4 Luna Park, Lower Esplanade (18 Cavell Street), St Kilda
Moon rising, 1912-1922
Like some great writhing sea serpent, Luna Park with its sinuous heaving Scenic Railway body, clattering to syncopated crescendo, and its leering gigantic face, is set to gulp all comers. No other Australian building has been so prolifically depicted by artists (it’s Melbourne’s Harbour Bridge), but never more tellingly than in David Larwill’s Luna Park (1979) in black face and crazed almond eyes confronting turmoil, Rinaldo Antico’s unnerving entrance photographs and in Albert Tucker’s Extinction Express (1988), where the scenic railway’s train is headed at full velocity vertically downwards, taking its passengers to certain obliteration. Here, Luna Park is not just for fun, but a powerful image of the darkest emotions. No wonder it remained closed during World War I, just when Melbourne needed cheering up.
Albert Tucker, Extinction Express.
Sidney Nolan (1, 2, 8, 9, 20 & 34, 1917-92), born and raised in St Kilda, was the most prolific and indeed joyful image-maker of Luna Park, producing numerous drawings, paintings and other images of Luna Park between 1939-45, listed in the References section below. His first Luna Park works were painted in 1940-41 whilst he kept a studio for a year with John Sinclair at 5
1 Smith Street, St Kilda. One of these works, of the Scenic Railway, Abstract (1940) was used as the concept for Ashton Raggatt McDougall’s (32 & 33) façade for the cinema complex of their Triangle Site design (3).
Two other views of both scary and vunerable Luna Park. Matt Golding, Sunday Age, 9 October and 18 December 2016.
At the end of 1941, his first marriage disintegrated, Nolan fled from St Kilda to be in a ménage à trois with Sunday and John Reed at sophisticated Heide in Bulleen. Then again in 1944-45, whilst AWL from the Army for fear of being sent to New Guinea, living at Heide under the false name of ‘Robin Murray’ and with false papers obtained by John Reed, but working in a studio in 32 Gatehouse Street, Parkville to paint the first Ned Kelly series, Nolan would frequently visit Albert Tucker and his wife, artist Joy Hester in St Kilda (9). During this time of Nolan’s emotional turmoil in 1945, he became obsessed with depicting the Giggle Palace’s hall of distorting mirrors. Yet even he described Luna Park as an ‘atmosphere of repressed sexuality.’
In the hugely enjoyable exhibition ‘Luna Park and the Art of Mass Delirium’ at the Heide Museum of Modern Art in 1999, twenty Nolans were included: depicting the Giggle Palace, the Big Dipper, the Carousel and the Scenic Railway (but never the Face). His images are coy and whimsical, recreating the world of childhood. The poet Barrett Reid, recalled:
Nolan and I went a number of times to Luna Park in December 1946. He challenged me to various acts of bravado such as standing up at the top of a curve, just before the Dipper plunged down, going on the tall slide without a mat, etc.
The first artist to have chosen Luna Park as a subject was Clarice Beckett (for earlier images of St Kilda, 23), with her Luna Park in about 1919. It had only been open seven years and its paint was still sleek and fre
Other Australian artists known to have depicted Luna Park include: Paul Andrew, Rachael Bartram, Charles Blackman, Dean Beck, Arthur Boyd, Alan Brown, Ian Burra, Jon Cattapan, Andrew Foster, Joy Hester, Kenneth Jack, Matt Kemp, Peter Kingston, Jasper Knight in his ‘Curb your enthusuasm’ series, David Larwill, Geoff Lowe, John Perceval, Robert Rooney, Michael Shannon, Tony Irving, Albert Tucker, Judith van Heeren, James Wigley, John Owe Young, Amanda De Simone in her ‘Nudie Postcards’ series and Pasquale Giardino (2015), and some 23 others.
Boyd’s images, sketched in the two wartime years after Nolan’s, are psychologically fraught with fear and anguish. From the rich emotional internalised metaphor of the 1940s, Luna Park came to be viewed from the 1950s as an icon of St Kilda and of the Kingdom of Pleasure.
2 Luna Park has little in common with European pleasure gardens such as Tivoli in Copenhagen, Blackpool, or Battersea Gardens in England, or the Prado in Vienna. Its direct inspiration was its namesake on Coney Island, in New York. The island first became accessible to the masses in 1883 with the opening of Brooklyn Bridge, long after the railway had brought them to St Kilda. By 1897 Coney Island’s fun parks were walled and an entrance created. It had particularly developed after the electric light arrived in 1890.
In 1901, Frederic Thomson (1872-1919), an American machinist and draughtsman and a promoter with the unlikely name of Elmer ‘Skip’ Dundy (1862-1907) struck it rich at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York in 1900 with their ride called A Trip to The Moon. Patrons flew there in a giant flying ship called the Luna, and greeted by midget moon men offering green cheese. In 1902, George Tilyou who had opened Steeplechase Park in1897 on 6- hectares of beachfront at Coney Island, enticed Thompson and Dundy to exhibit A Trip to the Moon at his Park. Tilyou demanded higher licensing fees in 1903, so they decided instead to lease the 15-hectare Boyton’s Sea Lion Park next door and with $700,000 in borrowed money, created their own Luna Park, named after their lucrative star attraction.
It became one of the three major funfairs on the island with 43,000 paying customers, nine years before its St Kilda namesake. The Williamsburg Bridge had opened earlier in 1903 and Coney Island’s Luna Park benefited. It was a forest of towers and spires lit at night by 122,000 electric lights.
Thomson and Dundy went on to build New York’s famous Hippodrome Theatre in 1904-05, designed by Stanford White. But when Dundy died of pneumonia in 1907, Luna Park lost direction, was damaged by fire in 1911 and Thomson had to file for personal bankruptcy in 1912. Although it was estimated that he was worth $1,500,000 at the zenith of his career, he was $665,000 in debt when he died in 1917. He had lost his beloved Luna Park to his creditors, who successfully franchised the name and soon ‘Luna Parks’ opened all over the world, including within the year, in Melbourne and soon six others in Australia.
