The Enchanting Existential Dread of Aussie Theme Parks: Chapter One - Mount Tamborine Heaven

“I’M THE MAN ON THE SILVER MOUNTAIN!” - Ronnie James Dio

Queensland's where my story, and my first impression of theme parks begins, the Gold Coast's plethora of summer fun destinations wasn't a long road trip away like Disneyland often is for many Americans. I was born in Southport Hospital, a stone’s throw from Sea World Nara Resort. We had an advantage Floridians don't, you totally can move to Brisbane just for the theme parks, although the place where I learned to walk and talk was even more magical than that: Mt. Tamborine Heaven, also known as Yowie Country where it is said the hairy-men hide their movements under cover of thunderstorms in the mountain’s lush greenery. These frequent storms never frightened me much growing up despite loud crackling on the mountaintop, whenever it sizzles across the sky in Sydney it reminds me of chasing peacocks in the rain like the Jack McBrayer-esque hick I truly am, versus the city boy I pretended to be. My family were watching this indie comedy starring Michael Shannon called Pottersville on Netflix together at Christmastime, halfway through the film they name-dropped Mt. Tamborine when the fraudulent monster-hunting reality show character distinguished between their American Sasquatch and the Australian yowie, we damn near lost our minds seeing what might be the first ever acknowledgement of Tamborine Mountain in any overseas media to date. It was an enchanted mountain that raised me to wonder and imagine, full of scenic locations like Witches Falls and Thunderbird Park that made you feel you were living amongst un-written Ronnie James Dio lyrics. Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Odditorium sat at Surfer’s Paradise as a temple of the weird and wonderful, I went there once with my family who didn’t appreciate it as much as I did and thus I was unable to visit any overseas Odditoriums on our travels to the United States. It was more museum than amusement park, yet its various tributes in waxwork to torture chamber devices felt very The London Dungeon for this part of Queensland. My grandmother (who is no longer with us) drove us to Nerang to rent our VHS movies way back when, and I recall seeing the poster for Disney’s Hocus Pocus sitting in the window. Dracula’s Restaurant loomed over the Pacific Fair playground, which was a theme restaurant for adults I was intrigued with from its spooky exterior with decor you’d expect from Vampire Counts Warhammer sprue kits adorning its entrance. The early nineties were a great time to live in Queensland, new theme parks were springing out of the ground and there was plenty of magic to go around on a state level, a surplus of experiences to be had by a wee nipper whose life had just begun. I learned to read from a book called Dangerous Australians, which was filled with creatures that could murder me with a touch, and I went to wildlife parks where the rangers showed us venomous snakes and spiders in formaldehyde jars. You could make your own fun with the cow-skulls in the yard left behind in the mysterious past, and at one point when my father went to the Phillipines I assumed it was within walking distance so I took off looking for him down the street.

Witches Falls was a popular destination for locals and tourists alike…

…for reasons like this waterfall grotto in the Mount Tamborine area.

I don’t have much to say about the Wet N’ Wild Water Park at the Gold Coast, except that the Double Screamer waterslide was steep and scary and amazing when I was twelve years old. The other water slides like White Water Mountain kinda blur together in a damp haze of nostalgia.

Here’s the Catherine Wheel from the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Odditorium, just as tacky as I remember it.

I’d love to go back to Ripley’s at Surfer’s Paradise someday, but I’m stymied by low funds and lack of a willing entourage.

Wet and Wild was a mainstay for us every summer, with its waterslides which felt like rollercoasters, but Sea World Nara Resort was where I encountered my first dark ride, the enigmatic Bermuda Triangle attraction had just opened in 1994 and I was just tall enough to experience it for myself. There was a lot of context to Bermuda Triangle which flew over my head as a kid, its mythos was built off of pre-Star Wars pulp sci-fi I wasn’t familiar with except through publications like The Usborne Book of the Haunted World, as an original IP attraction not based on any pre-existing franchises, it captured the paranormal atmosphere associated with the real-life location. Between this ride and the two Ghostbusters movies which were shown endlessly on TV, my interest in the supernatural started young and for the rest of my days I was curious about a lot of the ride’s theming which baffled me as a child but is now obvious cribbing from Chariots of the Gods?. The promotional materials for the ride showed an L. Ron Hubbard-ish vista of flying saucers orbiting near active volcanoes like the Dianetics book cover, yet as an adult I can’t help but notice this entire attraction espoused talking points from Ancient Aliens on The History Channel, long before Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull nuked the fridge, Bermuda Triangle was laying down some B-movie pseudo-science which works great as fiction but grates on the nerves of actual archaeologists when presented as fact. Bermuda as depicted by Bermuda Triangle might as well be Lovecraft’s Sunken R’lyeh or Robert E. Howard’s Hyperborean Age, it’s so divorced from the reality of its geographical location and setting, and rolled so deep with the pulp tradition it might just drown in it. It managed to borrow from very pernicious sources without racist depictions of natives, and was one of the more unique theme park rides up there with Rail Chase at Sega World in its ambition. The boat ride into the gaping maw of the gateway is a moment I’ll always remember, it was a little frightening but I loved it all the same even if my brother did not. The scene where pods containing human specimens from various historic eras in stasis as aliens tinkered with them was a haunting vista to behold, and the disappearing UFO was a stunning special effect for the time. The flooding of the terraformed temple made for an exciting escape, splashing through an ionic columned temple before rising up to the final drop zone.

