that afternoon, I added a quantity of Scotch and hunkered down in one of the cabins. Faye, understandably, was seriously concerned and called the local police, who broke into the cabin to 'save' me from me. They took me to the hospital, and I am forever grateful to the doctors who confirmed that I wasn't going 'nuts' and who sent me home the following day. My friends Margaret and Jack from Melbourne decided that Margaret would come home with me to 'bail mphe out'. The fun, however, had just begun.

Margaret and I arrived back at the Camp to be confronted with a disaster area. Faye had left the night before, following advice from various people that she needed to be in a 'safe house'. Doors had been left unlocked, meat from the deep freeze was left out on benches, and various items had mysteriously vanished. And, according to the Camp diary, 70 students from Monivae Catholic College in Hamilton were due to arrive in two days, booked in for five days and four nights. Without Margaret's assistance, I would have been wiped out.

Mourning the end of my marriage, the very thought of shopping was a mountain I didn't want to climb. What to feed 70 students plus staff? By the time I got my head around what to order, it was Sunday evening, and the Monivae group were due the following day. Then the hot water service broke down!

The staff were not happy about cold showers! Even so, for the next five years, Monivae College returned two and sometimes three times a year. Their support throughout this awful period helped me keep trading.

And, of course, Margaret's support. She carried so much through that first week. Aware that I was holding on by my fingernails, she suggested Brother Greg, one of the Monivae teachers, come to the house to talk to me. It was an inspired suggestion, and we talked well into the night, Margaret too, working through many things, from early childhood experiences to the end of twenty years of marriage.

In the weeks that followed, my phone problems continued unabated. I began keeping a log of phone faults, recording all complaints I received in an exercise book, along with names and contact details for each complaint and a note regarding the effect these failed calls were having on both the business and on me.

One day the phone extension in the kiosk was dead. The coin-operated gold phone in the dining room, which was on a separate line, had a normal dial tone, so I dialled my office number, only to hear the dreaded:

'The number you have called is not connected or has been changed. Please check the number before calling again. You have not been charged for this call.'

I was charged for the call because the phone did not return my coins! Five minutes later, I tried again. This time the office phone appeared to be engaged (it wasn't), and the gold phone happily regurgitated my coins.

I used this testing routine frequently over the next months and registered every fault I found with Telstra. The situation was beginning to tell on me. Why was this still happening after so many complaints? Could Telstra really be this incompetent? Or was there something worse going on? Had I made too much of a nuisance of myself? But that was ridiculous. Under the circumstances, I had behaved impeccably politely … when in fact, I had fantasies of sheer violence at times.

Now I was no longer one half of a working husband and wife team, and I started 1990 digging into my pitifully low financial reserves to pay staff or risk losing everything. I was suffering what is commonly known in the world of finance as a 'consequential resultant loss' — Faye was no longer contributing her unpaid labour. I now had to pay her a yearly dividend on her financial investment in the business.

The future looked grim. Telstra did not attempt to remedy the faults or at least no attempt that made any difference. The constant refrain of 'No fault found' was wearing very thin. I found it hard not to dwell on how many prospective customers night be lost because they couldn't reach me by phone. Nor was it long before the legal vultures were circling. I hadn't met my financial agreement with Faye, and her solicitor was demanding money. I was having trouble meeting my own legal costs, let alone finding any extra. My son's school fees were overdue, and to pay some of the mounting debts, I sold the 22-seater school bus I had originally used to ferry customers around and purchased a small utility in its place.

On the positive side, I had met a woman called Karen, who lived in Warrnambool. Our relationship developed to become quite serious. When Karen knew I was about to wind up my business because I couldn't raise funds to make any more payments to Faye, she put her house up as security for a loan, thereby giving me two years of breathing space. She believed in me, and she believed in the capacity of the Camp to succeed. She wanted to be a partner in it. This was early in 1991.

