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The Luna Park Tragedy · DEADBUG SAYS

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: You are about to partake in the dead, but partcast.
• 0:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as always, this partcast is not for everyone's taste.
• 0:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And certainly not for children.
• 0:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: So if you choose to proceed, I will ask if you want things.
• 0:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Shut the fuck up.
• 0:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Smoke him if you got him.
• 0:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Man enjoy.
• 0:29
  [UNKNOWN]: Thank you very much.
• 0:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Imagine Sydney, Australia, on a cold Saturday night, in June, 1979, winter, settled in.
• 1:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: The air carries a sharp bite from off the harbour.
• 1:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Sydney harbour bridge glows against the dark sky.
• 1:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's steel arch, a constant presence.
• 1:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Below it, on the northern shore, at Wilson's point, lunar parks, giant, face, entrance, grins with neon teeth and lit up eyes.
• 1:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The landmark that is welcome generations of families since 1935.
• 1:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Love the screams from the Big Dipper, and all the other wonderful rides that draw the crowds year after year.
• 1:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the smell of candy floss and hot chips makes in with the body odor from the carnies traveling across the night air.
• 2:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's just for fun, as the old slogan goes, it's just for fun.
• 2:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: But there's night, World Shada, that promise forever.
• 2:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: On this long weekend, crack and night season, when the fireworks usually light up the sky,
• 2:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: A transport worker's strike has halted most of the trains across the city.
• 2:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The only train running in Sydney tonight is the ghost train, inside Luna Park.
• 2:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: But tonight is a quiet night for the park because it's colder than usual.
• 2:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: But families and groups of teenagers still come.
• 3:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: just as they have but that gates.
• 3:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Among them is the gods and family from Warren and New South Wales.
• 3:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: John is wife Jenny and the two young sons.
• 3:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Damien H. Sexton is brother Craig for.
• 3:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they're on holiday in the big city.
• 3:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: They've already ridden the big dipper.
• 3:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And joyed to Rongo Zoo.
• 3:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: But now it's late.
• 3:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the kids beg for just one more ride.
• 3:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the father John begrudgingly agrees and that last ride is the ghost train.
• 3:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Jenny steps out of the line to buy some ice cream for when they finish, but she'll be eaten at ice cream alone.
• 3:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rebecca, she'll be the only one from our family, who will be walking at a loan apart that night, alive.
• 3:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nearby, five boys from Wavelay College, friends since kindergarten, are having the night of their lives.
• 4:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is their first time out, without adult supervision.
• 4:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: They played rugby that day, went to Mars at St. Mary's Magdalene's Rose Bay Church, took the bus to circuit key, then the ferry over to Luna Park.
• 4:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Jonathan Billings, Richard Carroll, Michael Johnson, and Seamus Rahili are all 13, while Jason Holman, the youngest, is 12, and tag along as he often does.
• 4:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The little hangar on, as they say, they're all giddy, jacked up on sugar and chips.
• 4:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: flicking the odd ships at each other, and the shore line up to get on the ghost train.
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: After all, Luna Park's ghost train is a right-of-passage that everyone has to do in at least once.
• 5:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: The ghost train has been there since the park opened.
• 5:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: A 2.5 minute journey through
• 5:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yanda threw the doors, Mark tells the way, and side there are hip-end tones, laughing, bans and skeletons, monsters, dragonheads that breathe via, and Dracula burn his bangs at you from a graveyard, a skeleton in a box.
• 5:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the end, you pass an imitation by a place, a crude fan blowing red and yellow and green streamers towards you, to look like flames, not very convincing mind you, but keep in mind this is 1979, it's all make believe after all.
• 6:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Pretend or an ablac painted timber maze of potitions and plaz the probes The perfect spooky thrill for kids and teenagers in 1979 And all this from a 50 cents you got yourself a bargain As the first carriage is enter the ride has no is something hard The imitation fire
• 6:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: It feels hard.
• 6:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like real heat.
• 6:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Have you think it's part of the show at first?
• 6:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh.
• 6:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: That feels like real fire.
• 6:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: One young woman called out to a friend.
• 6:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Who brushes it off.
• 6:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Another sea-small flames the size of a shoe box at the carriage height.
• 6:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: They assume it's part of the attraction just doing its job.
• 7:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then smoke begins to build.
• 7:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: But many think that it's just the state-of-the-art effects on the ride and the carriages keep going deeper and deeper into the tunnel.
• 7:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Jason Hormon is the last in line.
• 7:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Alone in his carriage, up there is four friends have gone ahead in pairs.
