THE LURE OF LUNA PARK – FROM SHOWMEN, SHYSTERS AND SCHEMERS TO THE THRILL OF THE RIDE – HELEN PITT

In Sydney, the icon of Luna Park has survived the decades as a pleasure park and symbol of Sydney. Helen Pitt, a former journalist with The Sydney Morning Herald and author of Luna Park, has researched the phenomenon of pleasure parks from their origin in the latter years of the nineteenth century. An era when the mechanical age was at its zenith. Like the big dipper, they had their ups and downs. And, yet, tragedy could follow pleasure as the Luna Park fire of 1979 showed. Helen Pitt addressed The Sydney Institute on Monday 18 May 2026 to capture some of Luna Park’s magic.

THE LURE OF LUNA PARK – FROM SHOWMEN, SHYSTERS AND SCHEMERS TO THE THRILL OF THE RIDE

HELEN PITT

Artist Martin Sharp, once the artist in residence at Luna Park, used to call it, along with the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Sydney Opera House, “our city’s triumvirate”. A holy trinity in this unholiest of cities. But let’s consider the amusement park and its big smile that’s been beaming from Milsons Point for 90 years now, one of the indisputable icons of Sydney, in comparison to these other two.

The Harbour Bridge, which opened in 1932, took 1600 people eight years to build, at a cost of 16 lives and over £6.25 million paid for with loans that took the city 55 years to pay off. The Sydney Opera House took 16 years to build from when Dane Jorn Utzon was declared winner of the international design competition in 1957 until its 1973 opening, with another architect Australian Peter Hall at the helm. Over 10,000 people from 90 different countries built it in post-war migrant rich Australia for a cost of $102 million paid for by punters in the form of 86 million Sydney Opera House lottery tickets. Four New South Wales premiers died a political death during its construction but, astoundingly, no lives were lost in the building.

In contrast, Luna Park opened three years after the Bridge in 1935, but took a mere 12 weeks to build – in fact the work was done often before North Sydney council could approve it – using around 800 workers (one of them my uncle) many of them unemployed former Bridge workers, and cost the owners – the Phillips Brothers – only £90,000 to build on land they leased from the Department of Main Roads. This land was once the Dorman Long workshops – the largest in the southern hemisphere at the time – where the parts of the bridge were forged from 1924 until 1932.

The building of the bridge would radically alter Sydney in many ways. Firstly, its public infrastructure had to be reshuffled. The distinctively domed Milsons Pt ferry/tram and transport interchange was one of the busiest in the city – with a ferry arriving every 10 minutes to connect with a train from the 1890 built north shore train line – which extended to Milsons Point in 1893. It was at the site where the northern pylon now stands.

So, to accommodate the workshops, the ferry pontoon was moved to a temporary spot at Lavender Bay – where Luna Park’s Coney Island now stands. And where the train line – now a shunting line – took passengers via Waverton to the north shore. The steeply sloped Lavender Bay site contained Australia’s first public escalator which took commuters from the ferry to Glen Street and its network of trams.

When the bridge and its attached Milsons Point train station was opened in 1932, the escalators were moved to Wynyard Station to play a part in bridge builder John Bradfields’s mass transport system. Those old escalators were removed not so long ago, and have been refashioned into Interloop, a Sculpture by Chris Fox which hangs in the current Wynyard station and won a host of heritage design awards in 2018. Another thing, like the bridge itself, forged at Milsons Point.

The Dorman Long wharf was where the steel from the UK and granite from Moruya was unloaded for the bridge. When the bridge was complete, the workshops were knocked down and became a weedy wasteland. Bookmaker and barrister Bill Waterhouse, whose father was the publican at the nearby Imperial Hotel, was just 13 when building of Luna Park began. He remembered the Luna Park workers piling into his father’s pub after work. “Where Luna Park is now was just a forest of weeds… all of a sudden workmen turned up and overnight it was finished… it was very quick,” he told the makers of a 2007 documentary about the park, The Art of Fun.

