Don't worry, the local rate was extortion.

Mobile calls were never untimed, until the age of "caps" and true unlimited calls. Australia did have a concept of "roaming calls" during the 1G era, which charged you (or a landline caller to you) a higher timed rate if the call was over 160km (? I think? if so it was really 100 miles). This was impossible for the customer to tell because it was measured from the nearest tower to the nearest exchange office, in the case of a landline. 1G "roaming" was really about your local town, and probably came from the Zero-G days before cellular, where your phone could literally only reach one big powerful tower and the rest were too far away. By the time of 2G, most mobile call prices were either national or international, and "roaming" started to refer to something else entirely - whether you were on a different network entirely, and that only happened if you left the country and the other network wanted to be part of an extortionate pricing deal. Ridiculous "roaming" charges didn't happen in your own country because your own carrier had its own towers and wouldn't take customers from other local networks, only their own (and anyone roaming as a tourist).

A minute is very expensive, good thing that Nokia Finland made Beepers easy to use and fuse it to their phones which we now call sms or text message

Programa de televisión australiano a principios de los 90, así que no creo que encuentres la versión en español