Novelist Joseph Heller (born 1923), so six years older than Nolan, grew up on Coney Island in the Great Depression.
He recalled:
Coney Island, with its beaches, crowds, commotion, and a couple of hundred entertainments, has always been magical to children and a gaudy magnet for adults. People came from everywhere. Early in this century, even Sigmund Freud dropped in for a look on his trip to the United States... The founding of Luna Park and... Steeplechase Park date back to the last years of the 1890s. Both had long been established and were already in decline by the time I grew aware of them.
Of the two amusement parks, there seemed to be a near unanimous preference for Luna Park... The architecture was a fantastic, almost nightmarish corruption of the Moorish and Byzantine in circus-clown colours of chalk-white and cherry red with ornamental stripes of black and bright green on minarets, spires and onion domes.
Coney Island itself was depicted by artists including Milton Avery (1885-1965), whose work Steeplechase, Coney Island (1929) is most evocative of Nolan‘s childhood Luna Park and doubtless of Heller’s, shortly afterwards.
After childhood, Heller’s next experience of Luna Park, Coney Island was on his army discharge in May 1945, at precisely the moment that Sidney Nolan, away from the army illegally, dallied in the Giggle Palace and the Big Dipper at Luna Park, St Kilda.
Heller wrote:
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...I was holding on for dear life through the racing plunges and veers, and I tottered off with a thumping ache in my head and a wrenched neck... After sixty missions overseas, I was nowselective in my adventures, and I had no doubt that I would never want to ride that or any other roller coaster again... I was twenty-two.
Now Coney Island itself is increasingly decrepit and threatened with redevelopment into shopping malls.
A map shows the region of Luna Park, St Kilda in about 1865 as wetland. It was drained in the 1870s, but remained vacant. The St Kilda Fore Shore Committee (3) first met on 22 June 1906. Its role was to manage the Crown Land along the beach from Fraser Street south to Head Street, Elwood and to promote its use. At this meeting, a vaudeville performer, E S Salambo applied to lease the paddock north of Shakespeare Grove.
In that year, in 1906, Charles Tait wrote and directed the world’s first feature-length movie The Story of the Kelly Gang was filmed on Salumbo’s paddock, as well as Charterisville in East Ivanhoe, Eltham and Mitcham. Later that year, Salambo opened Dreamland, St Kilda’s first amusement park, on two hectares of the land. It had a Mt Fujiama, the Rivers of the World, the Underworld, an Airship and the Destruction of San Francisco but locals found it too pricey and it closed in 1909.
T h e
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Above: Clarice Beckett, Luna Park, c1919. L Left: The entrance to Luna Park, that has now been reinstated. u n In 1907 (or 1909?) a figure-of-eight roller-coaster ride opened on the Palais Pictures (3) site, only a to be demolished five years later when the Palais was built. The Greater J D (James Dixon) Williams Amusement Company (‘The Man Whose Name Stands for Success’) acquired the lease P of the (by then 1.5 hectare) Salumbo’s paddock in 1911 for £400 per annum and began building. a Their chief designer and builder was T H Eslick, with 14 years international amusement park r experience. Williams was a Canadian who owned cinemas in Melbourne and Sydney. Some of k his team of 20 fun-fair experts had experience at Coney Island, including Louis Corbeille who was responsible for the original illusions and effects there, and the Whitney Brothers who had c invented the while-you-wait photographic studio, that was first seen at Coney Island. The visit of 1 George V to India in 1911 is said to have popularised and influenced both the Mughal forms and 9 the Scenic Railway, said to be a replica of the roller coaster Eslick built for the Great Durbar 5 Exhibition in Bombay during the king’s visit. 0 ,
n 4 o w
r e On 13 December 1912, Luna Park opened, illuminated by 15,000 electric light bulbs (some say 80,000, though Coney Island had 250,000!). Of these, there are still 20,000, now slowly being replaced with energy-efficient equiivalents. This was not a common sight in 1912 when electric light had only existed for twenty years, and 22,300 people came on the first night and 8-10,000 every Saturday night. The park closed in 1916 due to the war, but the scenic railway kept operating.
Already in 1912 its motto was, as now: ‘Just for fun.’ Attractions including the Scenic Railway encircling the perimeter, with the central space for live entertainment, including a Highwire, Bowl Slide and a Ferris Wheel. Sideshows included Pharaoh’s Daughter from Egypt, but live entertainment was the main attraction: acrobatic high wire artists, trick cyclists, unicyclists, a Swedish diver in flames, performing animals, a live band and MacRobertson’s Electric Fairy Floss Candy Spinner. Moon symbols were everywhere, including the tea-terrace balustrade. Rupert Browne, a Melbourne artist known for very little else, designed the famous Mr Moon’s face.1 Interestingly, the face at Sydney’s Luna Park is that of a leering female. This face, formed in 1994 in polyeurethene, is the park’s eighth different face since it opened in 1935.
But the next year, Williams returned to America and his film production house, First National Films subsequently grew to become Warner Brothers. So his partners, the Philips Brothers, Herman, Leon and Harold, also American showmen from Los Angeles, took over, forming a new company, Luna Park Limited, chaired by the ubiquitous Sir John Monash, who came once a week. They added new sideshows including Aunt Jemina’s Washing Day in which ‘hilariously,’ a Negro woman sitting over a washing tub fell in to the water when hit, a Hoopla Bazaar with a Canadian Log Walk, the Egyptian Palace of Fortune, Poker Toss, Ping Pong Pitch, Association High-Kick, the Chocolate Derby, the Arabian Dart Game and the Melbourne Joy Club, where the aim was to knock the hats off 16 silver-tailed inebriates rolling out of a pub.
