Life is all about regret. Years race by and, before you know it, it’s too late. I am now forced to concede that some of my dreams will remain unrealized. Sadly, I will never know what it’s like to be nestled under the gilded wing of Johnny Young or how it feels to be a permanent cast member of the Young Talent Team. It’s a pity too – I had plans to really shake things up. In fact, I dreamt of turning the Team squarely on its head by making hitherto unimaginable song choices. I’d worked it out down to the last detail. After Johnny introduced me for the first time, I was going to slug mainstream Australia right between the eyes, not by squeezing out some schmaltzy power ballad whilst staring longingly down the barrel of camera two, but by performing all fourteen and half minutes of The Sugarhill Gang’s hip-hop masterpiece, ‘Rapper’s Delight.’
Life is all about regret. Years race by and, before you know it, it’s too late. I am now forced to concede that some of my dreams will remain unrealized. Sadly, I will never know what it’s like to be nestled under the gilded wing of Johnny Young or how it feels to be a permanent cast member of the Young Talent Team. It’s a pity too – I had plans to really shake things up. In fact, I dreamt of turning the Team squarely on its head by making hitherto unimaginable song choices. I’d worked it out down to the last detail. After Johnny introduced me for the first time, I was going to slug mainstream Australia right between the eyes, not by squeezing out some schmaltzy power ballad whilst staring longingly down the barrel of camera two, but by performing all fourteen and half minutes of The Sugarhill Gang’s hip-hop masterpiece, ‘Rapper’s Delight.’
It doesn’t stop there. The odds are now firmly against my ever opening the batting for Australia or playing centre-half forward for Carlton. That said, given the current form of both teams, odds that were once slim might well be gaining weight. I’m certain I’ll never have a top ten single. Top fifty, perhaps, but definitely not top ten. The chances of me discovering some kind of rare gift or talent are now, at best, remote. But it’s one thing to admit that time has the advantage and that the unlimited possibilities youth brings are no longer available, it’s an entirely different matter to confess that you’ve simply been too slow off the mark.
The truth is, I have not always acted when I should have. Delay is fine if you can come back to things later, but that is not always possible. Sometimes opportunities come knocking but once before they vanish forever and all the wishing in the world won’t bring them back. I speak, of course, of Leisureland.
As a kid, you want to do everything. Chief amongst your aspirations are becoming a permanent cast member of the Young Talent Team and opening the batting for Australia whilst simultaneously holding down the position of centre half forward for the Carlton Football Club. Then there’s Disneyland. From an early age, we were led to believe that there was a magical kingdom where all our dreams would come true. That place was, of course, Chadstone Shopping Centre. But we were also told of another, equally alluring destination where all your dreams not involving buying a t-shirt for less than ten bucks could be realised. But whilst Disneyland may well have been the happiest place on earth, it was also on the other side of the planet. Your parents are never going to wake up one Saturday morning and decide, on a whim, to take the kids to visit Mickey.
Never did the tyranny of distance feel so insurmountable. But life is strange; the slightest twist of fate can change everything. So when news broke in 1984 that there would be an amusement park in nearby Langwarrin, it was as though all my dreams – or at least those which did not involve me being able to fly or shoot laser beams out of my eyes – had suddenly come true. Forget Walt Disney and his bunch of amateurish hacks, we had Leisureland.
I didn’t want to get too far ahead of myself – my parents had a pretty dire record when it came to visiting places that interested us. If we could convince them that the exercise was vaguely educational, we were in with a shot. Such entreaties had gotten us as far as Sovereign Hill (even if my father insisted that we keep panning for gold until we made back the price of admission). We then pushed our luck too far and went to Kryall Castle. (An excursion from which I am yet to fully recover and now simply refer to as ‘A Long Day’s Journey Into Knight’.) If we’d left it to our parents, we’d have been dragged from one antique shop to the next every weekend. Truth be told, adults who believe that it’s appropriate to take five young children shopping for antiques on a Sunday afternoon are already in a fantasyland and have no need to visit another in Langwarrin.
Despite my best efforts, my father did not seem very keen to go to Leisureland. Because they lacked their own flag or had failed to field an Olympic team, he struggled to take them seriously. He preferred what he termed ‘the big hitters’ like Wobbies’ World and Gumbuya Park. Now that I think about it, we never went to those places either. Worst of all, we would often pass right by the front gates of Leisureland as we set off to yet another antique shop. I could see its rollercoaster, log ride and the steam train that ran people from the car park up to the amusement park proper. So near and yet so far. Then it was too late. Leisureland closed in 1992, condemned to become a housing estate.
We simply weren’t meant to be together, Leisureland and I. Life is like that. It’s full of compromise and unexpected changes in direction. In fact, it’s like a rollercoaster which, in this instance, is ironic. I never got to perform Rapper’s Delight by The Sugarhill Gang on YTT either but I do a stirring rendition in my car as anyone who’s pulled up next to me in traffic will attest. And I’m quite okay with that.