Helen Pitt

We call it a protein spill because it happens so regularly.

We do not like to embarrass the patrons who do lose their lunch.

So they quickly change your clothes, launder them, and it's as if nothing has ever happened.

Yes.

That's exactly how it happens and it's very well efficiently handled today as it was back then too.

My dad completely lit up.

So it turns out, I didn't know when I was writing this book, I was just writing a book about another Sydney Harbour icon across the bridge from the Opera House, that my dad had gone as a nine-year-old with his elder brother, Fred,

He was 20 years younger than his elder brother.

And Uncle Fred, I always knew, had worked on the Big Dipper, but I didn't know he'd actually built it.

So this was an extraordinary story I found from my cousin.

So he was one of the unemployed workers in Depression-era Sydney who lined up at the front to get work.

So he was a mechanic.

He ended up working on the Big Dipper, testing it.

And so he really wanted to take his younger brother to test it out as a nine-year-old.

And Dad...

Even when he took me as an eight-year-old, just lit up at the face of all my friends running on to go on the turkey trot and the joy wheel and the barrels of fun.

But we were all a bit frightened to go down the slide.

So he induced us by walking up the stairs with us and getting the hessian sack out and pushing us off.

And then you couldn't stop us.

We even gamed the devil's drop, which is an even steeper slide.