• 7:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: A ride attendant suddenly grabs him and yanks him out, throwing him over the barricade, dropping six feet to the ground.
• 7:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Jason angrily protest yelling up, what the fuck did you do that for?
• 7:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what my friends, I'm supposed to be following those guys.
• 7:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't realize he has a guardian angel.
• 7:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Inside the rickety old ride, the fire takes like a retard lighten matches in a curtain factory.
• 7:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: The wooden structure, dry after decades, filled with litter and flammable props, no sprinkler system.
• 8:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: An attendant who normally patrols the inside is not there that night.
• 8:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: The afternoon shift worker left early, prepared they party.
• 8:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: was not replaced.
• 8:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Smoke paws from the entrance and the exit tunnels.
• 8:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then an empty burning carriage emerges, flames shoot out.
• 8:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The whole place, just one bush.
• 8:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: One witness later described
• 8:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: visible for miles, a column of red violites in the night near the water.
• 8:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Staff react quickly, if the situation is already dire.
• 8:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two young workers, Tony Jacob, and Frank Boitano.
• 9:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Russian, switching on the lights, opening internal doors, and varoxcapes, trying to help people out.
• 9:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: But they don't have a chance, and they're forced back by blinding smoke, intense heat, and a collapsing structure, planes that are shooting out, like they're in a cage, as if they were being banned and forced out.
• 9:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: who froze as to get close by a tunnel, recalls a series of bans and crashes and there was a large explosion.
• 9:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: That by a spread to the nearby areas and rides like the River Caves.
• 9:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: At 10-14 p.m., the first emergency call reached the new South Wales viral brigade headquarters, crews from close-nessed, and neutral bay arrived fast, only to see the emperon, and stare wide-eyed as if shock.
• 10:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm knowing what to do with a fire, so high.
• 10:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the hydrants, they have almost no pressure,
• 10:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: just a drizzle, firefighters have to reposition their trucks to the harbor edge, drop suction hoses into the water, and relay the pump.
• 10:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: From Sydney Harbor itself, it takes over an hour to bring the blaze under control.
• 10:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The ride is completely destroyed.
• 10:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: A collapsed
• 10:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: At first, staff and rescuers believe everyone has been pulled out, as the carriages exited.
• 10:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: But around 11.30pm, as they searched the smoldering wreckage with generators of light.
• 10:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: They make the grim discovery.
• 11:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: At first, what they see, sitting in the carriages, they believed to be ride mannequins.
• 11:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: These melted distorted figures, were human beings.
• 11:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: John Gods and Ernesto Suns, are found headled together.
• 11:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Towards the rear, the father's arms were stretched, protectively over his two young boys.
• 11:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were fused together, like melted Jesus candles.
• 11:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: But they were no salvation here.
• 11:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: They died from burns and carbon monoxide poisoning.
• 11:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And another section, near to the entrance in the center of the ride, lie Jonathan Billings, Richard Carroll, and Michael Johnson, and Seamus Rahali.
• 12:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The four school boys out for their big night of freedom never made it out.
• 12:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Asher, maybe they found freedom, but they found it up in heaven.
• 12:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: If that's where they ended up, Jason Holman, the tag-along, the 12-year-old dude, often been the butt of his older friends' jokes, well, I guess now, he had the last love, as he stared at them melted bodies.
• 12:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: She had lived, but now we would experience a lifetime of survivor's guilt, allowing us at questions.
• 12:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Jenny Godson, waiting outside, with the melted ice cream all over her hands and arms, seized the smoke, and knows instantly, it's not part of the ride and that something is terribly wrong.
• 13:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: She yelled my husband to my children are in there, screaming at the firefighters to save them.
• 13:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: But they just pushed it back.
• 13:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: That interaction will haunt the firefighters for decades.
• 13:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: She is left as the soul survivor of a family.
• 13:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The bark is evacuated and chaos.
• 13:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thousands of people stream out, confused, children crying.
• 13:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Parents gathering at the gate, looking for the sign of their child, Brandhic.
• 13:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: The magic of Luna Bark, the neon face, the laughter, the childhood memories under the bridge,
• 13:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: and are no more.
• 13:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the next day, police are already telling reporters that the cause is most certainly to be an electrical fault.
• 14:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Detective Inspector Doug Knight, leading the investigation states, they are satisfied that the fire was a result of an electrical fault within the building.
• 14:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the right switchboard is found in almost pristine condition and large land affected by the fire.