The bridge was failing to pay its way in its first few years. They needed to find a way to entice people to pay the toll and come northside – which is why North Sydney Council agreed to the site being used for recreational purposes.

The Luna Park owners, the American-born Phillips brothers and their financial backers – started Luna Park Melbourne in 1912, and Luna Park Adelaide on the Glenelg beachfront in 1930. When it began to fail financially, due to the Depression and South Australia’s strict no Sunday trading laws, they sought alternative sites. They decided on Milsons Point in NSW and so packed up the contents of the park – including the Big Dipper and the Rivers Caves piece by piece and shipped them from Glenelg to Milsons Point. Unloaded on that same wharf the bridge parts were delivered to. Rides like the whirler, Noah’s Ark and Goofy House came too.

That wharf is now Crystal palace – when it opened in 1935 it was home to the dodgem cars and the Luna Park offices. It is now the Stranger Things immersive experience courtesy of Netflix.

The ferry pontoon – which was the temporary one at Lavender Bay, was converted into the floating Palais dance hall, where many a Sydneysider met their future spouse dancing into the wee hours of 1940s Sydney.

One of the men responsible for unpacking the rides from Glenelg was a young Tasmanian engineer called Ted Hopkins. He worked for the park in Adelaide, packed up the rides onto a ship which took eight days – and he arrived not long after to take up his role overseeing their reassembly – like a giant Meccano set. Hopkins, a keen photographer, often snapped photos at the park as well as the divers at the Rudder and Groat designed North Sydney Olympic Pool next door.

Construction of the pool began in the same month as Luna Park, July 1935, as the two were considered twin projects to lure Sydneysiders to the north shore. The pool took several hundred North Sydney Council workers eight months to build at a cost of £47,000 pounds. At this point – with North Sydney Pool still closed – it has taken almost as many years to renovate as it took months to build, and let’s not begin to compare the many millions it has cost to renovate to £47,000 cost of the build.

But back to the amusement park.

The face of Sydney changed forever on the October long weekend of 1935 when the park opened and the iconic face, we’ve come to know and love was unveiled for the first time.

Many remember Dr Groot’s famous sword-wielding stealing of the thunder of Premier Jack Lang at the March opening of the bridge. But a few weeks after the grand opening it was making headlines again, when six elephants from Wirths’ Circus, accompanied by their attendants and a Shetland pony, crossed the bridge as a publicity stunt…captured famously by photographer Sam Hood. This was similar to a stunt by circus man P.T. Barnum on New York’s Brooklyn Bridge to quell public fears about its stability after its 1883 opening. The Luna Park operators had planned a similar stunt to publicise its 1935 opening – but their mechanical elephant complete with number plates – broke while attempting to pull a dodgem car…before they could pull off any Luna Park publicity stunts. “We killed the golden goose before it had a chance to lay an egg,” Hopkins joked at the time.

They didn’t need publicity – the city of a million lights as it was called in the dark days of the Depression, was a success from the moment it first opened. Thanks in part to that unforgettable face. People were curious to get a glimpse close up. The first one was made by scenic artist Rupert Browne, from Melbourne’s Luna Park and fashioned from chicken wire, plaster and canvas.

It was made in the manner of Melbourne Luna Park’s Mr Moon, the first park in the world to use an entry face. There was George Tilyou’s face at New York’s Steeplechase, which became known as the “Tilly” and Steeplechase, funny face. Tilyou, one of the early amusement park entrepreneurs, took his new bride on their honeymoon to Chicago’s Columbian World Fair in 1893, and rode the Ferris Wheel, which was invented especially for that fair by George Washington Gale Ferris. Tilyou vowed to buy one on the spot.

Chicago’s World Fair, also known as White City because of its temporary Beaux Arts built temporary buildings, provided the blueprint for the modern-day amusement park. It gave us not only the Ferris Wheel, but the word “the Midway”, still in use at Luna Park today to describe the central asphalted alleyway you walk down to all the rides. Tilyou, ordered a copy of the Ferris Wheel to be made for his park, which featured the Tilly face above the entrance way, that sat above the opening gates. It was a face, not a wide-open mouth like patrons walked through at both Melbourne and Sydney.

