From Tokyo: there is something universally recognisable about an amusement park perched at the edge of a great harbour, its grinning face lit against the dark water. Visitors from across the Asia-Pacific have made the pilgrimage to Luna Park at Milsons Point for decades, drawn by the same combination of spectacle and unease that defines the best fairgrounds everywhere. What most of them do not know is just how much darkness lurks behind that famous smile.
Award-winning journalist Helen Pitt sets out to correct that in her new book, Luna Park: The Amazing Story Behind the Smile, published by Allen & Unwin in March 2026. In the book, Pitt shares the dazzling, rollercoaster story of Australia's iconic harbourside amusement park, a tale filled with con men and criminals, crooked cops, failed politicians, and movie moguls, with echoes of the circuses from which amusement parks evolved, complete with elephants, performing snakes, and many ringmasters.
Before the so-called 'city of a million lights' first illuminated Milsons Point on opening night on 4 October 1935, the land on which the park stands was steep sandstone cliffs, known as Cammeraygal land. Sydney's Luna Park has a history that is truly a rollercoaster ride, much like its trademark Big Dipper, which was shipped piece by piece from South Australia for that 1935 opening. The rides were reassembled in a record three months by a team of over 800 workers, many of whom had helped build the Harbour Bridge.
Luna Park Sydney was not the world's first of its kind; that honour belongs to Coney Island in New York, which began in 1903. It was not even Australia's first, with Melbourne's Luna Park at St Kilda opening in 1912. In fact, there were once seven Australian Luna Parks, all modelled on the original in America. That broader lineage gives Pitt's account a sweep well beyond the postcard view from Circular Quay.
The book's most charged chapters deal with the event that has shadowed the park ever since: the Ghost Train fire at Luna Park Sydney on 9 June 1979, which killed seven people, six children and one adult, and destroyed the ride. The fire was originally blamed on an electrical fault. A 1979 coronial inquiry and a mid-1980s investigation were inconclusive about the cause. Over the years, claims emerged that the true cause was arson ordered by Sydney underworld figure Abe Saffron, and that NSW Police had covered it up.
The accountability failure preceding that night is damning on its own terms. The children's ride, which snaked through a dark tunnel of black-painted timber, had been inspected by the local council and fire brigade in 1977 and found to be a fire risk. Luna Park's management was given two years to adopt ten fire-protective measures. Those measures had not been undertaken by May 1979, and the Luna Park company was granted another twelve months to install emergency lighting, mark emergency exits, and add a hose reel inside the ride. Just a month later, a blaze broke out. The institutional failure there, a regulator issuing warnings while management deferred action, is a pattern that recurs in many of Australia's worst preventable disasters.
It would be reductive, though, to frame Luna Park's history purely as a catalogue of institutional failure. The park has also represented something genuinely democratic about Sydney life: a place of affordable pleasure on one of the world's great harbour foreshores, accessible to working families at a time when the waterfront was otherwise the preserve of industry or private wealth. Such is its enduring international appeal that visitors ranging from Taylor Swift to director Taika Waititi and the Kardashian family have made the trip to the harbour icon. Whatever its commercial history, the park retained a cultural weight that commerce alone cannot explain.
Pitt's first book, The House: The Dramatic Story of the Sydney Opera House and the People Who Made It, won the 2018 Walkley Book Award. That pedigree matters. The Walkley is journalism's highest recognition in Australia, and Pitt brings that same investigative instinct to a subject that has too often been treated as nostalgia rather than serious history. Despite attempts over the decades to transform the site into a World Trade Centre or an adult theme park, sustained protests and lobbying of politicians ensured it remained an amusement park. The story of how ordinary Sydneysiders fought to preserve it is, in its own quiet way, a story about democratic accountability.
For Australian readers with an eye on the broader region, Luna Park's story sits within a recognisable tradition. Across the Asia-Pacific, public spaces that carry collective memory have repeatedly faced pressure from developers and shifting political winds. The battles fought over a harbourside fun park in Sydney are not so different in kind from those fought over heritage precincts in Tokyo, Taipei, or Hong Kong. What makes Pitt's account worth reading is the reminder that these fights can, on occasion, be won.
The Luna Park Sydney that greets visitors today is the product of repeated reinvention, financial collapse, and community insistence. From the engineering feats of its construction in the dark days of the Depression to the tragic 1979 Ghost Train fire; despite financial disasters, legal battles, and closures, Luna Park still survives, glittering by the water. Whether justice will ever be done for the seven people who died inside that Ghost Train ride remains, as of 2026, an open question. The NSW Police Force established a strike force to reinvestigate the fire after a 2021 ABC documentary series renewed public pressure, but no charges have been laid. That is the kind of unresolved civic wound that a book like Pitt's can at least keep visible.