It’s like something out of the Brothers Grimm’s darkest fantasies. Snow White’s cottage, gutted and boarded up. The Three Bears’ house, covered in graffiti and spiderwebs. Down a dim and winding path, an abandoned witch’s house looms out of the trees.
For nearly 20 years, the site of the former Fantasy Glades kids fun park in Port Macquarie has been left for nature to swallow up. Set as it was amid the lush rainforest of the New South Wales mid-north coast, the bush had no trouble reclaiming the castles and storybook cottages that drew families for school holidays and countless birthdays.
Archival images from the Fantasy Glades Facebook page
The Crooked House and its Hall of Mirrors is gone. The red-eyed dragon in its cave. The dinosaurs. The Seven Dwarves, working in their mine. The miniature monorail, powered by an old-fashioned hand crank. The child-size “train” that chugged around the park on wheels.
Thanks to a new owner, what’s left is slowly and painstakingly being brought back to life. There are plans to convert the site into a high-end holiday park, with many of the old buildings and installations preserved and refurbished.
But not everyone in town is happy about it. After being abandoned for so long, koalas have moved in. And as Port Macquarie becomes one of the fastest-growing cities in NSW, the once-iconic park has become a touchstone for local anxieties about koala decline – and might never be reopened at all.
Two of the old buildings on the original site. Photographs: Carly Earl
Fantasy Glades’ unlikely second life
For nearly 35 years, Fantasy Glades was one of the most successful and beloved of the mid-sized family fun parks that once dotted the coast between Sydney and Brisbane. With a part-storybook, part-cribbed-from-Disney theme that would never escape a lawsuit today, it drew more than three million visitors from its opening in 1968 to its closure in 2002.
Unlike many of its counterparts – think the old Big Banana theme park at Coffs Harbour, or the ill-fated Leyland Brothers fibro Uluru outside Port Stephens – Fantasy Glades didn’t close because it ran out of money. In 2002, the owners, George and Pat Spry who bought the business in the 1980s, retired for family reasons. Vague plans for a new park never materialised.
After changing hands several times, businessman Jeff Crowe bought the site in 2015. While he had never visited the park in its heyday, he saw potential in the decaying buildings – and prime location – for a cafe and destination venue that trades on the nostalgia of locals and former tourists.
Jeff Crowe purchased the old Fantasy Glades site and is attempting to restore it. Photograph: Carly Earl
Since buying the site, Crowe has battled the forest, the council approval processes, and the periodic vandalism common of bored teenagers in regional towns.
“Kids would just come through holes in the fence and wreck everything,” he says. When I started cleaning everything out there were condoms, beer bottles, you name it. All the doors were kicked in, all the windows were smashed.”
Crowe’s efforts have saved many of the old buildings from complete destruction. Cinderella’s Castle has been repainted from its trademark pink to a dark blue. The miniature chapel where kids used to stage pint-sized weddings has a new roof. And the dense, clinging bush that choked the site has been cut back, replaced in many places by lawn.
George and Rosemary Whitaker built Fantasy Glades and opened the theme park in 1968. Photograph: Fantasy Glades
It’s been years of gut-busting work. But Crowe believes it will be worth it in the end.
“I sold the gym in Bathurst I owned for 37 years to move up here and do this,” he says. “There aren’t many negative boxes to tick about this place. It’s close to the beach, the CBD. And I liked the idea of having koalas at the back door.”
But those koalas are posing something of a dilemma. Crowe has unwittingly found himself caught in a battle for the future of Fantasy Glades – and for Port Macquarie’s identity.
The overgrown witch’s house. Photograph: Carly Earl
Port Macquarie’s growing pains
On the rare occasion Port Macquarie makes the news for something other than a horrific natural disaster, it’s usually for something very weird. For more than two years, the biggest story in town was the approval, construction and opening of Port’s first Kmart. Sustained public opposition to the introduction of fluoride in the town drinking water in 2012 has culminated in a planned non-binding poll. Last month, a life-size fibreglass statue of Colonel Sanders was stolen from the local KFC. (It was later recovered, minus a finger.)