• 14:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: With damage patterns that fire fighters and some investigators note do not match a typical electrical fault or electrical abortion.
• 14:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: But that is the official line at first electrical fault.
• 14:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The coroner's inquest will come later, an August and September of 1979.
• 14:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: It will find the exact cause of the fire cannot be conclusively stated.
• 14:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Most probable though was the ignition of flammable litter.
• 14:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: By discarded cigarette from someone on the ride most likely.
• 14:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: It certainly wouldn't be for one of those cigarettes hanging out of a Connie's mouth who worked
• 15:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the coroner also didn't rule out electrical failure.
• 15:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The coroner would later be scathing about Luna Pock's Management's failures.
• 15:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: They'd been warned as early as 1977, North Sydney Council and the fire brigade inspected the ghost train, and declared it a fire hazard.
• 15:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: They gave the park two years to install 10 safety measures, including sprinkler systems, emergency lighting, marked exits, and a hose reel inside the ride.
• 15:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: By May 1979, the work had not been done.
• 15:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not one single piece that they had been ordered to do.
• 15:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Extension, after extension was granted,
• 15:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The corn of Fowl loonapag breached its duty of care to patrons, though not to the level of criminal negligence mind you.
• 16:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The seven deaths were ruled accidental, carbon monoxide poisoning, and death by fire, melted to the bone.
• 16:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: But even in those early days, questions linger with those who were there.
• 16:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why did the fire start so suddenly, and spread so ferociously, and a ride that had operated for years without major incident, years has in 44 years, multi-generational and never been a problem, and why was there no attendant inside that night?
• 16:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why was the water pressure so poor?
• 16:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why did some witnesses smell something like carousine, who reports saying someone lurking underneath the ride's platform?
• 17:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those questions will grow louder, and louder, as the years passed.
• 17:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the story of how a beloved Sydney institution built on the site where the steel for Harbor Bridge itself had been fabricated.
• 17:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: became the scene of Australia's worst amusement park disaster.
• 17:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: To understand that night, we have to go back further.
• 17:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The land that Melson's point has deep layers.
• 17:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: For thousands of years, it was Kemera Go County, part of the Aurora Nation, an Aboriginal tribe given that name by early English settlers, with its coves and waterfront used for fishing and living.
• 17:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: After 1788 it passed through the colonial grants.
• 17:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the 1820s James Wilson had settled there, hence its name.
• 18:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Faris ran across the harbor from the 1830s and in the 1920s and early 1930s, the site was transformed into workshops and fabrication yards for a company called Dorman Long.
• 18:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: The British firm building the Sydney Harbor Bridge, cranes, steel beams, railways, the industrial heart of one of the great engineering feats of his age.
• 18:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the bridge opened in 1932, the workshops were dismantled and the land sat vacant.
• 18:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nor Sydney Council put it out for Tender for Public Recreation.
• 18:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the same time, the owners of Luna Park, Herman Phillips and Associates, were looking for a new location after the problems with the local council.
• 18:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they won the Tender on the property next to Sydney Bridge, and in 1935, a 20-year lease was given to them.
• 18:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rides were dismantled in South Australia and shipped north to be reassembled.
• 19:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nearly a thousand workers labored for just three months to build the new park.
• 19:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: architect and scenic artist Rupert Brown designed the iconic entrance face, a giant smiling, slightly eerie visage, flanking towers styled after New York's Chrysler building.
• 19:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was pure, art deco, fantasy, architecture, towers, spears, bright colors, with neon towers
• 19:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lunar Park Sydney opened on the 4th of October, 1935 to immediate success.
• 19:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Entry was cheap, a six-pants for adults, three-pants for children.
• 19:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: The big deparola coast that was the star thrill.
• 20:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: The ghost train was there from day one.
• 20:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a place of pure excapism through the depression, a magnet for service manager in World War II, drunken brawls under the neon lights, and more than one teenage pregnancy, what the blame.
• 20:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Under the manages David Atkins and then Ted Hoppy Hopkins, they added rides like the roader in 1951,
• 20:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was loud, colorful, and slightly ramshackle, and deeply loved, and people would travel from all over Australia to enjoy Luna Park, an iconic part of Sydney, a city state of illusion
• 21:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: But by the early 1970s, the park was showing its age.
• 21:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Television and cars competed for family time.
• 21:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the council raised the lease on the property where it was debated whether Luna Park should move somewhere else.
• 21:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: The park was sold.
• 21:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that had been threats of redevelopment turning the property into a shopping mall.
• 21:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: But plans were rejected.
