Melbourne theme park... on the way?

[Richard]

Some once-again promising news from Melbourne. The Victorian Government has sold/plans to sell off the Melbourne Showgrounds. This is bad news, until you hear what they've got planned for it. Among things like hotels and shops and whatnot is a $100mil theme park, known at this stage as "Kids Kingdom", featuring thrill rides and the only thing that can possibly go with thrill rides it seems, an animal nursery. And this isn't a project for 20 years down the track - it's expected to be finished by this time in 2006 - that's just three years time! Certainly not to the scale of the fabled Paramount park, but still very promising news that I know I'll be getting excited about as the project moves forwards.

[GoGoBoy]

Oh no... of all things why a kids theme park? What about us big kids? I'll never recover from my sadness over the fact that the Melbourne Studio City theme park never went ahead. They were apparantley going to inject $500 million into just the theme park itself. Such a pity.

[Richard]

Well, the word "thrill" was used when referring to the rides the park would have. How the developers interpret the word thrill or kid I don't know. But hey, probably more than half of the guests at Dreamworld in a given day, queuing for the "big" rides, would be under 12.

[Shaun]

In the newspaper a couple of months back they had a plan of the developed show grounds. The theme park part was very small, although it did have a big red rollercoaster that ran up the side of the showgrounds! It did look big, but from memory didn't look like a fllorless or anything along those lines (It didn't have any corkscrews or cobra turns in it) it was long and skinny. The article also put a fair bit of emphisis into the animal nursery. The show grounds will remain but just be much smaller. Apart from the hotel (whcih didn't take up that much space) I also rember seeing a little convention center, but now I think about it, I think that it's proably the one that is already there.... The main arena is also going to be rebuilt Shaun

[HussRainbow]

dont worry, nothing has been confirmed, also if it does go ahead THRILL rides will go there, dont think its gonna be kids rides, it would be nice to see the Rainbow go there!