Formerly part of the Roghan Road landfill site, this location is now home to the Hidden World Playground, which hides a secret for those who dare to explore.
What some visitors to Hidden World might not realise is that its name is based on a fictional but fitting narrative about a group of year nine students who in 1989 purportedly discovered the rotting remains of a giant creature next to a sinkhole at a waste management facility. The story goes that workers subsequently found other corpses of rotting creatures, and scientists were sent to investigate the sinkholes and the possibility of uncatalogued animals.
This supposedly led to the discovery in 1995 of a system of underground tunnels leading to a large cavern where new kinds of fauna and flora had evolved. The waste station on top of the cavern had leached contaminants that caused the creatures to mutate from insect-sized to elephant-sized. The fauna and flora had evolved to breathe methane but could not survive the outside atmosphere. The narrative concludes with the area being capped off in 2005 to preserve this “hidden world” for future generations.1
The real-life play area designed by Russell Anderson is purportedly based on the discoveries in this hidden world, including life-size representations of some of the “methane monsters”, particularly the sand worm that was the original discovery.2 To discover the ending to this story, visitors must solve a puzzle.
In the rotunda a plaque carries the code that can be unscrambled to read this fictional story, and the matching symbols are found throughout the playground.
- https://www.artplusdesign.com.au/hidden-world-stage-2-3/ (accessed 17 October 2022). ↩︎
- Lucy Brook. “Great outdoors.”Brisbane News, 18 January 2012: 12. ↩︎