The Official Wonderland Website

Wonderland Sydney’s own website, wonderland.com.au, survives as the working copy its developers kept, given to Wonderland History by a former staff member. The copy was last updated on 19 May 2004, three weeks after the park closed, so its home page is the closing notice. The site was built by Forest Interactive in late 2003 on a design from 2002, and an older version from 2001 to 2002 sits in a folder of its own.

The whole site can be browsed as it was: the archived website (the closing notice home page), the site as visitors saw it before the closure, the 2001 to 2002 version and the site map. It was built for 800 pixel screens and uses frames, so it looks small on a modern screen.

What is in it

• The themed lands: Old Botany Bay, Transylvania, Goldrush, The Beach, The Australian Wildlife Park and The Outback Woolshed, each with its rides, food outlets and shops of 2002 to 2004.
• Visitor information: opening hours, the 2003/04 admission prices, the No Worries Wet Weather Promise, how to get there, the park’s facilities and 50 park news items from 2002 to 2004, ending with the closing announcement and the Wonderpass refund details of 16 February 2004.
• The Australian Wildlife Park: the enclosures, the show times and the animals.
• Shows and events: Blinky Bill, Spellbinding Sorcery, The Outback Woolshed show and The Session.
• Media and sponsors: the corporate partners and 18 press releases from 2001 to 2003.
• The Wonderland Conservation Foundation, education and school groups, groups and special events, Wonderpass, employment and the Fun Zone with its celebrity visits and promotions.

What has been changed

The pages are the park’s own HTML, shown as they were. Five things are different. Phone numbers and email addresses have been taken out, though staff names stay. The forms, the downloadable documents and the pages the site’s server generated in 2004 are not included, and a notice stands in their place. The Flash banner on the old home page is shown as the site’s own still image. Four section front pages that were missing from the copy were rebuilt from the section’s own frames. And a thin bar on each page says what you are looking at and links back here.

The facts the site holds, from the closure statement to the admission prices and the outlets of each land, have been added to the pages of Wonderland History where they belong, among them the Food Outlets, Games and Sideshows and Closure pages.

What it looked like 6