FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Australia's Wonderland not forgotten after eight years
Thanks to the dedication of some local residents, the memory of Australia's Wonderland, will not just continue to live on in the hearts and minds of those who had visited, but an exciting online event will bring it back to life.
With all of the hype surrounding the impending construction of Wet & Wild Sydney at Blacktown, it will be very easy for the people of Western Sydney to forget that for 19 glorious years Australia’s Wonderland stood only a couple of kilometers down the M4.
However thanks to the hard work and dedication of a couple of local residents the memory of Wonderland still lives on, over eight years after it shut it gates for the final time. A unique online event is being held on the 10th of October to celebrate the memory of Australia’s Wonderland and to bring people together to share their stories of the magical place.
Founder of wonderlandhistory.net Chris Watts, says hosting this event is particularly special for him. “I grew up five minutes down the road from Wonderland and I still have not ventured too far away. I used to go all the time as a child, and I have many special memories of the place. From our online community it is clear that there are thousands upon thousands of people all over Sydney who have similar experiences. What we want to do with this online event is to bring back the feeling of being at Wonderland.”
In order to re-create this feeling, Chris will be broadcasting some pretty special footage of Wonderland taken from various home movies showing the complete lifespan of Wonderland. Again Chris explains, “We have many hours of footage at wonderlandhistory.net and we are going to distill it down to a couple of hours to show what it was like in the park in three distinct time periods. We will start just after the park first opened, with footage from 1986. Following this we push forward ten years to 1996 and you can see how the park had changed. After this will be some very extensive footage from the final weekend of operation of Wonderland in April 2004, which includes probably my favourite part which is a walk around the entire park. Anyone can take part, by simply joining us at wonderlandhistory.net at 8pm on the 10th of October and you will be whisked back to Wonderland”
Wonderlandhistory.net was incepted not long after the park closed in order to detail the demolition of the park. Over the years it has grown into a massive online memorial shrine to Australia’s Wonderland, featuring over 5,000 photos of the park and 700 documents.
Whilst there is excitement over the arrival of Wet n Wild at Blacktown, there are still many who yearn to re-live their childhood memories at Wonderland and through wonderlandhistory.net many will get that opportunity for one more ride on the Bush Beast, Snowy River Rampage or The Space Probe.
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Interview queries contact Chris at bushbeast@wonderlandhistory.net
