Cremorne Gardens in Melbourne was Australia’s first amusement park — but it didn’t end well
AUSTRALIA’S first amusement park was built behind a bluestone wall on the banks of the Yarra River in Melbourne. But booze, ladies of the night and lax morals soon spoiled the wholesome fun.
Melbourne
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MELBOURNE’S “pleasure garden” on the banks of the Yarra in Richmond offered the best entertainment available in gold rush-era Victoria.
Englishman James Ellis had leased and managed Cremorne Gardens by the River Thames in London’s Chelsea.
Bankrupted, he landed in Melbourne in 1852 with a plan to replicate Cremorne Gardens in Melbourne to entertain the locals and holidaying diggers from the goldfields looking to relax and spend some of their hard-earned riches.
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Ellis opened his new Cremorne Gardens in September 1853 on a site of about 65 hectares bounded by the river, present-day Cremorne Street, Balmain Street and a boundary parallel to the railway line to South Yarra, which was built in 1860.
The concept of a pleasure garden can be traced as far back as ancient Rome but the idea of a garden designed for recreation and filled with amusements was popular in 18th and 19th century London.
Behind a bluestone wall, Ellis went to work building Australia’s first amusement park.
He constructed a theatre, the Pantheon, on the site. It could take an audience up to 1500 people and was used for concerts and plays.
His gardens had a tea room; a menagerie with elephants, monkeys, bears, lions and tigers; a brass band and a dancing rotunda; three bars serving alcohol; staircases around tall trees offering views of the Yarra and early Melbourne; a lake and a maze.
There was also a circus, complete with performing horses and a nightly tightrope dancing display suspended high above the lake.
Fireworks capped off an evening’s entertainment.
The park opened from 10am to 11pm every day.
Admission prices varied over time but were as little as one shilling (about 10 cents) at one point.
By 1854, a paddle-steamer called the Gondola ferried patrons down the Yarra from Princes Bridge to Cremorne Gardens.
Coppin lobbied and entered a financial agreement with the private Melbourne and suburban Railway Company, which ran train services from Princes Bridge to Richmond, to extend its line 400 metres and build a station just north of Balmain Street to funnel revellers to the gardens.
Cremorne railway station opened in December 1859.
But trouble began brewing early. The presence and prodigious consumption of alcohol, and reports that ladies of the night and other illicit couplings took advantage of darker corners of the gardens, fuelled public protest about lax morals.
Ellis reportedly tried to appease his detractors by donating part of his profits to charities, but his reputation was tarnished.
He sold out to a W.P. Scott in 1855, and a year later, before George Coppin — a Richmond pioneer, actor, comic and showman — bought the gardens with partner Gus Brooke the following year.
Coppin brought his showmanship to the Cremorne Gardens with gusto.
He travelled to England in 1857 and used his superior theatrical contacts to recruit a better class of actors and entertainers to come to Melbourne and perform at the gardens.
The gardens were used by the union movement each year to celebrate the anniversary of the granting of the Eight-Hour Day in Victoria in 1856.
Coppin introduced hot air balloons to Australia under the stewardship of pioneering balloonists Joseph Dean and Harry Brown.
Giant panoramas depicting current events were created on the site.
The first, in 1856, was a working model of an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, near the Italian city of Naples, complete with “lava” flowing from the volcano each night from 9pm.
The first hot air balloon flight on Australian soil took off from Cremorne Gardens on February 1, 1858, flying more than 10 kilometres into what is now the inner northern suburbs.
Brooke and Coppin’s partnership ended in 1859. Coppin became the gardens’ sole proprietor, and Brooke took over their once shared ownership of Melbourne’s Theatre Royal.
It soon became apparent that Coppin’s flair for the performing arts far outmatched his ability as a businessman.
By the end of 1862, he was facing bankruptcy. Cremorne Gardens closed on February 9, 1863, opening for one more Eight-Hour Day anniversary on April 21, 1863.
Coppin was forced to sell the site.
The last train to Cremorne station arrived in November 1863 so bidders could attend an auction of good remaining at the gardens. The station was demolished and the area where it stood has been covered by subsequent rail expansion.
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By 1865, the former gardens became Melbourne’s first private asylum.
But that business also foundered by the 1880s, when politician, land speculator and future Victorian premier subdivided the land on which the Cremorne Gardens stood.
Eventually, a mixture of workers cottages and factories flourished including the Rosella preserves factory, which was built on Balmain Street in the early 1900s.
The land parcel that contained Cremorne Gardens was cut off from the river entirely by the construction of the South Eastern Freeway in the early 1960s.
The area around Cremorne Street, including the former gardens, was named officially as Cremorne in 1999.
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