But it was the 1.5 km Scenic Railway travelling at speeds up to 120 km/hour and the giant Bomarzo-like mouth that attracted swarms of revellers and by 1914, 8-10,000 people came to Luna Park every Saturday night and nearly 500,000 over the year, almost Melbourne’s population. Now the Scenic Railway is 976-metres long, but it’s oregon timber structure, originally in Canadian oregon, but now Audstralian timber, is 300 metres high. It has three trains including one recently restored by Brian Atkins. The train climbs up towards ‘Safeway bend’ from here, sheer momentum carries the two-tonne cars looping twice around the track. It is one of only two in the world with a ride-on driver who stands in the middle of the carriages and controls the speed. The railway has been ranked as one of the world's top eight roller-coasters and dubbed a "Coaster Classic" by the American Coaster Enthusiasts club. These
It was fully restired in 2008. ‘There is one wooden roller-coaster in the US that is slightly older, but it doesn't operate. The only other roller coaster that comes close in age is in Tivoli Gardens Copenhagen, built two years later in 1914.
It is not only the oldest operating scenic railway in the world, but also probably the last cable operated vehicle in Australia.
Through Mr Moon
Both the mouth, and its recent Post-modernist echo, the Sam Newman house, where cars enter through Pamela Anderson’s mouth (22, for faces), may be seen to be ultimately derived from the powerful medieval symbol of the devouring entrance through which the souls of the damned
1 Browne is not mentioned in Alan McCulloch, Susan McCulloch and Emily McCulloch Childs, The New McCulloch Encyclopedia of Australian Art, AUS Art Editions, Fitzroy and Miegunyah Press, Carlton (1968) 2006.
5 transmute down to the underworld. Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) described it in Inferno, which was illustrated by Sandro Botticelli (1444/5-1510) and by Albrecht Durer, in his woodcut etching, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, from The Apocalypse, published 1498. A particularly terrifying depiction of this Luna Park-like mouth is in the twelfth century Winchester Psalter, where a smug angel turns the key in the lock of eternity and the jaws of hell snap shut, entrapping the Damned, forever.
At Borobodur, Jogjakarta, Indonesia, the world's largest Buddhist temple, built in the ninth century, are deeply carved images of Kirtimukha, the swallowing fierce monster face with huge fangs, and gaping mouth, found in the iconography of much Indian and Southeast Asian temple architecture. In Southeast Asia it is Kala and in China it is T'ao t'ieh (or Monster of Greed). This monstrous face with bulging eyes sits also as an embellishment over the lintel of the gate to the inner sanctum in many Hindu temples signifying the reabsorption that marks the entry into the temple.
Borobodur.
6 Another frightening image of the animal Hell Mouth swallowing the Damned, is in a stained glass window in Bourges Cathedral, also 12th century. But its earliest depiction is an ivory carving of c800 in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and most other images of it before 1100 are English. The medieval mouth is sometimes the jaws of the gaping whale monster Leviathan, and for biblical Jonah, the open mouth was entry to the belly of a whale. For the Aztec people, a giant open mouth depicted the hungry, all-consuming earth.
The earliest sculpted giant Hell’s Mouth in a pleasure garden, is at the extraordinary Parco dei mostri, the Sacro Bosco of the Orsini family, at Bomarzo, 20 km north-east of Viterbo, Italy (1552) and there is another Mouth of Hell, hidden in the woods of the Villa Aldobrandini, at Frascati, southeast of Rome, of about 1600. At Bomarzo, the stern strictures of the Church and the constraints of the Renaissance are enjoyably shattered. It seems to me that similarly frightening sensations of being eaten, of entering the pleasurably transgressive delights of the Underworld, as Orpheus did in ancient Greek mythology and returned, occur at both Bomarzo and St Kilda.
The Parco dei mostri, Bomarzo.
In the narthex of the Early Christian Church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin (c1780, 1120-23), also in Rome, is the famous cracked antique marble cistern-cover forming in bas relief the face mask of a River God known as the ‘Bocca della Vertità,’ the Mouth of Truth, placed there in 1632, within which the thrusting hands of the untruthful are retained, or amputated, implying perhaps another layer of meaning to entry through Pamela’s person.
A more multifarious and deeply spiritual invocation is the famous image of the giant face over the south gate of Angkor Wat and that of the 216 deeply and sensuously carved giant stone faces of the Buddha, crowning the chapels and pavilions of the Bayon, at Angkor Thom, both in Cambodia, and surviving from the early 13th Century.
In the Palazzo Ducale, Venice (1340-1425) are bas-relief panels in the form of human faces, through whose mouths, written denunciations were posted to seal the fate of enemies. The
7 Inferno, Paris is apparently derived from the Bomarzo. Then, in Kyoto is the automata-like Face House, by Kazumasa Yamashita Architect of 1974, at corner Ebisugawa-dori and Koromotana- dori.
There is a long tradition that appropriates giant faces as ironic, yet strong design elements of building façades, exemplified in the delicious teratologic Mannerism of the Sacro Bosco garden of the Orsini family at Bomarzo, Italy (1552) and in the Palazzo that Federico Zuccari built for himself in Via Gregoriana 28, Rome (1593) with windows and door as gaping monster-faces, behind which lived both the artist Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1752-3, then the art historian Johann Winckelmann in 1755-68 and that is now owned by the Federal Republic of Germany as the Bibliotheca Hertziana and Max Planck Institute, one of the most famous art history libraries in Italy.
In Java, the Buddhist Temple Candi Kalasan, one of oldest Prambanan Plain temples has a huge kala (dragon) head glowering over a doorway and Plaosan Lor has intricate kala heads above the many of its openings, both about ninth century AD. The Taman Sari, at Kraton Yogyakarta built as a pleasure garden by the first Sultan in 1765, has a gogon’s gaping moth above the main entrance.
The entry to the house at Avenue Rapp, 29, Paris 1901 designed by Jules Lavirotte (1864-1924), has a face with blowfly eyes. The façade of the Inferno, Paris is also apparently derived from the faces of Bomarzo.
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Avenue Rapp, 29, Paris.
