Caspers World in Miniature was a theme park in Victoria, Australia, a bit over half way between Adelaide and Melbourne. I don’t have a definitive source, but I believe it opened in 1976. My one and only visit to Caspers was in 2008, to break up that same, long drive. It’s taken me that much time to come to terms with what we found there.

Despite looking like it, The World in Miniature wasn’t abandoned. The owners still lived out front and we paid to enter. However, it was empty. Outdated exhibitions on unloved grounds. Our detour seemed destined to be a disappointment.

Then we got to the basement of the pyramid, and that’s where we found all the human teeth.

And that’s just the start.

The summer of 2008 was an amazing time to be a music fan. The Australian dollar was weak, the festival promoters not yet bankrupt, the days warm and long. I found myself making several drives along the Princess Highway from my home in Adelaide to Melbourne to see the likes of LCD Soundsystem, Kings of Leon, and Arcade Fire at the festivals held on the east coast.

The Adelaide to Melbourne drive is about 750 kilometers (450 miles), the same distance as Brighton to Glasgow, or Cleveland to New York. Unlike those routes, however, there’s not much civilization between the cities in Australia. The eight hour drive is mostly straight and featureless.

It’s the kind of distance you can get over and done with in a single day, if you leave early, and don’t take long breaks. That’s what I usually did, but every time I passed the town of Stawell I would see the simple sign on the highway advertising Caspers World In Miniature, and every time I would regret not stopping to visit.

I knew nothing of the place, other than it was down a side road behind a country town, and that it was — presumably — the world in miniature. That’s all I really needed to know. I’ve always been fascinated by small things: miniature towns, model railways, the world’s tiniest horse. Perhaps that’s because, at 6"6' tall, your average tiny town is extra tiny from my perspective.

So it was that in January 2008, my eighth time driving past this sign in a few months, I made an impulsive decision. I hit the brakes and took the exit.

Our Visit

Sitting in the car with me is my little brother, Alex, and our friend Zee (who prefers to pretend none of this ever happened). Our trip to Melbourne had been short. We’d left Melbourne before breakfast that morning, after attending the Big Day Out until late the night before.

Neither of my passengers share any of my enthusiasm for delaying our return to Adelaide, but I was driving, and they were too hungover to argue. I drove us down a long, straight road to the gates of Caspers. From the car, through the cross-hatched fence, we spot an Eiffel Tower, maybe ten meters high. An Egyptian style pyramid looms over the road. A tingle of excitement runs through me.

The latest Google Street View of Caspers, from 2010.

The other reason the year is relevant is that 2008 was not the era of the smartphone. If it wasn’t for the compact Pentax digital camera I’d brought along for the festival, then there’d be no photos at all of this visit. I only owned one memory card which was almost full of concert pictures. I wish I’d documented more of this place. I wish I could answer the questions I still have.

It’s also relevant because Caspers World in Miniature is now closed, and has been possibly as far back as 2010. I can’t drive five hours to verify any of this, even if I wanted too.

Entrance to Caspers — in 2008 — is through the house of the owner/custodian. According to the photo timestamps, it’s around midday. A woman greets us, a couple of children who I assume are her family are playing in the background. They all seem surprised to see us. We pay our entry fees in cash — $8.50 each — receive our guide maps, and step into the park.

First impressions, the park is empty, and the park is dry. It’s the very middle of summer, almost the longest day of the year, and we’re visiting a piece of Australia not particularly moist to begin with. But this feels unnaturally dehydrated. Much of the grass beneath our feet is brown, everything we see is dusty, dirty, dead. We find shade in the first display pavilion, a small, concrete kind of bunker where opposing sides contain a dark diorama of miniature figures behind glass. A moment after stepping inside, the lights for the displays click on.

The owner has been watching us.

A photo from the guide map, showing a portion of the Alaska diorama.

After seconds of entertainment in the pavilion, we re-emerge into the sun. Already I feel dejected. While driving by, I’d imagined a sprawling layout of tiny villages, trickling streams, maybe some cities populated with miniature people. I’d wanted to visit a miniature metropolis and stomp around it (but not on it), like an ultra-polite Godzilla. Seeing plastic figurines in fish tanks? I could do almost anywhere.

There was still hours of driving ahead of us, so we skip a few pavilions and visit mini-Holland.

It is about as thrilling as we expect.

Zee and my brother show their approval for my choice of rest stop.

After the photo opportunity (and zero polite Godzilla-ing) we make our way past the locked up wishing well and the dirt-streaked igloo (which didn’t even appear to be miniature?). We head for the top of the hill. There, I figure, the most exciting miniature display in the park will be waiting. Perched on the rise, overlooking the water-less water garden is… A shell museum. A small, single-room building. Inside? A few shelves of dusty shells.

A high level view of Caspers.

There has been no sign of any other person in the park, nor hints anyone has visited recently. My remaining hope for our sojourn is the Steiermark Mountain Railway. I love model railways for the same reason I’m attracted to tiny towns. They’re so little! If there is an afterlife, I hope that it is Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg. There, within an old warehouse in the Speicherstadt district, lies the world’s largest model railway. Almost ten miles of track, over a thousand trains and a quarter-million tiny figurines.

Steiermark Mountain Railway is not a Wunderland. The train is not moving. Even the plastic trees look like they are parched and dying.

At that point we should have gone back to the car. I wasn’t satisfied. I insist we visit the pyramid.

That’s when things get weird.

The Pyramid