Ancient Aliens draws this handy diagram of the Triangle itself, which is in better resolution than most Bermuda Triangle ads.

Fifteen minutes into Bermuda Triangle and chill and he gives you this look.

There’s smatterings of Oceanic inspired carvings throughout the ride to balance out the Mesoamerican influences, such as this figure here.

Some of the captured-by-aliens aircraft that have gone missing in the Triangle.

One of the aliens atop an aircraft vessel, tinkering with the machinery.

Now somebody’s slapped a Balinese mask’s teeth on Mesoamerican architecture!

Aliens have captured people from different time periods in capsules!

The captive humans have been segregated by gender, with women to the left.

A row of aliens attending to monitor screens, back in the CRT 4:3 days.

Flying saucers and volcanoes, together at last! No Scientology vibes at all.

Tesla coils and lightning bolts encapsulated in these weird devices.

Another alien beside a tribal mask with lightning in its eyes, spooky!

The volcano is erupting! What will happen to our alien invaders now?

The flooding of the ionic columns! The aliens are going to drown at this rate!

You can see the coils where the hellfire-place used to be, I promise you it was massive. (Source for above panels: 1 Sharky)

The disappearing UFO trick, now you see it, now you don’t!

I still don’t know how the disappearing UFO trick was done, probably with holograms.

I’m as surprised as anyone else that the fireplace lasted until at least circa 2006. (Source for above three panels: Charlton Hawkins)

Evidence of the lost Bermuda Triangle logs which descended from above. (Source: Charlton Hawkins)

