Fairy Park Is the Last Great Human-Designed Place on This Godforsaken Earth

Growing up, I was not a Horse Girl. I was a Purple Girl.

Horse Girls subscribed to Pony Tales from Scholastic, whereas Purple Girls (age and gender are irrelevant to the definition of a Purple Girl) absolutely frothed fairy and magical princess books, body glitter, tambourines, extracurricular drama in primary school, found Brian Froud’s Faerie books very horny, and their favourite colour was purple. Obviously. 

To be honest, I’ve been hiding that Purple Girl inside of me since I was 15, when I realised that tambourines just aren’t that cool. But it’s 2022: the sluttiest flowers are currently blooming (jasmine) and so are the trees that smell like cum (callery pear). The world is on fire and Shrek is only gaining more popularity, 21 years after its release.

It felt like it was finally time for me to embrace my inner Purple Girl. So I did what any former Purple Girl would do: I went on a date to (probably) the most bonkers theme park in Australia, located in the township of Anakie, Victoria: Fairy Park. 

America and Europe have Disneyland, Queensland has Dreamworld and Wet’n’Wild, Merimbula on the Sapphire Coast has Magic Mountain – even Perth has Yagan Square during the summer. Not to be outdone, it kinda makes sense that Victoria has a park with terrifyingly weird statues of dragons with front-facing eyes (which seems wrong, to). 

I had to see this fucked-up Fairy Park for myself. 

On a beautifully sunny day, my boyfriend and I drove to Fairy Park in my 1993 Toyota Corolla (not important to the story, but I just want people to know I have a cool car). I was wearing the most appropriate dress I owned: a purple, puffy sleeved mini dress that looks like something I would have killed for when I was 5. 

To be honest, I thought Fairy Park was going to be terrible. 

In fact, I imagined it would be pretty similar to a shitty little amusement park In Tasmania called Zoo Doo that I used to go to a lot as a child for my friend's very disappointing birthday parties. 

My main memories of Zoo Doo are watching brightly painted rabbits, racing in a small track, and a red bus that drove through open plains where we would be terrorised by ostriches and camels demanding snacks, sticking their horrible heads through the glassless windows. There was one pirate ship ride, and frogs in ponds (the green jelly in a cup with a Freddo Frog sitting in the centre). 

Fairy Park was so much better.

Fairy Park is Australia’s first theme park, opened 6 December 1959 (only a few years after Disneyland in the USA). Apparently, Luna Park is an amusement park and is older (opened 1912), but because it’s not themed it’s technically not a theme park. 

I can’t believe I had lived all my life without knowing there was a difference between a theme park and an amusement park, but now you know as well.

At the entrance of Fairy Park I was greeted by a garden gnome the height of a house. Humpty Dumpty was also sitting on a wall. I wanted to climb on Humpty Dumpty but he was very well protected by a low fence. Cop behaviour, in my opinion.

I spoke with one of the attendants at the park while I was there. He wished to remain un-named. My boyfriend wondered if the attendant was hiding from the law but I think he was probably just shy.

“I’ve been working here since 2000, so 22 years,” the attendant told me. 

“Do adults ever come here on drugs?” I asked. 

He laughed and said, “oh ha, well I don’t ask them so I don’t know.”

Once I was inside the grounds of the park I knew this place was going to be different. For one thing, you can take your dog with you. For another, there was a designated smoking area. For a third reason, it’s in an insanely beautiful part of the country, and the park is built on a small hill that is made from huge granite boulders. 

The first stop in Fairy Park was the playground. Turns out there was no age limit for climbing on the equipment and it was filled with the kind of things I hadn’t seen in a playground since the 90s. Giant, long metal slides where you can burn your bum on a hot day (combined with picking up extreme speed when sliding down) and the spinny-things that make you vomit (I did, indeed, see piles of vomit near the spinny thing). Also, there was a series of narrow tunnels built in a wall that I climbed through that led me into a castle turret. 

Teenagers clearly used to break into the turret to smoke durries, declare their hatred of their own life and their undying crushes on the interior metal walls in permanent marker. 

On the outside of the wall, where the tunnels were, was a mural of a smoking monkey. I don’t really understand what a smoking monkey has to do with fairies, but I guess if a monkey is smoking a ciggie for fun then maybe the world of Fairy Park was more like the horny world of Shrek than the saccharine world of Tinkerbell from Peter Pan. 

The attendant said that local bored teenagers used to break into Fairy Park, but word had gotten out about their new heavy security with alarms and cameras, and also that when kids do get caught, “their photo goes up in the general store and they’re shamed for it.” Brutal. 

My boyfriend and I left the playground and got into the rest of the park. It was mainly animatronic displays of fairy tales: Puss in Boots, Pinocchio, like a best-of the Brothers Grimm. That makes it sound dull but I was genuinely having one of the funnest days of my life. At one point we were looking at a Jack and the Beanstalk display when, up on a huge gantine hill next to the Fairy Park sign (which was made to resemble the Hollywood sign and you could only really see it once you were inside the park), we saw a very creepy statue-thing staring unblinking down at us from a castle. It scared the fuck out of us. 

Next stop was something I had been looking forward to the most: the Puff the Magic Dragon statue. 

I really wanted to see him because he had front-facing eyes. You’d think a dragon would have eyes like lizards – that is, on the sides of its head. But Puff’s eyes were everything I could have dreamed of: round like plates, front-facing and colour changing. Puff the Magic Dragon would definitely offer me some of his horribly strong weed vape in the car park on the way out. 

We took a path through a bank of mutli-coloured giant mushrooms and scattered fairies with presumptuous expressions on their faces. After we wound our way past grinning gorillas, I was serenaded by a stationary animal band. A dog, a kangaroo, a cow, an emu and a koala were smartly dressed in red vests, all frozen, playing instruments. It definitely felt like a place where well-organised adults would go and take hallucinogens.

Eventually, we reached the castle on top of the hill. Weirdly enough, there was no way for us to access the creepy-looking figure who stared down at us when we were at the Jack and the Beanstalk display. But we did find a model train collection, a nutcracker collection and a fairly empty room with some coin-operated rides that you’d usually find outside supermarkets in tired, outer-suburban shopping centres. To be clear: I don’t mean this as a diss. It reminded me of the type of shopping centre where there would also be a CD store somehow still in operation and a Doughnut King pumping out fresh, hot cinnamon doughnuts. 

I wondered if people ever got married there. The attendant said they used to, but not so much anymore. Suspicious. Maybe Fairy Park had just catered one too many LSD weddings.

The attendant described Fairy Park as “a journey of discovery.” and by the end of my time there, I could say, with a hundred per cent assurance, that he was right. Fairy Park is fucking awesome.

I’d recommend bringing a picnic, and a hit of acid if that’s your thing. Because, as the attendant said, he wouldn’t ask.