Things were starting to look up, especially when I discovered that a new exchange was to be installed later in the year at Cape Bridgewater. I was hoping this would alleviate all the problems of congested lines. It was just a question of time. Karen moved in with me, and we worked together with new energy to pull the business out of the doldrums.

In August that year came another joy when I got the first confirmation from someone within Telstra that they knew my phone problems were real. I felt such a relief that the faults were, at last, being acknowledged, and I asked for my new friend's name. I was so happy; I didn't even really register any perturbation when all he could tell me was that he worked at the fault centre in Hamilton.

According to Telstra's own file note:

Alan Smith rang 15/8/91 re service 267 267. Incoming callers are receiving engaged signal when it's not engaged …

This has been a continuing problem and he is losing a lot of business.

I said it appears from the fault history that the problem may be in the exchange and that the next RCM exchange 21/8 would solve these problems but that I would check this out with the techs.

I also said we would have a look at the service now to try and get it working correctly until cutover.

At last, someone in Telstra had given me something to hang on to. When Karen sold her house, a part of the proceeds went towards paying my legal fees and my debt to Faye. I paid Faye out, and Karen's name was now officially on the title to the business. We counted the days to the installation of the new exchange.

But the triumph of a new exchange when it came at the end of August 1991 was the briefest of victories. It made not the slightest difference. The telephone problems continued just as before. However, now exacerbated by the dreadful disappointment that the war wasn't over at all. Increasingly, people reported complaints of recorded voice announcements, and I continued to complain to Telstra about faults which seemed to me to be getting worse, not better. I asked technicians if a new exchange didn't correct the problems, then where could the faults lie? Their response was unbelievable: 'No fault found.' They simply refused to engage with my question. I cursed the fact that I had no contact details for the one person who had acknowledged that there were faults. I did not see the file note he wrote until 1995.

New bookings continued to be rare. The Camp was getting in need of painting and upgrading. The business looked sad and bedraggled, and so people who passed by were not interested in stopping. And when we did have a booking, cash flow was a problem, making it tricky to put food on the table. We somehow always managed, but it was very stressful. Karen was starting to see her investment going down the drain, and the strain on her came to a head while we were in the middle of organising a charity camp for under-privileged children.

Despite the financial precariousness of the enterprise, I had from the start sponsored the stays of under-privileged groups at the Camp. It was no loss to me really: sponsored food was provided through the generosity of a number of commercial food outlets, and it cost me only a small amount in electricity and gas.

In May 1992, we held a charity week for kids from Ballarat and South-West Victoria, organised largely by Sister Maureen Burke, IBVM, Principal of Loreto College in Ballarat. Arrangements regarding food, transport, and any special needs the children might have, had to be handled over the phone, and of course, Sister Burke had enormous problems making phone contact. The Calls were either ringing out or she was getting a deadline — no sound at all. Finally, after trying in vain all through one week, she decided to drive the 3½ hours to make the final arrangements.

Just as she arrived at the Camp, Karen took a phone call from a very angry man who wanted information about a singles weekend we were trying to set up. This caller was quite abusive. He couldn't understand why we were advertising a business but never answered the phone. Karen burst into tears. She had reached the end of her tolerance, and nothing I could say was any help. When Sister Burke appeared in the office, I decided absence was the better part of valour and removed myself, leaving the two women together. Much later, Sister Burke came out and told me she thought it probably best for both of us if Karen were to leave Cape Bridgewater. I felt numb. It was all happening again.

But it wasn't the same as it had been with Faye. Karen and I sat and talked. True, we would separate, but I assured her that she would lose nothing because of her generosity to me, that I would do whatever was necessary to buy her out. We were both relieved at that. Karen rented a house in Portland, and we remained good friends, though, without her day-to-day assistance at the Camp, which had given me space to travel around, I had to drop my promotional tours.

Later I sent Sister Burke an early draft of this book. She wrote back, 'Only I know from personal experience that your story is true; otherwise I would find it difficult to believe.'

 

To be continued