ArchivesACT keeps finding neglected, long-lost treasures (setting an example to all of us to rummage in our attics and sheds) and has just found a wealth of information from the 1970s about Canberra's talking toadstools.

They were sturdy, metal, coin-operated, information-providing contraptions installed at strategic Canberra spots frequented by tourists. You plopped a 20c coin into them and a necessarily metallic-sounding recorded voice (sounding like a Dalek from Doctor Who) gave you, between bursts of music, information about what you could see from the spot where the toadstool was installed.

They were invented by Arthur Brackenrig of Mudgee (his company was called the Toadstool Automatic Advisory Service), and Canberra authorities installed seven of them at Canberra places in 1973. On April 9, 1973 The Canberra Times published a photograph captioned ''Miss Bronwyn Davis, 15, and Miss Mandy Johnson, 16, at the Red Hill lookout, last night, listening to the 'mushroom' '' and with the lights of the city twinkling away prettily in the darkness behind them.

ArchivesACT has found the sustained flurry of talking toadstool correspondence between the Department of the Interior, the Department of the Capital Territory, the Canberra Tourist Bureau and National Capital Authority.

So many great public service minds were employed on the issue and the correspondence all reads very like a draft of a Yes Minister plot and script. Decisions! Decisions! To install or not to install? To make people pay, or to allow the garrulous toadstool to natter to tourists free of charge? On the latter, and in a long, convoluted, 17-point minute of September 1972, the director of tourism agonised ''it is a controversial issue without a straight solution''.

The first toadstools mushroomed at Mount Ainslie, City Hill, Red Hill (there were two, one on the city side the other on the Woden side), at Government House lookout, at Scrivener Dam lookout and at Black Mountain. There was some talk of putting them in ACT nature reserves too but the Department of the Interior's director of conservation and agriculture argued persuasively that they might frighten the koalas. ''In a quiet bushland setting noise from the machine could be prejudicial to public enjoyment and may disturb the animals.''

Incredibly, at least one of the toadstools survives where it was installed, though broken rusty and mute (tight-lipped) now.

Brackenrig, the inventor, boasted that his toadstools were ''foolproof and vandalproof'' but the Archives' correspondence show that they promptly became vandal-magnets and thief-magnets (for their internal money boxes) too. The post-installation correspondence reports them often being ''uprooted'' and on two occasions stolen, even though stealing the big, sturdy brutes, must have required a major effort by big sturdy brigands.

Brackenrig rose to these challenges, the correspondence shows, and later in 1973 replaced the original, vulnerable toadstools with even tougher, reinforced, more deeply-entrenched ones, bemuscled steel chatterboxes that seem to have given years of service.

You can read more about the dear old toadstools and the correspondence about them, ArchivesACT's ''Find of the month,'' at the Archives' website www.archives.act.gov.au

Gang-gang is a column by Canberra Times journalist Ian Warden