Cottesloe Beach

As I said, first time in Perth.

My entire knowledge of this city has been based before this on aerial shots of Optus Stadium while watching the cricket and the Aunty Donna podcast with their South African Sam's characters and hearing about like Cottesloe Beach and apparently, I don't know.

But no, it is wonderful to be here.

And my friends, oh my goodness me, What a turnout tonight.

The annual event, now billed as the biggest free outdoor sculpture show in the world, is expected to draw about 450,000 visitors to the Sydney exhibition.

Its Perth counterpart will follow in March at Cottesloe Beach.

The milestone is a long way from the event's beginning.

The first exhibition started with $100 in the bank and was run entirely by volunteers working out of founder David Hadley's lounge room.

George shared a small bungalow with a girlfriend, Frizzy Tompkins, who ran a tie-and-dye T-shirt store in Fremantle.

They'd lived together for five years now, always in the same narrow house near Cottesloe Beach.

George liked to surf, and Cottesloe was a good place to do it, as the Indian Ocean broke there unhindered by anything more than the sliver of Rocknest Island.

He still surfed, although the thought of what was in the water beneath him was always in his mind, a nagging fear, repressed, but still there somewhere below the surface.

It's my duty.

Two weeks before the trial was due to take place, he went surfing.

It was early morning, the time he liked best, when there was virtually nobody around at Cottesloe Beach, other than the occasional dog owner taking a dog for a run along the sand.

Such beauty, he thought.

Call it Cottesloe?

Cottesloe Beach is another one.

Cottesloe Beach.

Yeah, yeah.

It's fantastic.

[laughs] She fell asleep once under a beach umbrella- Oh ...

in Cottesloe Beach.

It was a 37-degree day.

Now, she is blonde and vanilla white.

Well, I wish I had a plan to run.

No, I'm still figuring it out, but I'm going to run from Cottesloe Beach in WA to Brisbane.

Which is

fucking huge.

So then it was all up to the navigation, so we used this very experienced skipper who worked for Andrew at the time.

And to start with, we were trying to finish at Cottesloe Beach because we had all of the flags and the finish line and all the paraphernalia, but on that last lap when we were just pushing and fighting and fighting into the waves, one of the paddlers just said, "This is ridiculous.

We just need to make it." And so we ended up, I think we finished somewhere between North Cott and Cottesloe in the end.

I think even since then, probably we could have taken a better route.