I didn’t realise, in those early days, that a single recorded message could dismantle a life. It sounded harmless enough the first time I heard it — that flat, emotionless voice telling callers that my number was not connected, or had been changed, and that they hadn’t been charged for the call. A small inconvenience, I thought. A glitch. Something that would sort itself out once the dust settled and the camp found its rhythm.

But it didn’t sort itself out. 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.