The following is an excerpt from PLAYTIME: AMUSING MELBOURNE THROUGH THE AGES published by City Museum at Old Treasury.

The first Melburnians, in the spirit of emulating our more civilized European antecedents, created theme parks modelled on English contemporaries. Cremorne Gardens was conceived in 1853 by London caterer James Ellis, who emigrated to Melbourne after having managed, and bankrupted, the London Cremorne Gardens. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Melbourne Cremorne Gardens soon ran into financial difficulties, and was eventually purchased by theatre entrepreneur George Coppin in 1856, for £10,000.

Cremorne Gardens was a model of the civilized amusement park of the nineteenth century, which sought desperately to embody a polite Englishness. As the nineteenth turned into the twentieth century, Melbourne found a new role model in America, namely, New York’s Coney Island. Politeness, or ‘a means of imposing social control on a potentially rebellious population’, as James Ellis wrote to Lieutenant-Governor Hotham in a letter pleading the virtues of Cremorne Gardens, turned to riotous abandonment.

Cremorne Gardens lasted a few years only, closing in 1863, but St Kilda’s Luna Park this year celebrates its 95th birthday, having opened in 1912. Similarly the circuses, sideshows and performance-based attractions on the swampy Southbank site, unable to be otherwise developed until the 1950s, remained active for decades in the guise of Prince’s Court and Wirth’s Park.

A hive of amusements inhabited the top four blocks of Bourke Street between Elizabeth and Spring Streets through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Within this short distance revellers on a Saturday night could enjoy the delights of Cole’s Book Arcade, Kreitmayer’s Waxworks, the Mountfords Cyclorama, various sideshows such as ‘The Ghost Show’ (comprising a repertoire of some 50 ‘eerie’ sketches, such as The Ghost in the Pawn Shop and The Egyptian Mummy), and a most extraordinary device known as the ‘Haunted Swing’. A precursor to the modern-day amusement park ride, brave souls were strapped into seats on a platform suspended in a well furnished room. The seats remained stationary while unseen men on the outside began to swing the entire room, backwards and forwards, and eventually over and over. While the ‘riders’ remained stationary it gave the sensation they were swinging, and as spruiker Charlie Fredricksen reports, ‘there were always loud screams!’

The ‘golden-age’ of outdoor amusements in Melbourne has been rightly defined as the century between the gold rush and the advent of television: the 1850s to the 1950s. As citizens of the world descended on Melbourne in their hundreds of thousands to seek their fortune on the goldfields, so too did a new industry spring up to serve their entertainment needs. Fortunately the gold rush coincided with the development of technology, through the industrial revolution, that enabled the modern-day travelling circus to materialise. Earlier entertainments had inhabited immovable ‘amphitheatres’, but the constant wandering of diggers necessitated an infrastructure that was equally mobile. Arising from these needs, the circus was the earliest example of an Australian travelling show.

Playtime follows the interweaving lineage of circuses, travelling carnivals and permanent amusement parks as a means of illuminating a culture of recreation specific to Melbourne. The transience of two of these three phenomena dictate a culture unto themselves, accountable to no one locality. A less lateral approach must be employed in measuring their influence upon this city, namely, by gauging their impact upon Melbourne, and gauging Melbourne’s impact upon them. In doing so Melbourne emerges as a unique melting pot of sin and symbolism, proving that the imposition of social control characteristic of Cremorne Gardens was always destined to be thwarted.

Text © City Museum 2007

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