05/07/2026
People got properly upset about these lights!
Devonport City Council installs a sound and light show on the foreshore and suddenly half the comment section has a Certificate IV in public infrastructure allocation.
Waste of money.
Fix the roads.
Typical council.
And look, fair enough to ask questions. It is public money. People should ask where it went and why.
But this is where the conversation usually goes sideways.
People look at the object.
Lights.
Art.
Beams in the sky.
And they judge the spending based on whether they personally like the object.
That is not how you measure whether something worked.
It is the same mistake businesses make with marketing all the time.
They ask:
Do I like the logo?
Do I like the ad?
Do I like the photo?
Do I like the colour?
Useful questions, but not the whole game.
The better question is:
What was this supposed to do?
From what I can find, From Sky to Sea cost about $3 million, with $1.5 million from the Federal Government, $750,000 from the State Government, and $750,000 from Devonport City Council.
It is part of the broader Living City waterfront work. It runs nightly as a free public attraction.
The installation tells the story of the Mersey River from Cradle Mountain to Bass Strait, using lights, projections, sound, the foreshore, the trees, the gardens, and those big blue beams that make half the town wonder if Batman has finally given up on Gotham and moved somewhere with better parking (even Batman couldn’t afford our parking).
Now, was it worth it?
I don’t know.
That is the only honest answer at this point.
But the outcome is not “do I personally enjoy lights in the sky?”
The outcome is whether it helps activate the foreshore.
Whether it gives people a reason to walk down there at night.
Whether it creates photos, questions, conversations, movement, curiosity, and a reason for visitors to ask what the hell is going on in Devonport after dark.
Because in the middle of winter, when Devonport is not exactly buckling under the pressure of peak tourist season, these beams still get people looking.
They stop.
They ask.
They take photos.
They bring other people down to see it.
That does not prove it was worth $3 million.
But it does show the thing is doing at least part of the job it was built to do.
And this is where marketing people, business owners, councils, and comment-section economists all run into the same wall.
You cannot judge an investment properly until you know the intended outcome.
A website is not good because the owner likes the homepage.
A logo is not good because the committee agreed it looked nice.
An ad is not good because it got approved quickly and nobody in the office felt personally attacked by the font.
The question is always:
Did it do the job?
Did it create attention from the right people?
Did it make the place, product, offer, or business easier to notice, understand, remember, visit, trust, or buy from?
That is the useful measurement.
Everything else is mostly personal taste and vanity metrics.
Only time will tell whether From Sky to Sea becomes a genuine Devonport asset or just another expensive thing people argue about until the next expensive thing arrives.
But every time someone posts a photo like this and people ask, “What are those beams?”, the installation is doing something most marketing fails to do.
It is making people curious.
And curiosity is not the whole outcome.
But it is a bloody good place to start.
Side note: and it’s better than a statue in the ocean.