In a related image, the two firey orange lamps surmounting the organic stalks of Hector Guimard’s Paris Métro entrances (from 1900) were then said to look like Devil’s eyes at night; the steps of Hades down his throat leading to the belly of the beast.
The Architect’s Steve Irvine's Mowanjum Art and Culture Centre, Mowanjum, near Derby, WA, 2012, has a roof when seen from above, depicts a Wandjina spirit being’s face, an image painted obsecssively by the three local aboriginal tribes: the Worora, the Ngarinyin and the Wunumbul.
At the other end of the St Kilda railway line at Flinders Street is yet another giant mouth, its entry on the corner of Flinders and Swanston Streets, is J W Fawcett and H P C Ashworth’s railway station (1901-11) that had opened just two years before Luna Park and itself derived from, or at least related to J R Scott’s entrance to Waterloo Station (1901-22), in south London. The entry ‘mouth’ which geeted visitors in 1906 to the Dragon’s Gorge, an enclosed rollercoaster at Coney
9 Island is not literally figurative, but a broard arch, more like that of Waterloo or Flinders Street Stations, but guarded by two enormous scary wyverns (but called dragons), their eyes glowing from green electric light bulbs. The ride caught fire in 1944, leading to the closing of the park two years later.
The Dragon’s Gorge, Luna Park, Coney Island, 1906.
A more recent St Kilda face, possibly referencing that at Luna Park is Cassandra Fahey’s Sam Newman House (2000-01, 7 & 22). An even more direct and recent response to Mr Luna’s face, to which it is opposite, is Ashton Raggatt McDougall architects’ The Face, four-storied apartments (2010), corner Carlisle and Acland Street, clad with a copper façade derived from Salvador Dali’s (1904-89) Surrealist picture, Sleep, 1937 of a drowsy monster’s melting cow-pat face.
Later again in 2010-13, Elenberg Fraser architects designed and completed a $40 million five- storied apartment block in Barkly Street, called Luna Apartments, St Kilda. Its 289 solar protection elements are made of shimmering golden ALU 6010 German anodised aluminium mesh, some fixed, some folding. The evocations of coruscating Luna Park, and its giant face continue.
Many more attractions
In 1914 more patriotically, the River Caves expressed British and Australian naval history and its monuments and patrons hurled crockery at an effigy of Kaiser Wilheim II at the ‘Kaiser’s Kitchen’ show in the Palace of Illusions. The 1914/15 and 1915/16 seasons were equally successful.
In 1916, the Great War closed Luna Park. The Scenic Railway remained operating, but the Park was only opened for patriotic events and following a dispute about the lease and post-war materials shortages, it did not completely re-open until 1923, as New Luna Park. Only the Scenic Railway, the Palais de Folies (renamed Funnyland) and the River Caves (surmounted by a faux snow-capped mountain) survived from before the war. Luna Park was now targeted at children, who were admitted free to Saturday Matinees. New attractions included: the Whip, the Water Chute, Noah’s Ark and the Supreme Thrill Machine (the Big Dipper). A restored Luna Park Big Dipper carriage is now held in the Museum Victoria Collection.
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sk0912 Aerial Surrounds OK, 1933.
1923-1984: fun and fires
But the new centrepiece in 1923 was the Philadelphia Toboggan Company’s (PTC), built in Pennsylvania, still the largest and most ornate of the 24 carousels known to survive in Australia. It was ordered and erected in 1913 for the White City Amusement Park, Sydney, which closed at the declaration of war and never re-opened. So the Phillips brothers snapped it up for £15,000 and it operated until 1991, repainted 24 times.
The PTC made 80 carousels from 1903-31. They were one of the most highly regarded manufacturers and the last to stop making carousels. Only 25 PTC carousels still operate worldwide. The Luna Park carousel, PTC #30, was one of the company’s finest four-row machines; the only one it exported and its working drawings survive. It has 68 horses (66 jumpers and two ‘king horse standers’) four abreast, two Roman chariots, cherubs on the ‘rounding boards’ and 26 scenes depicting leisure and hunting and the company sign with tambourines and trumpets, flanking mirrored shields carved with angel-heads painted on the central aperture, by Max Soltman of the PTC, under head painter Gus Weiss. Its theme, as with PTC#20, 21 and 22 (1911-12) was ‘war and peace,’ expressed in the armour, swords and shields following the ‘Eagle’ war chariot and the flowers and butterflies of the ‘Colombia’ peace chariot, whilst the golden lead horse has both a war helmet and an angel.
During the 1920s, there were 1,400 patrons each day at Luna Park. The first Dodgems (‘dodg’em’) ride in Australia, opened at Luna Park in 1926 and it still operates with 11 cars. Leon Philips purchased it in the United States, it was installed whilst the Phillips were also rebuilding the Palais Theatre (3) and occupied the first floor of the Games Arcade building, a romantic Gothic Chateau, with its own Scenic Railway station. It is not known what the first ‘cars’ looked like, but American equivalents from c1920, were oval capsule tubs, not resembling automobiles. Sydney’s did not open until 1935. In 1928, the Water Chute became a Jack and Jill tumbling down the hill experience (like an American Bowl Slide) and the Goofy House appeared.
Hit by the Great Depression, Luna Park suffered its first loss in 1931 and in 1932, accepted voluntary liquidation and the Argus newspaper feared it was attracting the ‘wrong classes of people to St Kilda.’
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But it survived. In 1934, Ray Johnson (43) designed a building for the Scoota Boats in a huge water tank at Little Luna Park on the Triangle Site (3), across Cavell Street, a large shed with a rising sun motif on its gables housed the Swirl and there was a giant revolving vertical Ferris wheel with peripheral passenger cars, a ride designed and constructed Ferris, by George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr, an American engineer (died 1896) as a landmark for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, intended to rival the Eiffel Tower, centrepiece of the earlier 1889 Paris Exposition. There was an even more highly decorated merry-go-round that is now relocated to Canberra, the Scooter Boats in a huge water tank, and a miniature train, travelling through landscaped countryside through tunnels and across bridges.
