In those far-off days, Mr Ridsdale says, it was a legitimate recruiting practice for those government bodies to turn up at a school and offer a career.

And it worked. Mr Ridsdale chose to sit both exams for the police and the PMG, passed both, and went into the PMG, because, he says, he was a Ballarat boy and the training was here rather than in Melbourne for the force.

Turning up to the PMG Wendouree Training Centre at 333 Gillies St Wendouree in 1970, Mr Ridsdale was issued a grey dustcoat with a PMG logo, a 20c Commonwealth Bank savings account and a firm instruction to join the union and the social club. He was now a technician-in-training (abbreviated to the unfortunate acronym of TIT).

Trained in corrugated iron Nissen huts which had housed both new Australians and Olympians, the TITs were taught telecommunications theory, mathematics, metalwork and drawing among other topics.

The PMG training centre was opened on February 8, 1958 by local MP Dudley Erwin. It made the front page of The Courier with 300 people attending the opening of the repurposed migrant centre.

Long before the advent of Telecom and Telstra and Australia Post, Australia's communications were delivered by the hands, stamps and wires of the PMG.

A Commonwealth Government department established in 1901, the PMG ran telegraphy, mail services, telephones and the beginnings of what is now our computer networks, as well as administering licences and licence fees.

In 1958 first-year PMG TITs were on a salary of £6/l0/9 per week, or about $13. By the time Chris Ridsdale had begun his training, pay had risen to about $60 a fortnight.

They stayed in Wendouree for their first year before moving out to positions around Victoria, before returning to Wendouree or another school for further training modules, which enabled them to rise in the job.

"Freezing in winter, stinking hot in summer, the huts were "unbearable," Mr Ridsdale says.

"They were long, maybe 30-40m with a tiny gas heater at the door; louvre windows, no insulation. Most of rode bikes or walked and rode buses to the school, so we were cold and wet by the time we got there."

Chris Ridsdale moved through telephone exchange installation (replacing the manual plug-in 'number please' exchanges and party lines), becoming a senior technical officer, team leader and specialist with Telstra before accepting redundancy and moving to Ericsson in a 43-year later career.

"In 1975 I did a certificate of technology which the PMG put me through," he says.

"I became a technical officer and started building real telephone exchanges, ARKs, which replaced the 'Hello' girls in various towns around Ballarat: Skipton, Avoca, Moonambel, Dunolly - all those places. I also built a lot of the infrastructure at the Ballarat Telephone Exchange, and did a lot of work upstairs at the Post Office where the international girls worked, because there was no automatic international subscriber dialling (ISD) then."

The PMG was broken in two 1975, becoming the Australian Telecommunications Commission (Telecom) and the Australian Postal Commission (Australia Post). The department responsible for the PMG was abolished in 1980.

The training section started to reduce staff in the late 1980s, leaving Gillies St site in 1992. Staff were relocated to the IOOF building in Armstrong St. Most accepted redundancy packages; the Nissen huts were sold off and relocated.

At one stage, Chris Ridsdale says, 72,000 people worked for Telstra, the last form of what remained of the PMG and Telecom. On January 18, the remaining 1970 Wendouree technicians and four of their instructors will be celebrating their 50-year reunion.

"All of us have finished working for the PMG (Telstra)," Mr Ridsdale says.

"The last of our year finished up with Telstra last year after 49 years of service. In 1970, we were 'promised a job for life' and quite a few of us did have that."