The Ghost Train was the only train operating in Sydney on the night of June 9, 1979. A statewide rail strike had shut down the network, but at Luna Park in Milsons Point, the rides were running. It was cracker night, the Saturday of the June long weekend, and a near-full moon hung over the harbour as families and groups of teenagers streamed through the famous smiling face at the park's entrance.
Four friends from Waverley College, boys who had been inseparable since kindergarten, boarded the ride together that night. Jonathan Billings, Richard Carroll, Michael Johnson and Seamus Rahilly went in two by two. A fifth friend, Jason Holman, a year younger and sometimes self-conscious about being the hanger-on, followed in his own carriage. He would never see his friends alive again.
Holman had barely entered the ride when an attendant pulled him out and placed him over a safety fence. He waited. Then smoke began curling from the ride's exit. "I started to freak out when smoke started to appear," Holman recalled. "I kept looking for my mates to come out of the ride. I start watching the carriages and they are coming out on fire. I panicked when the flames got bigger and louder. I was over the fence no more than 10 minutes when there was an explosion and I was forced back by the inferno. I started to cry."
A woman nearby noticed the distressed teenager and guided him away, walking briskly toward the park entrance. By the time they reached it, police cars and fire trucks were already converging under the famous face, their sirens splitting the crowd.
Peter Little was in one of those fire trucks. Stationed at The Rocks and only six months out of training college, this was his first working fire. At 10.14 pm, NSW Fire Brigade Headquarters Control in Castlereagh Street had received the first call. Crews from Crows Nest and Neutral Bay arrived first, confronted by columns of smoke rising 100 metres into the harbour sky. Little's unit and the Kent Street station followed shortly after, crossing the Harbour Bridge with the blaze visible from the truck's left-hand windows.
"I remember driving from Millers Point over the Harbour Bridge and looking out to the left and you could see the fire better," Little said. "It was a very intense blaze. The smoke was pluming over the Harbour Bridge."
Getting to the fire proved harder than expected. Luna Park had only a single road in and out, and streams of evacuating people pushed against the arriving crews. Once inside, firefighters discovered the hydrants were delivering almost nothing. "There was no water pressure whatsoever," Little recalled. "The hydrants were there, but there wasn't enough water coming out of the hose. It was just a drizzle."
Crews moved their trucks to the harbour's edge and dropped suction hoses directly into the water. It was in those first frantic minutes, as Little was setting up the initial lines, that a woman approached him near the ride. He asked her to move back. She told him her husband and children were inside.
Her name was Jenny Godson. Her husband John and their two young boys, Craig and Damien, were among the seven people who died that night. The exchange, Little says, has stayed with him ever since.
The Ghost Train's structure, built largely from highly combustible materials and lacking any sprinkler system, offered little resistance to the fire. The ride's 180-metre darkened track, with its foam scenery, papier-mache figures and flammable decorations, collapsed in showers of sparks and burning debris. Firefighters battled to prevent the blaze spreading to the Big Dipper roller coaster overhead and the adjoining River Caves. Both were damaged, and an area known as Toyland was destroyed, though aerial appliances rigged to turntable ladders eventually brought the Big Dipper outbreak under control.
At 11.17 pm, just over an hour after the first call, the stop message was sent to headquarters indicating the fire was out. But the work was far from over. Electricity to certain areas of the park had to be isolated before crews could safely enter, the burnt wiring creating a real risk of electrocution in the darkness. Lighting rigs and generators were carried in by hand.
"I went inside with one of the senior guys," Little said. "It was then we started discovering the bodies. It was quite shocking. The boys were all together. There was nothing much left. They were burnt to the bone of their fingers and toes. It was such an intense fire. We went inside and wandered further around. The father and two young kids. He had been laying on top of them, trying to use his body to shield them."
It took crews more than six hours to carefully clear the debris and recover all seven bodies. Geoff Quayle's account in The Daily Telegraph of June 11, 1979, reported that crews from 12 stations fought for about an hour to control the blaze, and that rescuers using floodlights worked through the night, with a front-end loader shifting tonnes of charred rubble while police and firefighters sifted through the debris piece by piece.
Others who were at the park that night have their own vivid recollections. Geoff Farlow, visiting with friends from Ryde High School, says his group were among the last to go through on the carriages before the fire took hold. Inside the ride, he noticed a real flame in what was supposed to be a fake fireplace, already several inches high, with the smell of electrical burning. He also remembers a young family entering behind his group. "The boys had homemade knitted jumpers on," he said. "They were the Godson boys."
In a terrace in nearby Lavender Bay, a university party was under way when the sirens began. A first-year student named Kate McClymont and her friends slipped through a gap in the park fence and made their way down to the scene. "The scene around the Ghost Train was chaotic," she later wrote. "Firemen were everywhere and onlookers stood by in small, silent groups."
Little's investigation of the site in the hours after the fire led him to a firm conclusion. "There was no damage to the switchboard area," he said. "You could tell the damage wasn't consistent with an electrical fault. Most damage will take place where the fire originated. It definitely wasn't the fuse box or an electrical fault." The cause of the fire has been disputed and examined in the decades since, and the deaths have never resulted in a successful prosecution, a fact that has frustrated the survivors and the families of the victims for more than forty years.
The NSW Parliament and various inquiries have examined the tragedy over the years. The broader questions it raised about public safety standards, the obligations of amusement park operators, and the accountability of those who profit from public entertainment remain as relevant today as they were in 1979. For Peter Little, the operational failures of that night, the water pressure problems, the single access road, the absence of fire suppression in the ride itself, pointed to systemic gaps that should never have existed in a venue welcoming thousands of Sydneysiders on a public holiday.
What the Luna Park fire also revealed was the human cost borne quietly by the people who respond to such disasters. Peter Little was twenty-something years old, six months into the job, the night he told a mother her children could not be reached. The NSW Police and fire services of the era offered little in the way of formal psychological support for personnel who attended mass casualty incidents. The expectation was that you carried on. Many did, and carried the weight of what they had seen for the rest of their lives.
The Beyond Blue support line and the First Responders Health programme now exist in part because of what was learned, slowly and painfully, from incidents like this one. That is a real, if incomplete, measure of progress. The seven people who died at Luna Park on June 9, 1979, deserve to be remembered not as a footnote to Sydney's colourful history of entertainment, but as a reminder of what is owed to the public by those who operate spaces of mass gathering, and to the men and women asked to run toward the flames when things go wrong.