A missing story, a pair of googly eyes and a $136,000 lesson
A woman has been charged with vandalism after sticking giant googly eyes on a $136,000 public sculpture in Mount Gambier.
That was the headline. And honestly, it's a pretty good one. Googly eyes. A giant blue creature. A court charge. A GoFundMe. It writes itself.
But here's the part that didn't make the news: nineteen-year-old Amelia Vanderhorst may have done more for public engagement with Cast in Blue than the council's own communications team. The memes spread faster than any press release. The GoFundMe generated its own news cycle. And a community that had spent months divided over a blue shape on Bay Road suddenly had something to talk about together.
Accidentally, the googly eyes worked.
It wasn't the first time the community had rewritten the brief. Long before the court appearance, locals had already given the sculpture a name of their own: the Blue Blob. Not Cast in Blue. Not the Beacon Art Project. The Blue Blob. Unglamorous, affectionate, and entirely theirs.
So what went wrong before that? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Cast in Blue was designed by Melbourne-based artists Tom Proctor and Mitch Walker of Huna Studio. The artists built the sculpture on a remarkable story, creating a mythical megafauna drawn from cave-diving expedition photographs gathered by Proctor’s paleontologist aunt, blending elements of multiple extinct marsupials and coloured electric blue as a direct nod to Mount Gambier's iconic Blue Lake. Emerging from the limestone depths as though it had always been there.
ABC South East SA/Josh Brine
That's a remarkable story. A story worth telling.
And to commission it at all took genuine courage. The City of Mount Gambier didn't play it safe. They backed something bold, something with real cultural ambition, chosen from 22 national submissions. A motion to revoke funding was defeated in November 2024. They held the line.
Then they unveiled it with a media embargo that expired thirty minutes after the ceremony ended. Around seventy people attended — mostly council staff.
When meaning isn't embedded in the encounter, people fill the gap themselves. Sometimes with curiosity. Sometimes with a petition. Sometimes with superglue, googly eyes and a magistrates' court appearance.
The brave move was commissioning the work. The missing move was bringing the community along for the ride. Public art doesn’t work without the public becoming part of the story. In the end, all it took was a nickname and a nineteen-year-old with a pair of novelty eyes.
Mount Gambier didn't accept Cast in Blue through a council ceremony. It was accepted in the way communities usually do, by making it their own.
Facebook/Amelia Vanderhorst
Aryani Singh, April 2026