That first rather scary looking face at Milsons Point – was the first use of neon in Australia – especially arresting in its eyes – where it was used to blink when it opened on the Friday night of the October Labor Day long weekend. The next day, all the local children from North Sydney and Waverton were let in for free, an act of benevolence that has been remembered by one woman in particular, Patti Harbutt who was there that day as one of the local kids, given a free packet of Aeroplane jelly.

There have been eight Luna Park faces since inception – including one by Martin Sharp in 1973. The early ones were rather frightening but were works of art in themselves. The latest face is made from fibreglass and modelled on the 1950s version, known as the old King Cole face, from the nursery rhyme.

The Art Deco towers – were modelled on New York’s Chrysler building which was the tallest building in the world in 1931.

Luna Park Sydney was modelled on Luna Park Coney Island in New York. It was begun in 1903 by Fred Thompson and Elmer Dundy who created together a ride called a trip to the moon, first at Steeplechase Park, but then next door at their very own Luna Park par which they set up with all the money they had made from their trip to the moon ride, which entailed patrons flying in a kayak-like device where they looked out of portholes and could see sites like Niagara Falls as they went above earth. It sounds rudimentary now, but it was revolutionary, in the days before those magnificent men in their flying machines, the Wright brothers, had invented airplanes.

Now you would think with a name like “A Trip to the Moon” that they named their amusement park after it as in LUNAR but the inspiration actually more likely came from Elmer Dundy’s sister who was Luna Dundy, spelt Luna… her name has lent itself to hundreds amusement parks all over the world including eight once in Australia. Two in Western Australia, at Cottesloe and Scarborough beaches, two in Queensland at Brisbane and Redcliffe, one each in Victoria and South Australia, and before Milsons Point there was a Luna Park at Manly’s South Steyne in the late 1920s. The new owners arranged to purchase the naming rights from the operators at Manly, who then moved their fun park to the site that became known as the Manly fun pier.

Arthur Barton was one of the 35 artists hired to decorate the Park prior to its 1935 opening. Barton is responsible for the Park’s art deco style, which merges American influences with Australian flavour. He also became known as the “Rembrandt of Luna Park” because of all the art he created there. As a gunner in World War one he lost an eye, but that didn’t impact his art, especially in Coney Island which today is his living legacy.

The summer of 1958-59 saw Luna Park host a world first: it became a film set for the first Australian film made with foreign money. Hollywood money. The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, the play written by Ray Lawler was considered a turning point in Australian drama when it was first performed in Melbourne in 1955. The film rights were bought in 1957 for $US300,000 (an unheard-of sum for an Australian drama at the time) and the movie switched location to Sydney. Luna Park has featured in everything from an episode of Skippy, Number 96 and a 2006 film starring Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish, Candy, which opens with a scene of them riding the ROTOR.

But the real art existed already in the gloriously kitsch dioramas that came from South Australia – in the popular River caves ride. Nine of them in total, featuring everything from Arctic to jungle scenes complete with Tarzan at the time when Johnny Weissmuller was popular. It brought the world to Milsons Point which you could coast through on a cool gondola ride. It was revolutionary in Depression era Sydney and brightened the dark days of World War two.

Ted Hopkins continued to take glorious photos capturing the daily drama of the park – his photos of the beauty competitions were often so good they landed on the front page of the newspapers. His collection is in the State Library of NSW. He ran the park from 1935 until his retirement in 1970 – but stayed on as a consultant well into his 80s

His moody night shots of the deserted park capture some of the glory of its heyday. Because of their mutual love of photography, he befriended Rev Frank Cash at Christ Church Lavender Bay. Ted always threw a bit of money at the local church fetes, and Bob’s your uncle, there was no trouble in Sydney about Sunday trading as there had been in South Australia. He scoured the world for rides over winter months when Luna Park was closed for maintenance and would bring the plans home and make his own versions like the Rotor and the Wild Mouse.

