An amazing image of a totally metal play area exceptionally prominent with Aussies throughout the 1970s and 80s has actually revived waves of timeless memories for numerous.
From rising on the flying fox to zooming down the dauntingly high– and warm– slides throughout the college vacations, the Monash Adventure Playground was “the” area to be in the “excellent ‘ol days”, locals recalled online this week.
In its prime, 200,000 to 300,000 revellers would reportedly travel from all over the country to visit the five-acre tourist hotspot near the South Australian and Victorian border. Several of which relived their favourite memories about the playground online this week after a vintage picture went viral.
Some joked that they were surprised anyone got through to adulthood after venturing up the slide’s stairs, while others lamented that such features “wouldn’ t be enabled nowadays”.
Speaking to Yahoo News Australia, Labor MP Louise Miller-Frost claimed Monash was just one of her “favourite places” to go as a youngster.
“As a migrant family we spent every school holiday camping and exploring the country,” she claimed. “After a long drive in the Ford Falcon (vinyl seats, no air conditioning — it was the 1970s!), there it was — a glistening metal playground in a dusty red paddock.”
Aussie MP remembers ‘huge unsafe dips’ and speeding spinning tops
Ms Miller-Frost claimed the “giant slippery dips with humps” made use of to release kids like her and her sibling“into the air” “You felt you might fly off the edge,” she included, keeping in mind if you were “lucky” you can discover a hessian sack or cardboard box to quit “your skin from burning on the shiny hot surfaces”.
“If you slipped off the sack as you flew down the slippery dip, you would know about it!” the mother chuckled.
For the rotating tops, revellers needed to run around the side to obtain it going, Ms Miller-Frost discussed. “Once it started, you had to hold on or you would slide across the floor and hit the other side with force,” she informed Yahoo.
“The entire structure was made of metal bars which made for fantastic bruises and probably a few broken bones. And there was always the risk of falling through the arms onto the hard ground a couple of metres below. Soft-fall playground surfaces hadn’t been invented.”
The political leader claimed the “really interesting” feature of the website was that many of the trips were “entirely human powered” and took substantial initiative to press.
“All the equipment was big enough for adults to go on at the same time as children, and with adult weight behind getting the equipment moving meant once it got a bit of momentum, small children could get thrown around like twigs.”
Who developed the famous previous Monash Adventure Playground?
So that was the crazy wizard behind the famous piece of Aussie background? A regional business owner called Grant Telfer that developed sheds for a living and designed the gopher movement scooter.
While the play area initially began as a solitary slide in the 60s, it was later on full of 180 of his steel productions, the ABC records.
Mr Telfer’s little girl, Alison Halupka, informed the magazine in 2015 that her daddy’s “mind went into overdrive” with concepts after he semi-retired in his mid-40s.
“He had a brilliant mind, while never having done, you know, an engineering degree or anything like that,” she claimed. “And once [onto a] project, he really got his teeth into it for a long time, and he would really focus on it. His fun was thinking up the next thing.”
The play area was compelled to enclose the very early 1990s after it was incapable to protect insurance coverage. It resumed a number of years later on as the Monash Adventure Park and includes modern-day devices and yard.
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