Spirits of the Carnival

People have always looked for ways to have fun. Sigmund Freud called it 'The Pleasure Principle'; for more than half a century in Sydney and Melbourne, Australians have called it 'Luna Park'. This is a story of two men who dedicated their lives to the spirit of fun, Ted Hopkins and David Atkins. As the builders and managers of Sydney's Luna Park, they provided delight and laughter for generations of children and the young at heart who came to visit their playground. But their dream to bring pleasure to people would be plagued with difficulty: the Great Depression, a World War, the greed of big business and time itself. With each new decade Luna Park would have to compete with new technology and the dreams of a new age. When it was first built, Luna Park's combination of carnival, theatre and physics created a truly remarkable phenomenon... fun! Behind the smiling face lies a story of sweat, greed, competition and tragedy that threatened to destroy a city's dream forever. Thorburn