Luna Park held Big Band competitions, and the Caterpillar, Pretzel and probably the Whirler and Ghost Train were installed, though the first death was sustained on the Big Dipper. The Ghost Train is technically a Pretzel dark ride, bought from the hugely successful Pretzel Amusement Ride Company of New Jersey. It is derived from the first single rail ‘dry’ dark ride developed by Leon Cassidy in Bridgetown, New Jersey in 1928.
A double-flanged wheel guided cars on electrified track, emitting showers of sparks in the dark. By doubling back repeatedly via hairpin bends, a long track is compressed into a modest rectangle. Patrons in toy steam trains with five to seven cars experienced ‘fun devices’ of skeletons, ghosts, ‘noise makers’ and hanging black threads scarily brushed the faces of passing patrons. Until c1995, a resident (human) ghoul was employed to scare the riders. About 65 dark rides are known to survive in the world.
For Luna Park’s Silver Jubilee in 1937-38, the carousel was enclosed in a giant birthday cake. During the ‘brown-out’ of lights during World War II, Luna Park continued to operate, being particularly popular with American servicemen. It became, as Nolan observed, associated with sexual desire and looser morals. Historian John Slater described John Percival’s complex evocation of Luna Park, its carnival exuberance and its carousel in the war-time brown-out for soldiers on leave, as an unashamedly seductive, make-believe place: ‘a respite of forgetting.’
In the 1940s, patrons could have their photo taken on a stage-set representing the standing at, or behind a ‘bar,’at a window of the Sprit of Progress, the famous streamlined Sydney-Melbourne train, or sitting on the moon. In the early 1960s, it also had a small reciording studio where you could record youyrself singing a song and 30 minutes later, it would come out as a vinyl recording.
In 1951 the Rotor was installed, and the Penny Arcade of mechanical games machines and popular rides was renovated. By the 1950s, it had deteriorated to be the favoured rendezvous of Bodgies and Widgies and in 1957, both Harold and Leon Philips died and control passed to their financiers, the Abraham brothers, who sold the lease to their relatives, the Hyams brothers who operated Luna Park until 1987. So Luna Park remained unaltered for thirty years, suffering from operators without imagination and uninterested in injecting capital. In the late 1960s, spirited architecture students held parties there.
In 1970, scenes from the quaint, but surprisingly frank and influential film saga The Naked Bunyip, directed by John B Murray and made by Southern Cross Films Pty Ltd, were filmed at Luna Park. It follows the adventures of a callow youth (Graeme Blundell), selected to survey the sexual mores of Melburne and Sydney, with numerous digressions. An interview between Blundell and a photograpoher occurs in a depolated Luna Park, then he peruses a peep-show and the crazy mirrors. The entrance mouth is never shown.
By 1983, both the River Caves (a fire risk) and the Rotor (unpopular) also went and even the Big Dipper disappeared in 1988. Only Mr Moon’s Face and the Entrance Towers, the Scenic Railway and the Carousel remained from 1911.
12 There have been numerous fires in the St Kilda foreshore and beyond. In 1926, the 1904 Sea Baths (1) were destroyed by fire, later the same year, a second fire destroyed Griffins’ Palais Pictures and in 1968 Griffins’ Palais de Danse interior and the adjoining Stardust Ballroom totally destroyed (3). In 1979, Luna Park’s 1934 Ghost Train was destroyed and in 1970s-80s Bojangles nightclub in the St Kilda Baths (2)1981 Nolan’s Giggle Palace, the Shoot em up’ Gallery and most of Luna Park’s arcades were destroyed by a fire. Also in 1981 fire destroyed the Town Hall (33), St Moritz (the Novotel site) was destroyed in 1982, and in 1989 the Railway Station (19) roof was destroyed by several fires. In 2004, the Pier Kiosk was destroyed by fire and in 2007 the Palace Nightclub destroyed by fire before demolition. No-one was charged.In 2014 Republica at the St Kilda Baths (1) was twice the victim of arson attacks for which nobody has been charged.
The perceptive architect Allan Powell (7 & 13) recalls the ‘thrilling’ empty space in Cavell Street, between Luna Park and the Palais towards the sea, depicted above, now cluttered with street furniture and ‘villagized.’ In 1981, the National Trust classified Luna Park, the first recognition of its cultural value and six years later Heritage Victoria registered it. In realising its cultural significance, the community supported its conservation and the Friends of Luna Park was formed in March 1993. That year, the owners drafted a grand Development Plan, but it was smoke and mirrors because concurrently, Luna Park’s lease was offered for sale.
1985-2008: conserving an icon
In 1987, when the lease was sold to racehorse owner Dennis Marks and his partner Mr Goldberg, it was reported they had waited seven years to gain possession, whilewatching the success of Dreamland on the Gold Coast and Australia’s Wonderland in Sydney. In 1990, it was the subject of an exhibition at Linden Gallery (8).
From 1985, the carousel severely deteriorated, horses were left in the weather, one was lost, four heads went missing, and legs were broken. Eventually, from 1997-2002, $2,200,000 was spent on its restoration, using archival 1913 photos, was completed directed by Nigel Lewis, conservation architect. All 68 horses, two chariots, 25 scenery paintings and 35 plaster cherubs were conserved fastidiously. The carousel includes a band organ manufactured by Limonair Frères, Paris in 1908, an impressive and rare Art Nouveau case, one of only three in the world. Conservation of its façade has now been completed, but not yet the organ itself. In 2008, Nigel Lewis was responsible for obtaining a permit to rebuild the elevated part of the Scenic Railway.
Though still attracting 450,000 patrons a year to its 20 rides, who brought in $2 million revenue, in 1994, headlines told that Luna Park, now looking shabby, was for sale, when the leaseholder, racehorse owner Dennis Marks, who had the previous year been given a 50-year extension to his lease till 2044, had scrapped a major $15 million refurbishment. He was concentrating on his $4 million purchase of the Seven CreeksEstate near Euroa, his Rub-a-Dub car washes and his aptly named horse, Let’s Elope.
