Dreamworld nightmare blights memories of a Queensland childhood

Dreamworld was a highlight of any Queensland childhood, which is why this tragedy felt so ­incomprehensible.

The Wipeout is one of rides providing some the greatest thrills at Dreamworld.

You were always the last to know. You’d smell the sunscreen first and sunscreen always meant adventure. Your mum was tanned bronze back then, a careless early 1980s Queensland tan, brown and leathery like her summer sandals. She was busy doing things because she carried a secret that wasn’t safe in your head. She was filling water bottles, packing your towel with winking Matilda on it from the 1982 Commonwealth Games.

“What’s going on?” you asked your older brother but he stayed tortuously mute. Tell me. Somebody please tell me. And then she told you. Your mum leaned down so close you could see the freckles on those bronze shoulders, smell the coconut in her sunscreen, and she whispered four of the finest universe-cracking words that can ever reach the big, dumb ears of a suburban Queensland kid:

“We’re going to Dreamworld!”

Dreamworld boasted the world’s longest double loop roller-coaster when the Thunderbolt was opened in 1982.

In 1974 a Queensland truck driver named John Longhurst bought 85ha of cattle country on the northern edge of the Gold Coast and decided to build a world of dreams.

Longhurst was handy. He knew motor mechanics, built boats, built a whole lawnmower manufacturing business. He looked at his new property holdings and he saw Australia’s Disneyland. He saw a paddle steamer chugging down the Mississippi River. He saw a steam-powered railway winding through a Ned Kelly bushland robbery. He saw Queensland kids driving Model-T Fords. He saw Australian families from down south joyously rushing down whitewater river rapids.

He bought a second-hand bulldozer and he asked a friend to teach him how to drive it. For two straight years he worked himself to the point of collapse, gouging out 800m of man-made waterway; 12 hours a day, seven days a week, obsessively hacking out a channel 30m wide and 3m deep that would become the main artery of his grand and impossible creation.

Dreamworld opened on Dec­ember 15, 1981, and a Gold Coast theme park industry opened up around it. Suddenly there was something else to do on the Gold Coast between swims at Surfers Paradise. Movie World would follow. Wet ’n’ Wild water park, 20 minutes’ drive south from Dreamworld along the Pacific Motorway.

If Dreamworld had a theme it was transportation. By road, rail and river, and by dream. Like the gates of Luna Park before it, the gates of Dreamworld were a threshold to a kid, a magic and powerful line between the realms of the real and the make-believe. You walked in through a kind of Dreamworld welcome mansion with the Australian flag waving from a clock tower that was ­entirely unnecessary because time stopped in the rabbit hole of Longhurst’s wonderland.

For so long the scariest ride in Dreamworld was the Rocky Hollow Log Ride, where four guests boarded a fibreglass log boat and navigated a 500m flume lined with spooky-faced figures or moustachioed bandits towards a wondrously stomach-churning cli­mactic splash fall.

In 1982, they opened the world’s longest double loop rollercoaster, the Thunderbolt. This rickety red mechanical snake was emblazoned with a lightning bolt motif but would have been better illustrated with a skull and crossbones. You’d stand in line for 30 minutes for a ride on the Thunderbolt and sneak away, sheepishly, at zero hour, when the rattle and the speed of the roaring snake got too much to stomach. But you’d conquer it next summer, when you were older, wiser and your pre-teen balls were just that little bit bigger.

The entrance to Dreamworld featured a clock but inside time stood still for young visitors.

The fear of these rides, and therefore the thrill, stemmed from a matter of trust. A kid had to take it on faith alone that the rattling bolts and chains beneath any given thrill ride were in safe working order. The more impossible the engineering — the Tower of Terror, the Giant Drop, the Wipeout — the more trust that was ­required, the greater the thrill that was experienced. It all didn’t seem right to young eyes. You didn’t know how these machines could twist like they did; how they could turn you upside down, make you spin, make you fly. It had to be a dream.

The Thunder River Rapids Ride opened in 1986, in the second phase of Dreamworld’s life, when Longhurst’s vision expanded into Gold Rush Country, a brown dirt world that mixed Australian history with the singular thrill of riding a speeding out-of-control mine cart through a fake mountain.

In the terrifying shadow of the mighty Thunderbolt, the rapid river ride seemed positively tame, a pedestrian family ride, giving ­occupants a few unexpected dips and splashes as it cut its rocky way through Gold Rush Country, past the old cottage that once belonged to the land’s original cattle-raising owners, John and Sarah Williamson. Parents in the always long rapid river ride queues would stand by wary and gun-shy kids as young as two and assure them the ride was perfectly safe, that nothing bad could ever possibly happen in this world of dreams.

It was a ­reconvene ride, one of those ­attractions a family would arrange to meet back up at just ­before lunch. You’d all bounce around ­together laughing as a family for 10 minutes, then go grab a hot dog and chips in Kenny Koala’s barn.

The rapid river ride encapsu­lated every part of Longhurst’s outrageous and ambitious dream in 1974. Togetherness. Family. Laughter. Dreams. Which is why the deaths of four people in this setting on Tuesday felt so ­incomprehensible. Longhurst’s joyous and impossible world of ­imagination and endeavour meeting impossible and inconceivable tragedy. The girl by the side of that man-made river screaming: “Where’s Mummy?” The girl stuck in a nightmare within a world of dreams.