Interesting and very colorful. That is another example of a colder than normal souther hemisphere. (For one that started out using an 8 phone party line as a child, I constantly marvel at the continuing advances in all forms of electronic and digital communication.)
Here is a youtube blast from the past. Leonard Nimoy, 1978. And yes, that winter was darned cold!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kGB5MMIAVA&feature=player_embedded#t=0
My BFF in highschool was on a party line. Shared it with a little old widow lady. When we’d been gossiping like typical teenage females for a while, the little old lady would pick up the phone and say something like ‘you girls have talked enough!’, and hang up. We’d get the message and give her 30 or 45m to get her telephoning done and then call each other back.