Luna Park Melbourne

That enormous grinning face you walk through to enter Luna Park is not just a quirky entrance. It is heritage-listed. The entire amusement park has been on this St Kilda foreshore site since nineteen twelve, making it one of the oldest continually operating amusement parks in the world. You enter through Mr Moon's mouth, a tradition that has not changed in over a century. The face has been repainted and redesigned over the decades, but you have always walked through a giant open mouth to get in.

Luna Park was designed by showman J. D. Williams, who had also been instrumental in developing Luna Park in New York's Coney Island. The scenic railway roller coaster, that timber structure you can see rattling along the foreshore, is the oldest continually operating roller coaster in the world. It opened in nineteen twelve, the same year as the park, and it still requires a brakeman to ride on every single train, manually controlling the speed through each turn. There are only a handful of roller coasters in the world that still use this system.

Here is a detail most visitors miss. Entry to Luna Park is free. You only pay if you want to ride. This was a deliberate decision to keep the park accessible to everyone, including the families who could not afford the rides but still wanted to enjoy the atmosphere. The park sits right on the beach, and on summer evenings the combination of the vintage rides, the fairy lights, and the bay stretching out behind creates a scene that looks like it has not changed in a hundred years. Which, honestly, it mostly has not. Melbourne has grown up around Luna Park, but the park itself has stubbornly refused to grow up at all.