The pillaging of Mesoamerican architecture for the ride’s theming was justified by the narrative, aliens were terraforming this structure out of thin air and the probe mission inside the volcano received radio transmissions from scientists as you went on your voyage of the damned, until you reached this incline leading to a Tony Jay-tier Hellfire-place close enough to the boat to singe your hair if you weren’t careful. I carry that hot flame in my heart whenever I need to feel brave or young again, and as you dropped down the slope the volcano would erupt. It was a rare breed of dark ride in Australia that was hard to maintain, closing in 2010. The landscape of 1994 was a beneficial era to debut such an esoteric attraction to the masses, as The X-Files hit TV screens and UFO culture would continue to be popular with blockbusters like Independence Day or Men In Black. The truth was out there, and Bermuda Triangle capitalised on this wave without even trying to chase trends because it was ahead of the curve. An active volcano you could explore was revelatory to me at four years old, and I drew pictures of it in crayon in some long-lost scrapbook. It captured my imagination, and there was very little like it in the Southern Hemisphere. Bermuda Triangle was replaced by a mediocre Storm Coaster attraction, which I never had the opportunity to ride myself but the ride-through footage looks disappointing. At some point Australia forgot how to build impressive new dark rides and put their emphasis on thrill rides like Six Flags in the States. So much of my Queensland childhood is gone, but there remains slivers of magic left like the dinosaurs at the Queensland museum and the national parks. I was yet to discover that Bermuda Triangle had one last secret to reveal to me as an adult, it was built atop the remains of an attraction called Lassiter’s Lost Mine which didn’t last long in terms of relative success, it was themed around a flooding mine and one of the main moving pieces was a cow being lifted up on a crane. Very little fragments are available of Lassiter’s Lost Mine, having been absorbed into the iconic Bermuda Triangle, and only a few snippets in eighties souvenir videos show the ride in operation. I was astounded at how lame the predecessor of Bermuda Triangle was, and was grateful to have experienced its superior upgrade in its most uncut form possible. Bermuda Triangle really put Sea World on the map, and allowed the park to compete with Warner Bros. Movie World in terms of excitement, and losing it in 2012 was disappointing to say the least. Sea World to date hasn’t recreated anything close to the enchantment Bermuda Triangle weaved over us in 1994, and for the most part its attractions are for really little kids like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles themed Turtle Power live show and the Spongebob Squarepants 3D film, with not much for the adults to do. Sea World has a bit of an image problem post-Blackfish, but it could solve a lot of headaches if they leaned into the yacht rock revival for the grown ups to enjoy themselves. At present, Sea World Nara Resort is building the New Atlantis themed area with a new wooden rollercoaster to replace the Sea Viper of old, which is the first step in the right direction Sea World has had for a while. The iconic flume ride Viking’s Revenge has been replaced by Jet Rescue, an educational attraction about rescuing sea animals that ties into Sea World’s mission statement, for the most part you come to Sea World for the dolphins and polar bears. Castaway Bay in 2010 added another children’s area to the park’s assortment of lands, which are perhaps over-represented. Somewhere in the eighties, the live shows at Sea World had an influx of clowns on jet-skis, and there was mention of the Sea World “family” which sounded like an underwater cult of initiates compared to the all too necessary update where Smash Mouth’s All Star played in their early 2000s adverts. If you want to communicate fun in the sun, accept no substitutes, Sea World made an excellent choice of soundtrack there. As a theme park, Sea World has a bright future ahead of it once the new revamps are completed and work-walls are torn down, and its animal attractions continue to draw in crowds to this day. It’s been around the longest out of the main Gold Coast theme parks for over forty-five years, and shows no sign of going away even if there isn’t enough to do there to warrant staying at the Nara Resort part of that moniker overnight at the moment. Sea World is limited to its specific ocean theme compared to the other Village Roadshow parks, and unfortunately this neglect of its attractions in equivalent investment has stagnated for a while. You can go see the fairy penguins and seals as expected, plus the Jet Stunt Extreme show, yet you won’t find the diversity of attractions it once had in the nineties when I first went. As of 2020, with Queensland’s borders in lockdown for the coronavirus recovery effort, the parks are shut and new developments are halted. The future looked promising before COVID-19 came along and scuttled Village Roadshow’s best laid plans, construction on the wooden Leviathan rollercoaster, and upcoming Vortex ride is halted and gates closed with no end in sight. New attractions are always good for a theme park in good need of replacement E-tickets, and whilst there may never be another Bermuda Triangle, that fibre-glass volcano will forever explode in our hearts. Sea World Nara Resort has attempted to shake off its perception as a glorified Free Willy zoo for aquatic animals, not everything they’ve done has been successful but I look forward to the post-plague reopening of Sea World once New Atlantis rises from the briny deep.

What little remains on YouTube of Lassiter’s Lost Mine isn’t much, but it’s interesting.

As you can see, it was a boat ride through what should’ve been a mine cart ride at any other park, but Sea World had to stick to its maritime theming somehow.

One of the animatronics on Lassiter’s Lost Mine, covered in mist for the ads.

Here’s the animatronic cow being lifted up into a steel bucket from disaster. (Source for above four panels: JozParks)

The new Leviathan rollercoaster in all of its wooden glory.

Queensland is who I root for every State of Origin, and outside of the parks there’s plenty to see and do, my last visit took me to Netherworld bar and arcade where my friend Rhys and I played X-Men and went to see a 35MM screening of Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards at GoMa. I love Queensland with all my heart and travelling back there reconfirmed my allegiance to the North despite living in Sydney half my life. The parks are long dead and buried here in New South Wales, so I look to the North for inspiration when all seems too dark and dismal. I came back from Brisbane and there was a sign saying Sydney is not the same, it sure isn’t. The roads make sense in Brisbane, and there’s enough green around that you can breathe, whereas in Sydney I often have to suppress an asthmatic cough. Sydney sucks the life out of you, like a New York without a Broadway to spice things up, it’s expensive yet soul-crushing. My mother had to leave Mount Tamborine heaven behind to find work as a Family Court solicitor, I guess there was too few divorce cases to find in paradise, so she had to go where the action was. My cat Wilbur, who I named after Wilbur from Charlotte’s Web because I rented that VHS tape all the time, ran away from me in the transition to Sydney, which is another thing this awful city took away from me. We lived at Glen Ormond Avenue in Abbotsford, where my brother’s cat Danny survived the trip south but was presumably stolen by a cat-burglar according to my mum. After our big move to Sydney, we did on the other hand get plenty of opportunities to revisit Queensland to go to the theme parks on the Gold Coast in the early two-thousands, and we’ll talk about Movie World’s early years next time.

Even Sydney airport admits that my current city of residence sucks, all we have left is Luna Park and dreadful parking lots.