North Sydney Sun March/April issue 2021

ABC documentary revives interest in 1979 Luna Park Ghost Train fire

The airing of a three part documentary series by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation about the Luna Park Ghost Train Fire has revived interest in what really happened on that night of Saturday 9 June 1979.

Six children and one adult perished in the flames of the Ghost Train, which started in an imitation fireplace on the train route.

And despite the initial police verdict that it was the result of an electrical fault and a later coronial finding that the “cause of the fire cannot be conclusively stated”, there is still plenty of evidence that foul play may have been the cause of the blaze.

The ABC Exposed series focuses on a survivor, Jason Holman, who was just 12 when he attended Luna Park with his four schoolboy best mates from Waverley College - Jonathan Billings, Richard Carroll, Seamus Rahilly and Michael Johnson. This was the first time the boys had ventured out without their parents. In a cruel twist, Holman survived while his friends perished. Holman has been haunted by their deaths ever since and participated in the documentary via assisting the producers with making sense of the extensive dossier on the fire compiled by the late Martin Sharp, the famous Australian pop artist.

Sharp, who died in 2013, painted the iconic laughing face and viewed the place as a form of inanimate muse.

Sharp was among the first to suspect foul play and was determined to get to the bottom of the mystery of the fire. Martin’s Sydney estate Wirian is effectively a shrine to the Ghost Train disaster: a whole room is dedicated to it: containing thousands of documents, witness statements, official inquiries, court records, media clippings, hundreds of hours of audio recordings with key people connected to the story and a treasure trove of art inspired by the fire and its victims.

Sharp’s biographer and friend Lowell Tarling says the findings of the Exposed documentary have long been known, and buried, for decades. What’s new now is that Holman, via the ABC, is getting some of the revelations out to the wider world.

“I met Jason Holman at Wirian - and he wanted to tell his story, so I guess what’s new is that the story got and the general public got to hear what has been struggling to get out of Wirian for several decades,” Tarling told the North Sydney Sun.

“Like many others I helped Martin with his research, ran tapes on him telling the story and did rather a lot of tidying up and labelling tapes and ordering newspaper clippings. Martin would have been so pleased to have this story out,” he adds.

According to Tarling, Martin was essential in keeping the story alive because of the persistence he showed all the way to his passing 24 years on.

“He taped all the major players, kept the reports, stored a lot of Luna Park's effects. He just wanted to hand the torch over to people who would listen. Back in 1985, I was running around various media trying to get them to run the story. He did too. But they just weren't interested,” Tarling laments.

Sharp was first made aware of the fire by Arkie Whiteley, the daughter of Wendy and Brett Whiteley, who spotted the flames from their nearby Lavender Bay residence.

She called Sharp to tell him, and the news was quickly repeated to him by two visitors. He quickly drove over and was taken aback by the scale of the fire, which also claimed the adjoining Big Dipper, itself closed for repairs.

Sharp saw a form of religious meaning in the deaths: the four dead boys from Waverley College were like the four apostles, even having attended Mass prior to visiting the park. The other three—a father and two sons—were named Godson. And the deaths occurred where the living poked fun at the deceased in the form of a ghost train.

Tarling admits: “Martin didn’t help his case by presenting a whole host of metaphysical and numerological examples to prove his point. Like, there was a train strike so on that day the Ghost Train was the only train running in Sydney. Martin didn’t have to start there as he had a whole lot of testimonials from people who said they smelt an accelerant or they saw bikers.”

Tarling’s book Sharpest catalogues testimony from a number of witnesses on the day who either overheard bikies talking about kerosene and matches, or whose observations of the fire almost certainly suggested the presence of accelerant.

The ABC documentary also highlights from testimony from firefighters who attended the scene that night, who could not understand how police could attribute the fire to an electrical fault within a matter of hours.

Sharp himself originally thought it was “an amazing coincidence” that a real fire had begun in an imitation one.

But he then grew convinced that it indicated an act of “total deviousness,” according to the ABC.

“All those people who went through were fooled by it. So the alarm wasn’t given until it was too late.”

This, to Sharp, was evidence of premeditation.

As Tarling records in Sharpest, “Martin pieced together a theory that Abe Saffron had deliberately orchestrated the conflagration as a way of getting control of the place and turning it into a development.”

“Six children and one adult died, which no one wanted to happen. Martin reasoned his case from synchronicity rather than from empirical evidence, which made some people think his ideas were quite loopy.”

“The years pass. Nobody ever records this period about Luna Park without tabling Martin’s case, whether they agree with it or not. They laughed then but they’re not laughing now.”

As for Tarling, he has an even more elaborate theory that it was not Saffron behind the fire but an associate who wanted to set him up as appearing to be the perpetrator.

As for the documentary itself, it is quite a technical achievement, realistically showing what the burning Ghost Train ride felt like.

It was a massive undertaking that involved building a historically accurate replica of the Ghost Train ride, an extensive risk and safety assessment and liaison with the NSW fire brigade, which was on site during filming.

Documentary maker Caro Meldrum- Hanna said: “One detective said to me, 'You have found information that noone had at the time, this is fresh material', and it demands it to be reopened, whether that be another inquest or something even bigger with more compulsion powers.”

The three-part series of EXPOSED: The Ghost Train Fire is on ABC TV iview. Sharpest, the new biography of Martin Sharp by Lowell Tarling is published by ETT Imprint.