Dads group turn vintage phone box into epic little library

A significant prop used in the Channel 7 series The Claremont Murders has found itself a new lease of life after being rescued by a dedicated fathering group in Currambine.

The vintage Telstra phone box gained notoriety as the location where Sarah Spiers made her last telephone call from in the TV program before she was abducted.

But that wasn’t something father-of-two Robert Wilson knew when he reached out to Telstra requesting for a disused telephone box — in the hope the Currambine dads group he’s part of, Loving and Devoted Dads, could turn it into a library.

“We’ve been trying to actively get our dads or father figures at the school to be more engaging with kids in regards to reading . . . and I remembered seeing telephone boxes used as community libraries in the UK,” Mr Wilson said.

“So I wondered if we might be able to get one here in Australia. I contacted Telstra and they said they had old ones every now and then and that they would give us one when one was available.”

The 52-year-old Tapping father said it was a pretty well-known fact that dads don’t spend enough time with their kids.

“If you got one or two kids, the ideal amount of direct time is about eight to 10 minutes a day, per that activity,” he said.

“One fantastic thing that people can do, particularly at bedtime is to spend time with your child reading. It’s good for the development of a child and it’s good for the father and child interaction.”

As a fly-in, fly-out worker, the performance improvement adviser says he makes sure he reads to his two kids every night.

“So sometimes I read to them via Skype or FaceTime on my phone as I try and make sure I engage with my kids as often as I can,” Mr Wilson said.

“Honestly, electronic devices are a go nowadays but reading remains a key function in society in helping a child develop reading and writing skills and improving their vocabulary.”

So for the last 12 months, the fathering group with the help of the Joondalup Men’s Shed worked on restoring the shabby telephone box and bringing it to new life.

“The Men’s Shed has been very helpful because a lot of them are pretty handy people. Telstra gave us some pieces we needed because we wanted to make it watertight,” Mr Wilson said.

“We engaged with a couple of different companies for wood, paint, bracket and screws and they gave it to us for free. KNA Security screen doors in Wangara made a door for us as I hadn’t realised telephone boxes don’t have doors.

“Signarama in Joondalup did the door artwork and printed the decals for us — again for free. From there we rebuilt the structure to make it stronger, painted it red and fitted it out with bookshelves.”

The now-completed community library will be installed and ready at Mr Wilson’s son’s school, Currambine Primary, on June 12 — positioned near the school library as an extra resource specifically for parents to borrow books to read to their kids at bedtime.

“So the idea is that when parents go onto the school property, they go into this library which contains 100s of the best books as voted by the school community, pick it and read to their kids at bedtime,” he said.

“They can read it for a few nights at home or save it for another week, then bring it back to swap for another one.

“We’ve also engaged with the fathering project to get a hold of some parental advice self-help books so it’s not just kids’ books there.”

Currambine LADDS started just under a decade ago under the national organisation The Fathering Project.

The small but mighty group of local father figures gather regularly to organise a couple of events per school term, in a bid to get parents and kids out doing activities they wouldn’t normally do.