Finally, in 1998, BCR investments (or BCR Asset Management), an Adelaide Superannuation Fund investing in tourism sites, bought the 45-year lease and implemented elements of the Plan. The towers were repaired in colours of the 1950s chosen by the artist Leigh Hobbs and the 1936 Pretzel, the 1911 Entrance and Scenic Railway were refurbished. Browne’s first plaster face was discovered partially intact underneath an unfortunate concrete layer applied in the 1960s that had softened the sharp facial creases and presented a more bland appearance. So this 1911 face was used as a basis for a new glass-fibre reinforced face in the form and with the complex expression that had not been visible for 70 years.
For 80 years, Luna Park’s Mr Moon face had become a recognised meeting place for a good night out, like meeting ‘under the clocks’ at Flinders Street Station. US soldier M Sam Burkes, 87
13 met Elma May his Australian partner in 57 years marriage there in early 1942. In July 2001, Mr Burks brought his daughter Toni and granddaughter Sydney to St Kilda to reminisce.
The milder previous Luna Park entrance and Cavell Street, c1981.
The Scenic Railway from Shakespeare Grove, c1981 Now the face is not only the most recognisable icon of St Kilda, but was one image of Victoria shown to British and worldwide television audiences of up to one billion, to introduce Melbourne as the site of the 2006 Commonwealth Games. Earlier, the City of St Kilda had adopted the image of the Scenic Railway on its letterhead. In 2007, a mural depicting the Luna Park face was painted in a lane at the corner of Brunswick and Johnson Streets, Fitzroy, right at the other end of the 112 tram route.
In 2001, a proposed $60 million redevelopment scheme of Luna Park was scrapped in favour of a $10 million version, in which theming replaced big gestures. The park closed for five months so this could be implemented. Except for the heritage structures, it was stripped and new
14 infrastructure, a 300-seat function space and nine new rides were installed, including: the Spider, the Red Baron, the Enterprise, the Odyssey ASI Simulator and Metropolis.
In 2004, the Scenic Railway (1912) Station was ‘revitalised’ by repainting with a ‘Moorish influence,’ the dome ‘elevated,’ and eight of the 16 spires demolished, by FMSA [Fooks Martin Sandow] Architects commissioned by Luna Park Operations, to achieve a ‘more cohesive and logical link with the heritage-listed scenic railway structure.’
In 2005, a group including truckie csar Lindsay Fox, paid the Victorian government $7 million for the lease of Luna Park ‘for fun,’ and on 14 December 2007, another ‘major upgrade’ was announced. Luna Park would become a ‘24-hour entertainment precinct’ partly roofed, with restaurants, replication of the Giggle Palace and live performances, with Fender Katsilidis (11 & 14) as the architects. It was believed that the purchase was linked to the group’s bid for the Triangle site, which failed (3). In the almost three years since then, the Council has received no planning permit applications for any works. A few ‘cheap’ rides and a W-Class tram have been added, but the park is only open weekends and public holidays and is believed to be still losing money.
On Luna Park’s 99th birthday in 2011, Lindsay Fox, now only co-owner, announced that he wanted Luna Park to become a community charitable trust. He wanted it to be surrounded by ‘marvellous botanical-type gardens and great restaurants’ but couldn’t resist the dig that that can’t be done on limited space (that presumbably the lease of the Triangle Site would solve for him).
Luna Park’s current rides and other attractions include: the Ferris Wheel, Twin Dragon, Red Baron, Ghost Train, G Force, Street Legal Dodgems, Metropolis, Shock Drop (formerly Coney Drop), Odyssey AS1, Enterprise, Arabian Merry, Spider, Silly Serpent, Pharaoh’s Curse, the Scenic Railway and the Carousel. In the Coney Drop, a platform is slowly raised as participants dangle in harnessthen, lets goand allows them to plummet sickeningly towards the ground and Pharaoh’s Curse vigourously swings a cageful of masochists upside down.
The redundant cast iron turnstiles survive, their metal plates inscribed with:
THE ELLIPTICAL IMPROVED PATENT TURNSTILE C ISLER & CO ARTESIAN WORKS BEAR LANE SOUTHWARK LONDON S.E
C Isler & Co, established in 1881, were better known as artesian well sinkers and engineers, which is why their factory was the Artesian Works, but they were also manufactured turnstiles. Two fine Isler cast iron turnstiles also survive at the entrance to the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin, Dublin.
The company was still in business by 1961 as artesian well engineers and boring tool manufacturers
The steel bolts corrode in the unforgiving saline atmosphere and cockatoos eat the Oregon timbers. Since 2006 every day, maintenance man Robert Brent’s walks around the whole track, taking 20-90 minutes, and then drives the train round as well. He replaces popped steel bolts with more durable timber plugs. And he takes photographs.
A severe storm in February 2005 flooded Luna Park’s entrance and washed away $250,000 of sand from Middle Park beach. By June 2007, the future risk of flooding from rising sea levels and
15 intense storms was front-page news (3). A detailed climate-change risk assessment of ten square kilometres of St Kilda warned that global warming might cause water levels in the bay to rise by 450 mm by 2020 and 2,850 mm by 2100. Luna Park was at risk. That month, a Nicholson cartoon in The Age graphically depicted Prime Minister John Howard’s gaping mouth as the entrance to Luna Park, flooding with torrents of water that is labelled: ‘Climate Change politics.’
Luna Park, the Triangle, St Kilda Pier, the Sea Baths with its underground car park, six kilometres of bike trails, the 96 and 112 trams, Beaconsfield Parade and 9,000 houses, including those along Elwood Canal, were all at risk. The Triangle lease had already been signed, but Council assured us that the developer had to submit to the planning permit process, which would consider potential flooding. Insurance premiums would rise, or be withdrawn. The Age’s 2 June report was spread across pages one and two, with a dramatic digitally enhanced front-page image of Luna Park’s entrance awash with enticingly surfable waves.
