Twenty-Nine Dollars, Eighteen Years Later
Melbourne's giant wheel opened in 2008 at $29 a ticket and shut 40 days later when the steel cracked. It reopens October 15, still $29.
On December 20, 2008, a ticket on Melbourne's brand-new Southern Star observation wheel cost $29 for an adult and $17 for a kid. On Thursday, October 15, at 10 a.m., the wheel starts carrying passengers again, tickets already on sale, and the adult Classic Spin is from $29. Kids are $18. Nearly eighteen years, and the only thing that moved is a dollar on the children's fare.
Everything else moved a lot. The wheel opened two years behind schedule, 120 metres of white steel at the edge of the Docklands, a reported A$100 million to build and a forecast of a million visitors a year. It opened right in the middle of the first run of this site, and I checked: the archive never mentions it. Forty days in, on January 30, 2009, it shut. Cracks up to three metres long had turned up in the steel. The operators first blamed that week's heat wave. Then the engineers looked and said no, it was the design. Fourteen cracks, and the company that designed and built the thing, Sanoyas, took responsibility and agreed to build a new wheel. Most of the original went for scrap; the central columns and the passenger cabins were kept.
The rebuild was meant to take about a year. In October 2010 the wheel's management explained the delay by saying the construction was “highly influenced by adverse weather conditions, including rain, wind, [and] hot and cold weather,” which, as far as I can tell, is all of them. In late 2011, with the new wheel half-built, a gust of wind pulled it free of its restraints and it began to turn on its own while the workers ran. It was renamed the Melbourne Star in April 2013 and finally reopened on December 23, 2013, five years after the first time. Three days later someone noticed a cracked window. The CEO called it a “very minor cosmetic issue” caused by a bird strike.
It then ran for almost eight years before the owners went into liquidation and it closed for good on September 6, 2021. In 2024 there was a plan to cut it down, and its 120 metres of steel, which cost around $100 million to build, would have fetched about $500,000. Instead a local operator, Skyline Attractions, took it over in August 2025, and the new owners have put in $11 million: remanufactured motors and cabin clutches, new lighting, VIP cabins, and a bar, a cafe and a gift shop at the bottom. By the time it turns again it will have been dark for 1,865 days.
One rotation takes thirty minutes. Booking online is cheaper than turning up.