Seniors Festival | Author's Platform: in conversation with Helen Pitt

Join us at Ryde Library as Helen Pitt chats about the colourful history of our very own senior Sydney landmark - Luna Park.

Join us at Ryde Library as award winning journalist and author Helen Pitt chats about her new book Luna Park with former Local Studies Librarian and enthusiastic Historian Angela Phippen. The book tells the dazzling, roller-coaster story of Australia's iconic amusement park on Sydney Harbour. It is an extraordinary story of the showmen, shysters and schemers who built Sydney's famous fun park, now a senior itself celebrating 90 years!

In association with Allen & Unwin.

About the Book

'All the thrills, spills and tragedy behind that iconic grin, brought to life by a masterful storyteller.' Wendy Harmer

'A rollercoaster ride through some of Sydney's brightest and darkest stories. A compelling tale, vividly told, and history every Sydneysider should know.' Richard Glover

For decades, the young and the young at heart have loved the Luna Park face and its promise of laughs and thrills - and a whiff of danger.

Helen Pitt has uncovered Australia's intriguing Luna Park story. It's filled with con men and criminals, crooked cops, failed politicians and movie moguls. Like the circuses, from which amusement parks evolved, this is a tale with elephants, performing snakes and many ringmasters.

The story starts in late 19th-century America, and follows the eight fun parks that opened—and closed—across Australia. The most famous of them all, Sydney's Luna Park, has a history that's truly a roller-coaster ride like its trademark Big Dipper, which was shipped piece by piece from South Australia for its 1935 opening.

From the engineering feats of its construction in the dark days of the Depression to the tragic deaths of six boys and a father in the 1979 Ghost Train fire - one of Sydney's most heartbreaking unsolved mysteries - and despite financial disasters, legal battles and closures, Luna Park survives, glittering by the water.

About the Author

Helen Pitt is an award-winning journalist and author. Her first book, The House: The dramatic story of the Sydney Opera House and the people who made it, won the 2018 Walkley Book Award. She has over four decades of experience in the media, reporting from three different continents (Australia, Europe and the America). She has worked as the Sydney Morning Herald's opinion editor, Spectrum deputy editor and as a staff news and feature writer there, and at The Bulletin, HQ magazine and New York Times Digital. She was worked as a reporter at Euronews in France. Luna Park is her second book.