The Outback Woolshed

The Outback Woolshed opened in 1995 between Goldrush and The Australian Wildlife Park. The park’s 1995/96 season flyer announced “the new $2 million Outback Woolshed is now open, with 3 spectacular shows daily”, and the Country Music Festival of August and September 1995 was promoted as a celebration of its opening alongside the new look Goldrush.

The staff newsletter The Probe described it in September 1995 as offering “a real life Outback feel”, with sheep being shorn, dogs and horses and the cracking of whips, and noted that its 400 seat twin themed restaurants, the Governor Phillip and The Shearers Rest, had filled a gap in the park’s offering. The 1996 park map listed four shows daily and called the two “our two new fully licensed restaurants serving freshly prepared Aussie-style barbeque meals”. The 1997 souvenir map placed the Woolshed within the Wildlife Park area, next to an amphitheatre used for educational talks.

By 2002 the park’s brochure presented “The Outback Woolshed and Restaurant” as true blue Australian cuisine, with billy tea and damper, two licensed family dining areas open seven days for breakfast and lunch and on Friday and Saturday nights for dinner, and a venue for corporate functions and bush dance themed parties. The Wildlife Park brochure of the same years described The Outback Woolshed Show: stockmen on horseback, sheep shearing, whip cracking, sheep dog displays and Aussie humour. Coach tours in 1999 offered lunch at the Woolshed with the sheep shearing demonstration, and Wonderpass holders had a discount at the Outback Restaurant from 1999.

The Woolshed was built with a multilingual audio system that broadcast a translated narration to headsets worn by overseas guests; Kent Learned describes it on The Woolshed audio page. The park’s staff celebrated Wonderland’s 10th birthday with a party at the Woolshed on 27 September 1995. A show logo named Heroes of the Outback, with a sheepdog photo, survives on the Heroes of the Outback page; whether that was the Woolshed show’s name is not confirmed.

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