He operated in tandem with the park’s first showman, David Atkins, a South Australian who had toured the bush with his Big Brother Jack a showman known for his travelling tent of boxing men and performing snakes.

Atkins had got his start at the pleasure palace known as the Coogee Pier, which opened in July 1928. Along with the penny arcade, where Atkins was working, he also established the big wheel grounds in manly. With a keen eye for enterprise Akins learned much from his Sydney experience. It was he who discovered the Milsons Point site was available and large enough for the rides to be re-erected after they were transported from South Australia.

He was the showman to Ted Hopkins’ Mr Fix it. When Atkins dropped dead of a heart attack in 1957, it was up to Hopkins to keep the lights on at Luna Park. Which he did for decades – so long in fact – he became known as “Mr Luna Park”. He was also a beloved neighbour in Milner Crescent, Wollstonecraft, remembered fondly by all the children who grew up in that street, which also became home to former Prime Minister John Howard. When Hopkins’ daughter sold the family home in 2014, it had been in the family for 75 years. When he died in the early 1990s, his ashes were scattered into Sydney Harbour, from the wharf where Crystal Palace now stands. The same wharf he had unpacked the rides on in 1935.

One of my favourite stories unveiled in the writing of this book took place in 1974… Sydneysiders woke to the news on 25 July that six of the giant face’s teeth had been extracted overnight. Many were gobsmacked.

The saga of the stolen teeth made front page and evening news bulletins. “The giant’s face at the entrance to Luna Park is minus six teeth today,” The Sun of 26 July 1974 reported. “They have been a landmark for the past 39 years . . . goodness knows why the teeth were stolen but we want them back,” general manager Rod Earle said in a plea to the public.

Over half a century later, the mystery of the missing pearly whites is revealed in my book.

Photo credit: Luna Park Sydney

It was students from the University of New South Wales, taking part in the annual university scavenger hunt. These students were in the middle of their first year at Baxter College, one of the university’s residential colleges that went head-to-head with competing residential colleges to bag the kitty required for the uni prank. The list of items required included one tooth from Luna Park, a condom machine from Sydney University, and a railway sign and seat from a Sydney train station.

‘We decided we’d give it a good hard crack,’confessed one of the then students, now a recently retired New South Wales North Coast medico. ‘I had an old bread van from Fielder’s Bakery and we went out on a number of sorties to get our loot. We went to Luna Park on a 10 pm reccy one night and found it totally deserted.

‘One guy, from Condobolin [in country New South Wales], was a very agile climber, and good with a spanner and hammer. He had one tooth off in minutes, so then we decided to get as many as we could. Suddenly we heard a dog barking its head off. It belonged to the security guy, so we put them in the van and made a quick getaway.

‘I jumped the median strip on the Sydney Harbour Bridge in our bread van getaway vehicle to avoid paying the 20 cents toll. We laughed when the newspaper reports came out and the security guard said, “They must have been professional, I heard and saw nothing.”

‘When we got back to Baxter College we hid them under our beds. My mother came to visit from Wollongong the next day and asked me if I’d read about Luna Park’s missing teeth as she sat down on my bed. “You’re sitting on one of the teeth, Mum,” I told her.’

Photo credit: Luna Park Sydney

The Baxter College contingent managed to gather the teeth, plus a seat and sign from Lindfield railway station, as well as a condom machine from Sydney University. They laid out all their other booty on the university lawn anonymously. ‘It was up to the student union to return the objects, not us,’ the retired doctor told me half a century later. Given there had been around this time so many people upset about ‘thieves stealing railway property’, the organisers of the treasure hunt, the university’s student union—who were not the actual teeth thieves—agreed to be photographed by The Sydney Morning Herald when they returned the seat and station sign to Lindfield station.

Among the Great Teeth Robbers were students who went on to become some of the state’s best dentists and doctors. It was probably the first and last dental extraction any of them ever performed for free.