• 21:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: The park was operating week to week at times.
• 21:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1972 to 73, a new group took over Loona Park, brought in young artists, including Martin Sharp and Peter Kingston, to refresh the park and its look with pop art and vibrant colours, repainting.
• 21:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: The giant face got a psychedelic makeover.
• 21:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Neville Rans Label government of New South Wales was odd-friendly and culturally ambitious.
• 21:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Opera House had opened the 1973 a new theater and dance companies were forming.
• 22:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sydney was shaking things up from its old ways, an image that needed to be updated, with a vibrant, cosmopolitan identity.
• 22:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yet underneath, there were tensions, economic pressures from global oil sharks and inflation, manufacturing the decline, whispers of corruption,
• 22:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And at the end of the day, kids love on a amusement park.
• 22:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: So no one was an hurry to close it down.
• 22:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: If we were talking about entertain in the people, now making a profit, that was another issue.
• 22:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Luna Park remained a working class in middle class family destination, but its infrastructure was badly aging.
• 22:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: A steel runner came loose on the Big Dipper, causing a collision that injured 13 people, many of them children.
• 23:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Safety concerns were already in the air, and then came the night of June 9th.
• 23:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Ghost Train Fire did not destroy a ride.
• 23:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'd expose something deeper about how the park had been run in its final years under old management.
• 23:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: warnings ignored, caused cutting on safety, inadequate staffing, and no fire safety and a structure full of combustible timber, and dark confusing spaces.
• 23:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The coronalated described the interior as a pitch black maze, where even with the lights
• 23:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: You had the follow the track, the find your way out.
• 23:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Normal agency lighting, or clear exit signs, are a ride that have been given deadline, have the deadline, to come up with a way to make it safe.
• 24:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: For the families, the loss was total and sudden.
• 24:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Four school boys who had finally earned their parents' trust for a night at a loan, a father and his two little boys on a family holiday.
• 24:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Found, huddled together and death, fused together, like three burn-in-Jesus candles.
• 24:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Jenny Goodson left to rebuild her life without her husband and son's.
• 24:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Twelve-year-old Jason Holman left with the haunting knowledge that he was pulled out while his friends were not.
• 24:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the immediate aftermath, all of Australia was stunned.
• 24:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Luna Park, that cheerful, slightly spooky icon under the bridge, had become a place of unimaginable grief and horror.
• 25:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: The park closed its gates.
• 25:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: It would not reopen for three years.
• 25:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then under no management and with major changes.
• 25:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: But even as the official story settled on,
• 25:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ben knows first weeks and months.
• 25:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those were already forming among the witnesses, the staff members, and the firefighters who saw the bodies, saw the damage, and later the investigators.
• 25:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: The ride had run like clockwork for decades with no history of any trouble.
• 25:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: A former staff member would say the sudden ferocity of that fire and the reports of unusual smells or groups of people behaving oddly and the ignored safety upgrades.
• 26:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: These would fuel decades of questions, allegations of vows and claims of police mishandling a worse cause for fresh inquiries that continued to this day.
• 26:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is where we're going to begin our story.
• 26:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: In this first episode, we've set the scene, the long history of the site, the park, the people who grew up around there, and said the, who ended up there in 1979.
• 26:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: At that point in a city in transition, the culture alive, but carrying its old problems.
• 26:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the ordinary joyful night, the turned catastrophic in minutes, and side the ghost train.
• 26:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the episodes ahead will go deeper, into the victims, their families, the investigations, and what they missed or what they ignored.
• 27:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: competing theories about how and why the fire started, the allegations of cover-ups and connections, the powerful figures, and the long shadow of this tragedy has cast over Luna Park and the city of Sydney itself.
• 27:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: For now, on that cold June 9th, 1979, has smoked still rows above the harbor,
• 27:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the emergency lights cut through the darkness.
• 27:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: One thing was clear.
• 27:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: The latter had stopped.
• 27:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The magic had been broken, and seven lives, six of them children, had been lost on a place built for fun.
• 27:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: What really happened?
• 28:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: On that night, I'd loon a park, inside the ghost train, and why has the truth been so hard to pin down, for nearly half a century?
• 28:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this story, where he it looks am and carefully, fact by fact, what happened at loon a
• 28:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: You typed out a question I slipped in the toy I'm a glitching, I'm chasing it, I'm cold for the lines On the digital look in the cloud heart In the last dream, and you were so real-time Days in the frame, just to curse a blow But the worst I didn't like, you're on a shelf
• 29:52
  [UNKNOWN]: Yeah.