Helen Pitt Launches Her Luna Park Book 

March 2026 has been a big month for Luna Park Sydney with the launch on March 3 of a book all about us, in the year we celebrate our 90th birthday.


A party to celebrate Luna Park, by Helen Pitt took place in the Palais on March 5, hosted by radio and TV personality Wendy Harmer, who is also an amusement park aficionado.
“I’ve been to many around the world and here in Australia,” Harmer told the crowd.

"There’s nothing like a theme park to allow you to become a kid again. And as the late, great Luna Park artist-in-residence  Martin Sharp  once said : for Sydney to lose Luna Park would have been like losing our collective childhood."
Harmer described the book as: “a tour de force of journalistic endeavour – painstaking, forensic research, new eyewitness accounts and all wrapped up with Helen’s extraordinary skill as a storyteller.”


“It tells the tale of how Luna Park survived threats from real estate developers to be turned into a world trade centre," an adult entertainment complex ( the mind boggles) a tourist hotel, a Club Med, an Alan Bond Australiana complex, and even the prospect of a Disney- Style theme park.

“And what we have now is a marvellous mish-mash of kitsch and art styles from over the decades, layers as thick as the vomit under the rotor (or protein spills as they call it at the park)... but it seems to me that the story of Luna Park is the story of Sydney itself... with an outlandish cast of conmen, criminals, crooked cops, failed politicians and movie moguls...showmen, shysters and schemers.”

Luna Park VIPs who attended the party included longest serving employee, former CEO now maintenance man Tony Maloney, artist in residence Ashley Taylor who has worked at the park over 30 years, and architect and author Sam Marshall, who wrote Just for Fun, the first book about the park published in the 1990s and was one of the original members of the friends of Luna Park which fought to save it. 

Helen Pitt & Tony Maloney
Helen Pitt & Wendy Harmer

To help Helen cut the party cake (what celebration at Luna Park would be complete without a cake?) were four of the girls who celebrated Helen’s eighth birthday, which was spent at Milsons Point in 1973, just before Martin Sharp repainted the face in his pop art style.

Also in attendance was 96-year-old Dolores King, who as a 16-year-old from Redfern was there the day Prince Phillip (then Prince Phillip of Greece) visited the park, and remembered seeing him in Coney Island.

“I was quite into Greek mythology at the time, and I thought he was a tall blonde handsome Adonis-like character. Later when he married Queen Elizabeth II, that image of the carefree young man did not match the Prince Phillip we all came to know,” she said.

She recalls that day he was escorted out of the River Caves, as he stood up on the ride and was asked to leave. Her story is in the book published by Allen & Unwin.

Performer Patricia Amphlett, better known as Little Pattie, and her song Doing the Maroubra Stomp, spoke about her memories of singing at the park with Col Joye and the Joy Boys. There’s a photo of the singer, well known for singing the It’s Time song for the 1972 Gough Whitlam election, in Coney Island still, where she is sitting for a portrait by the park’s silhouette artist S. John Ross.

Cake Chemistry by Genevieve

The unlikely saviours of the Luna Park story, the two entrepreneurs Warick Doughty and Peter Hearne who re-opened the park on 04/04/04 after it was closed for  most of the 1990s were also there.

They had run the Metro Theatre in George Street and put together the consortium for the 1998 bid which re-opened the park in 2004 (and it hasn’t shut since but for COVID).

Doughty the man who brought the K-tel record selector to Australia and started Demtel (the TV channel known for Tim Shaw’s immortal spiel, “but wait, there’s more, and we’ll throw in a free set of steak knives.”) explains in the book why he always had a soft spot for Luna Park.

He took his then girlfriend now wife Anne (who went on to be Luna Park archivist) on their first date to Luna Park, and they had their first kiss in the River Caves.

Peter Hearne, who before Luna Park championed the live music scene in Sydney as owner of the Hopetoun in Surry Hills and The Annandale Hotel, attended with his wife Anna, who ran the functions at the park in the over two decades they ran the park.

Nicole Brett, the Hardquiz champion with her special subject Luna Park, who also administered the History of Luna Park Facebook group, came all the way from Brisbane for the event.

Helen Pitt, Peter Hearne, & Warick Doughty
Helen Pitt & Nicole Brett

Wendy Harmer described Helen "as rare a parking space in Chippendale, as tasty as a prawn roll at Circular Quay and as scenic as the Rivercat Ride from Barangaroo to Paramatta...stopping at Cockatoo Island along the way.” 

She encouraged everyone, especially Luna Park lovers to buy the book, which follows on from Helen’s 2018 Walkley Award-winning The House, about the Sydney Opera House.

“This is the book Sydney had to have...the definitive history of Luna Park that won’t ever be surpassed,” Harmer said.

For a limited time only you can pick up signed copies of Luna Park which Helen will sign especially for you or for whomever you would like to give it to at  Bondi’s Gertrude & Alice bookstore:

https://www.gertrudeandalice.com.au/product/luna-park-by-helen-pitt-signed-copy/

$34.99 plus postage. Please stay tuned for when you can purchase copies in our retail shop in the coming months.