There are of course many dark stories associated with the park. The shysters and schemers referred to in the title of my book, include T.H, Eslick, the man behind Lua Park Melbourne’s construction, and the failed White City amusement park in Rushcutters Bay (where the tennis complex once stood) and Luna Park Brisbane, which was meant to be built adjoining the Cloudland dance hall. He was twice bankrupt, and in the manner of Christopher Skase, skipped off overseas claiming he was too unwell to return to face creditors in bankruptcy court to the chagrin of his angry shareholders. Lionel Morris, a convicted criminal started Western Australia’s first Luna Park at Cottesloe Beach before it was washed away by huge tides.

Other questionable characters involved with the Luna Park name include Abe Saffron, whose name has always been linked with the mysterious 1979 Ghost train fire, one of Sydney’s most enduring mysteries.

By this stage Ted Hopkins had left the park, and the lease was taken over in 1969 by Leon Fink and Nathan Spatt. They had initially wanted to turn the park into a Harry Seidler-designed World Trade Centre, but this idea was knocked back by the Askin government.

By the time Neville Wran became premier in 1976, the new owners were confident of their proposal for the park. Wran and Fink were friends, Wran even stayed down at Fink’s south coast holiday home while awaiting the outcome of the 1976 state election. But for reasons detailed in my book, he had fallen out with the leaseholders, who were then forced to operate on a week-to-week basis. That uncertainty discouraged investment in the park’s upkeep. It was during this period that the tragic blaze of the June long weekend in 1979, then known as Cracker Night, occurred.

Martin Sharp who was artist-in-residence at this time, became quite obsessed with the tragedy in which seven people, six of them children were killed. He spent most of his life campaigning to keep the park open and to find justice for the families who lost loved ones.

His friend, fellow artist Peter Kingston who lived in nearby Lavender Bay next door to Brett and Wendy Whiteley, lovingly oversaw the restoration of Luna Park’s Coney Island in the 1990s. Kingston joined him mate Martin, in the fight to retain the park after the fire which closed it. All up the park closed for 17 years on and off during the 1980s and 90s. But survives today one of only two amusement parks in the world protected by goverment legislation. The other is Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen.

You most likely recall the legal battles between the Milsons Point neighbours and Luna Park which resulted in a Supreme court order that restricted the operating hours of the park’s most popular ride, the Big Dipper. This made it financially unviable for the operators, Wittingslow’s to continue. So after a brief 13 months of operation in the 1990s, it closed again. It was what the then owners called, not a case of NIMBYism, but NUMBYism, “Not under my balcony.” By then Milsons Point was home to some of the swankiest high-rise homes on the harbour.

The unlikely heroes of the Luna Park story are two entrepreneurs, Warwick Doughty, who brought the K-Tel record selector to Australia and who started Demtel TV, As in “But wait there’s more,” the immortal lines spoken by Demtel man Tim Shaw, who promised to “throw in a free set of steak knives” to eager purchasers. The other hero of the story is Peter Hearn who was a publican and lawyer who begin his career in John Howard’s office. He ran both the Hopetoun and Annandale hotels that championed live music across Sydney. The two men teamed together to start the Metro Theatre in George Street with plans to turn Luna Park into a live music venue as well as an amusement park.

They teamed with Multiplex, and in 1998, successfully made a bid to take on the lease of Luna Park. It reopened on the fourth of the 4th 04 and has been open ever since with the exception of closures for COVID.

It survives today one of only two amusement parks in the world protected by government legislation, known as the Luna Park site Act of 1990, which means it must always be an amusement park. This means it’s Heritage-listed façade and rides, can’t be knocked down and turned into a World Trade Centre, a high-rise adult entertainment complex or a Club Med, as previous leassees have attempted. The only other amusement park in the world with such legal protction is Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen.

The lease is currently operated by Oscar’s Hospitality Group, who bought it off the Canadian asset management firm Brookfield, which had taken over Multiplex. As it hurtles towards its centenary celebrations in 2035, it remarkably continues to operate for kids of all ages, just for fun.