But under the surface, a lot has changed. Port Macquarie is experiencing a sustained population boom as retirees and young families migrate north from Sydney. Charles Sturt University opened a campus in 2012, bringing in hundreds of students. Like everywhere else, house prices have risen astronomically. On Port’s outskirts, swathes of forest have been bulldozed to make way for massive new housing developments and shopping plazas.
Like a teenager trying out different looks, Port Macquarie has fumbled with its changing identity as it has grown from a sleepy beachside town into a major regional centre. The long push to market itself as a Schoolies destination was always undercut by the fact that there’s never really been anywhere to go for a drink, much less a big night out. Its fumbling attempt to rebrand as a regional arts and culture hub went belly-up when the Glasshouse, a pristine performing arts centre a street back from the waterfront, went a cool $60m over its original $6.7m budget. The state government was forced to sack the council, launch a public inquiry and appoint an administrator, the delightfully named Dick Persson.
Two parts of Port Macquarie’s image have stayed the same: its beaches, and its koalas. One of the largest koala populations in the country lives in the greater Port Macquarie area. Mimicking Berlin’s Buddy Bears tourism campaign, large fibreglass koalas are dotted around town, each one painted by a local artist to resemble figures like Dame Edna, Lachlan Macquarie, and – in one especially unsettling case – a Japanese geisha.
But Black Summer raised real fears that Port Macquarie’s unofficial mascots could be wiped out. A Biolink study in September estimated that 34% of the koala population at the Lake Innes Nature Reserve on Port’s south-west fringe was killed. When the local koala hospital appealed for $25,000 in donations, it was flooded with nearly $8m from around the world.
Even before Black Summer, Port Macquarie’s koalas were in serious danger. As the town expands west into previously untouched bushland, koalas are losing habitat and increasingly running foul of cars and dogs. The council’s most recent koala recovery strategy, which was published in 2018, found the area’s koalas would be “functionally extinct within the next 50 years” without drastic action.
A koala statue painted like Dame Edna on the Hello Koalas Sculpture Trail. Photograph: Carly Earl
The koala conundrum
The passion the koalas inspire – and the fear that they might soon be gone – helps explain the massive success of the campaign to leave Fantasy Glades as it is.
More than 26,000 people have signed an online petition demanding that Port Macquarie-Hastings council reject Crowe’s application to build 11 holiday cabins on the site. The authors of the petition, the Shelly Beach Residents Action Group, claim that the site “is home to koalas, migratory birds and other wildlife” that are “threatened” by Crowe’s plans.
It’s unclear how many koalas actually live in the site and surrounding bush. Much of it is rainforest, where koalas don’t typically live. But a koala management plan prepared for Crowe in 2019 by Biodiversity Australia confirmed that “the site is used regularly by koalas” and concluded that “the site forms part of a larger area of Core Koala Habitat”.
Crowe claims he has broad community support to revitalise the site, has worked extensively with the council to ensure the protection of the site’s biodiversity, and – in accordance with council requirements – has submitted a social impact statement that found the site’s koala management plan “will ensure the safety of the local koala community”. His original plans for the site have been amended numerous times to accommodate the issues raised, including the preservation of koala feeding trees.
Photographs: Carly Earl
But the prospect of more koalas being displaced has struck a chord. After the Shelly Beach Residents Action Group delivered its petition at a council meeting in May, the council promised to ask the state government to consider buying the land and earmarking it for koala conservation.
That is news to Crowe.
“They haven’t spoken to me about it! It’s like I don’t exist,” he says. “They don’t come down here and help clean the place up.”
Crowe is convinced the site will eventually be allowed to reopen. But with the state government potentially getting involved, Fantasy Glades could remain semi-derelict for months or years.
“Look around. It’s just too nice to lock up and let it go to vandals,” he says. “But I’m not fixing anything more until we get approval. Otherwise there’s no point.”
Until there is a decision one way or the other, Fantasy Glades will stay where it’s been for the past 19 years: in limbo.