Luna Park’s mouth even made it to the national politics of climate change in the business pages. In a swipe at The Age’s image, Herald Sun Business commentator, Terry McCrann, recalled the ‘mad left’s’ 1960s slogan: ‘Hey hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?’ and naughtily speculated whether The Age was proposing: ‘Hey John, how many Luna Parks will you drown this decade?’
Luna Park was voted the National Trust’s Victorian Heritage Icon for 2007 and on 8 September 2008, appeared as an image on a 55 cent stamp designed by Simone Sakinofsky and released by Australia Post, as one of Australia’s seven most-loved tourist precincts. By late 2011, it was even being considered as the new home for the revamped Big Brother reality television series in 2012.
On 29 December, a blackout caused 20 people to be trapped in rides and 25 January 2008, three children were stranded for 20 minutes and had to escape in a cherry picker, when a Scenic Railway car stuck on a crest. And the Pet Shop Boys pop group recorded an ominously foreboding song they had written in 2006: ‘Its always dark in Luna Park,’ they sang, over and over again. Rem Koolhaus, one of the world’s most perceptive architects, in his early book, Delirious New York (1978) spent a chapter exploring Coney Island, and concluding: ‘The Metropolis leads to reality shortage: Coney’s multiple synthetic realities offer a replacement.’
In 2011, the script-form illuminated light-bulb sign, erected in the 1930s above Mr Moon’s face was removed, because the load of its reinforced concrete slab backing, which weighed 1.5 tonne was causing the face to fracture.
On 14 December 2012, a day late, Luna Park celebrated its centenary and the film A Century of Lunacy Memories of Melbourne’s Luna Park premiered later that month.
During 2013, Luna Park appeared in the Gingerbread Village at the Melbourne Town Hall, including the scenic railway, the carousel, clowns and carnival food.
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The Gingerbread Village.
In October 2015, Luna Park acquired its first new structures in decades: a three-level café a ‘events centre,’ and passed through Mr Moon’s mouth: seven ten-metre high carved sculptural carnival figures in the tradition of brightly coloured carnival art. Designed by Mark Ogge, built in the Philippines by a team of 40 sculptors and painters., they depict a diva with six musicians: trombone, accordion, saxophone, flute, French horn and clarinet.
17 Luna Park sculptured figures from the Philippines.
In November 2016, Luna Park and the Palais (3) were featured in Myer's famous Christmas Windows display now in its 61st year and enjoyed by an estimated 1.2 million Australian and international visitors each Christmas, which tells the story of Corinne Fenton's new children's book One Christmas Eve, illustrated by Marjorie Crosby-Fairakll and set on Christmas eve, 1968 in St Kilda. The creatrive dirctor John Kerr said recrerating a miniature Luna Park carousel was a challenge, but well worthwhile. 'Luna Park reminds me of everything about Christmas – the twinkling lights, the happy kids.
By December 2017, when its toilets the most populat in the area, Luna Park was spending over a million dollars on maintenance each year. For only the second time in its history, an entry fee of $2 was charged, to recover that cost. Luna Park has 800,000 visitors each year.
References
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Andrew, Paul, Trick, BSG Gallery, 322 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, 2008, www.brunswickstreetgallery.com.au
Antico, Rinaldo, Luna Park After Dark, Luna Park After Dark II and Luna Park After Dark III, photographic images. Australian Heritage Commission, Register of the National Estate, No 14,662.
Australia Post: www.stamps.com.au/shop/stamps/tourist-precincts
Avery, Milton (1885-1965), The Steeplechase, Coney Island, 1929, Oil on canvas, 81 x 102 cm, 1929, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Sally M Avery, 1984.
Banagan, John, Luna Park, Melbourne (1991), cibachrome photograph, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
Banagan, John, Tram St Kilda (1982), cibachrome photograph, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, printed c 1992.
Barrett, Peter, ‘Behind Closed Doors: Luna Park,’ the(melbourne) magazine, The Age, 25 May 2012, pp 30 and 31.
Beckett, Clarice, Luna Park 1919, oil on board, private collection.
Bennett, Dianne, and William Graebner, Rome the Second Time, 26 April 2012, for the image of Bomarzo, http://romethesecondtime.blogspot.com.au
Borobodur, image from National Library of Indonesia, 2003.
Boyd, Arthur, Fallen horse and head: Luna Park, 1943, reed pen and ink on paper, 25.9 x 36.2 cm irreg.), National Gallery of Victoria.
Boyd, Arthur, Luna Park, c1943, pen and ink on paper, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, Bequest of John and Sunday Reed, 1982.
Boyd, Arthur, Organist with Head and Beasts, 1943, pen and ink on paper, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, Bequest of John and Sunday Reed, 1982.
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Boyd, Arthur, Children with Kite and Butterfly, 1942-43, pen and ink and wash and gouache on paper, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, Bequest of John and Sunday Reed, 1982.
Boyd, Arthur, Dog Devouring Cripple, 1943-44, pen and ink and wash and gouache on paper, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, Bequest of John and Sunday Reed, 1982.
Brother’s Luna landing, Herald Sun, 5 December 2011.
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Cooper, J C, An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols, Thames & Hudson, p 111, which includes a photograph of the terrifying page from the Winchester Psalter.
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Durer, Albrecht, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, from The Apocalypse, published 1498, woodcut etching, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
Eidelson, Meyer and Joe, A Century of Lunacy Memories of Melbourne’s Luna Park, 2012. [Film]. www.environment.gov.au/heritage National Heritage List. Luna Park was said to have been nominated to the National Heritage list, but this is not true. It should be. www.flickr.com/photos/23885771@N03/4867830069/ The Dublin turnstile.
Foster, Andrew, ‘Images of Port Phillip Bay,’ Angela Robarts Bird Gallery, Gasworks Arts Park, 2010.
Fried, Frederick, A Pictorial History of the Carousel, 1964, Appendices.
