The Wheel of Misfortune will spin over Docklands again, and I’m excited

The news this week that Melbourne’s much-maligned, mocked, and long-motionless giant ferris wheel will soon(-ish) turn again – following a complex $11 million deal with Swiss and American backers – has me in a spin.

The story spoke (sorry, can’t resist) to me. But what did I feel, exactly? A mix of disbelief, doubt, disdain, maybe even dread? A lot of D words, which is appropriate given the oversized role the attraction (or distraction) plays in the life of Docklands.

The $100 million wheel opened in 2008, was shut down 40 days later when structural flaws were detected, reopened after extensive and expensive repairs (practically a rebuild) in 2013, and closed again in 2021, a victim of COVID and lack of interest.

You might say the wheel is symptomatic of Docklands itself. It should work, but it doesn’t.

But for all that, one D word I don’t apply to the Melbourne Star Observation Wheel – or M-SOW, as I prefer to think of it – is disaster.

Unlike most Melburnians, I have been on the wheel. I was gifted a spin with my family for a birthday some years ago. It was winter, it was night, the sky was clear, and we could see for miles: shipping containers as far as the eye could see in one direction; suburban sprawl to the Dandenongs in another; the stretch of the bay to Dromana to the south; the strange solitary highrise blip of the Broadmeadows Civic Plaza to the north. And, of course, the dense forest of towers of New Quay, the CBD and Southbank right up close.

People love to complain about the view, to insist the 120-metre-tall wheel is in the wrong spot, that it should be on the banks of the Yarra, at Birrarung Marr, perhaps, or by Polly Woodside, where its much smaller sibling, the 35-metre-high Skyline Melbourne, operates. But I’m not sure that I buy that.

What you see from M-SOW is Melbourne as it really is. A sprawl. A nice bay, with some lovely beaches. A cluster of hills in the distance, but not overly endowed with the geographical magnificence of Sydney, or the lush green and undulating topography of Brisbane.

This is a city to experience rather than to gawk at, and that’s nothing to be ashamed of. But it does make the wheel much more valuable as something to be looked at rather than something to be looked from. It is a landmark, rather than a place from which to view them.

Ablaze with LED lights, the wheel is a beacon, as much a gateway to the city as the magnificent cheese grater and carrot sticks in Flemington. It’s a grand welcome-home marker as I drive from the airport or north of the city to my home on the south side of the Yarra, via another beautifully engineered landmark, the Bolte Bridge.

The biggest problem with the wheel is the weight of expectation that rests on those slender spokes, that hard-working hub. It is single-handedly (or single-wheeledly) supposed to solve all the planning issues that have blighted the transformation of Docklands from industrial precinct to high-density village since the mid-1990s. No wonder it cracked under the pressure.

Before its first “flight” in late 2008, projections were that the Southern Star wheel, as it was then known, would draw 1.5 million paying customers per year, many of whom would presumably go on to splash the cash in The District shopping centre or in the restaurants (oversized and underpopulated) of Waterfront City.

But that never happened. According to a report in trade publication European Amusement Professional, by February 2021 M-SOW had drawn roughly 2 million customers in total over nine years since its relaunch in 2013.

The expectations are still outsized. Lord mayor and master of hyperbole Nick Reece told 3AW this week he was confident “the new Star will attract 300,000 visitors in its first 12 months”.

If it does, good luck to its new owners (who have been courted, according to Dockland News, since at least early 2024). But if it doesn’t – and frankly, that seems much more likely – let’s not write it off as yet another “failure”.

If tourists flock to the wheel, great. If locals get to mock its pointlessness and the supposed drabness of its views, also great. There could hardly be anything more Melbourne than that.

The wheel may never rival London’s Millennium Eye (85 million visitors since 2000) as an attraction, but in its never-ending vicissitudes, it has so much to teach us about hubris and karma and resilience. What goes around, comes around.

And for that alone, we should look upon it with thanks.

Karl Quinn is a senior culture writer at The Age.

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