Because it's Friday: Danger and Adventure at Monash Playground

A bit of personal nostalgia for my Friday post today. When I was a kid, 7 or 8 or so, back in South Australia, our family often made pilgrimages to Monash, then about a four hour drive from Adelaide. Until sometime in the 80's that's where you found Monash Playground, which was pretty much Disneyland for us kids at the time. It was built, so the legend went, by some crazy guy out of scrap metal, and featured the most amazing slippery-dips (slides), roundabouts, flying foxes (ziplines) and other playthings. They were all very dangerous and completely awesome. The towers for some of the slides were at least 30 feet high, and the metal got so hot in the summer you had to have a burlap bag to avoid getting burned (it also made the slide much faster). The flying foxes soared way above the ground, and you had to hold on until the very end to avoid a painful fall. There were even "roller coasters" you could push up a metal track and then ride down at speed (and hopefully any kids on the tracks would jump away in time). Best of all, it was all completely free: no tickets or lines, just run in and play. (There were also some cool towers were you could drop coins and watch them tumble through Rube Goldberg contraptions, used to collect donations.)

I couldn't find much about Monash Playground on the web; it seems to have been lost to history. I did find this video on YouTube though which proves it really did exist:

Of course between public liability and helicopter parents nothing like this could still exist today ... but boy, was it fun as a kid! Did anyone else have anything like this growing up, or was it unique to rural Australia?

Anyway, that's all for this week. Go out and play this weekend, and we'll see you back here on Monday.

Comments

[Dean Abbott]

Now that looks like a lot of fun!. Definitely did slides similar to these as a kid (not quite as big, but the same style of high, metal slides that you don't want your skin touching, and got super hot in the summer!).

Mostly, we made our own fun: bicycle banked turns and jumps, climbing trees who knows how high up, etc.

[Colin]

I never went to Monash, but I do remember the St Kilda adventure playground, next to the mangrove boardwalk in the north of Adelaide. Not quite as impressive as Monash, but apparently still open, complete with hot metal slides.

[David Smith]

@Colin, I remember going to the playground at St Kilda, glad to hear it's still open. Thanks for the reminder!