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19 Holt, Stephanie, Julia Murray, Jennifer Phipps, Ian McDougall & Sam Marshall, Luna Park and the Art of Mass Delirium, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Bulleen 1999, catalogue including images of several of the art works mentioned here.
Holy Bible, Job, Chapter 41, for Leviathan’s jaws as the entrance to hell.
Koolhaas, Rem, Delirious New York. A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhatten, The Monacelli Press, New York (1978) 1994, pp 28-79.
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Larwill, David, Luna Park, 1979, oil on canvas, private collection.
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McMahon, Neil, ‘Luna Park sttues “gobsmackingly beautiful,”’ The Age, 9 October 2015.
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Matt Kemp Photography [postcard]. http://melbournewalks.com.au/film-launch-luna-park/sk0912-aerial-surrounds-ok-1933/ for links to photographs from the State Library of Victoria, Luna Park and City of Port Phillip and community members.
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Nolan, Sidney, Icare, 1940, transfer drawing on paper, Gift of Sir Sidney Nolan, 1984, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Templestowe. Reproduced in Kendrah Morgan, Paula Dredge, Lesley
20 Harding, Sidney Nolan, early experiments, with Narelle Jubelin: Coda, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen 2012, p 13.
Nolan, Sidney, Abstract Drawing, 1940, transfer drawing on paper Bequest of John and Sunday Reed 1982, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Templestowe. Reproduced in Kendrah Morgan, Paula Dredge, Lesley Harding, Sidney Nolan, early experiments, with Narelle Jubelin: Coda, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen 2012, p 13.
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Nolan, Sidney, Untitled (Luna Park), c1941, enamel on glass negative, Private collection, UK.
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Nolan, Sidney, Untitled (Big Dipper), c1940, enamel on canvas, Bequest of Barrett Reid, 2000, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Templestowe.
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Percival, John, Soul Singer at Luna Park, 1942-43, oil on composition board,124.0 x 90.0 cm
This work was actually inspired by the Jazz night club scene in Swanston Street, which was a haunt for service people on leave, which Percival transposed to Luna Park.
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Tucker, Albert, (Luna Park), c1945, pen and ink on paper (in sketchbook), Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen 2009. Reproduced in Dr Juliette Peers, 1940s Melbourne. Photographs by Albert Tucker, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen 2009, p 45.
Tucker, Albert, Little Luna Park, St Kilda at Night, c1945. Ref: H 2008.98/473. Black and white photograph, held by the Albert Tucker Photograph Collection, donated by Barbara Tucker jointly to Heide Museum of Modern Art and the State Library of Victoria, 2008. Ref: H2008.98/49.
22 Reproduced in Dr Juliette Peers, 1940s Melbourne. Photographs by Albert Tucker, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen 2009, p 41.
Tucker, Albert, Luna Park, St Kilda c1945. Ref: H 2008.98/365. Black and white photograph, held by the Albert Tucker Photograph Collection, donated by Barbara Tucker jointly to Heide Museum of Modern Art and the State Library of Victoria, 2008. Ref: H2008.98/49. Reproduced in Dr Juliette Peers, 1940s Melbourne. Photographs by Albert Tucker, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen 2009, p 41.
Tucker, Albert, Luna Park, St Kilda at Night, c1945. Ref: H 2008.98/361. Black and white photograph, held by the Albert Tucker Photograph Collection, donated by Barbara Tucker jointly to Heide Museum of Modern Art and the State Library of Victoria, 2008. Ref: H2008.98/49. Reproduced in Dr Juliette Peers, 1940s Melbourne. Photographs by Albert Tucker, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen 2009, p 41.
Tucker, Albert, Luna Park, St Kilda, c1945. Ref: H 2008.98/363. Black and white photograph, held by the Albert Tucker Photograph Collection, donated by Barbara Tucker jointly to Heide Museum of Modern Art and the State Library of Victoria, 2008. Ref: H2008.98/49. Reproduced in Dr Juliette Peers, 1940s Melbourne. Photographs by Albert Tucker, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen 2009, p 44.
Tucker, Albert, Luna Park, St Kilda, c1945. Ref: H 2008.98/364. Black and white photograph, held by the Albert Tucker Photograph Collection, donated by Barbara Tucker jointly to Heide Museum of Modern Art and the State Library of Victoria, 2008. Ref: H2008.98/49. Reproduced in Dr Juliette Peers, 1940s Melbourne. Photographs by Albert Tucker, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen 2009, p 44.
Tucker, Albert, Luna Park, St Kilda, c1945. Ref: H 2008.98/366. Black and white photograph, held by the Albert Tucker Photograph Collection, donated by Barbara Tucker jointly to Heide Museum of Modern Art and the State Library of Victoria, 2008. Ref: H2008.98/49. Reproduced in Dr Juliette Peers, 1940s Melbourne. Photographs by Albert Tucker, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen 2009, p 44.
Tucker, Albert, Luna Park, St Kilda, c1945. Ref: H 2008.98/362. . Black and white photograph, held by the Albert Tucker Photograph Collection, donated by Barbara Tucker jointly to Heide Museum of Modern Art and the State Library of Victoria, 2008. Ref: H2008.98/49. Reproduced in Dr Juliette Peers, 1940s Melbourne. Photographs by Albert Tucker, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen 2009, p 44.
Tucker, Albert, Merry-go-round at Little Luna Park, St Kilda, c1945. Ref: H 2008.98/48. . Black and white photograph, held by the Albert Tucker Photograph Collection, donated by Barbara Tucker jointly to Heide Museum of Modern Art and the State Library of Victoria, 2008. Ref: H2008.98/49. Reproduced in Dr Juliette Peers, 1940s Melbourne. Photographs by Albert Tucker, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen 2009, p 44.
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23 Wemlinger, Eugene, ‘Luna Park, Coney Island, New York,’ photograph, 1906. Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection, 1996.164.10-18. www.westland.net/coneyisland/articles/thompson&dundy
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