We were visiting Port Macquarie on holiday & this was one of the highlights! On our last day the weather wasn’t great, so we drove to lots of the koala locations! Such good fun finding them! They are so beautifully designed, which each one being so unique. The shop was great too & we were delighted to add to our numbers as there was lots on show in the shop. We managed to find 42 koalas, if we didn’t have to head home, we would have tried to find them all!!!

Upon arriving at my hotel in Port Macquarie the first thing I noticed was a sculpture of a koala outside the hotel. I soon learnt that there were many other koala sculptures like this around Port Macquarie and that the aim was to try and find all of the sculptures. If you go to Sea Acres Rainforest Centre they have a map you can take which shows you where all of the sculptures are, you can also get a map from the offical Hello Koala's store where they work on the sculptures and sell merchandise.
I met the Woman behind Hello Koala's Margret Meagher, she invited me into the shop and kindly shared with me the history of Hello Koalas. During a trip to the UK Margret came across the Larkin With Toads Public Art Project which inspired her to create Hello Koalas, she felt that these sculptures would be a good way to engage and up lift the community, Margret also explained that these sculptures can be beneficial to people with Dementia as art has been proven to help people with Dementia as it can increase brain stimulation and improve memory.
The sculptures are all hand painted by Australian artists, I think this project is amazing and I wish we had this here in Sydney, it was great fun going around with my map and one by one ticking the sculptures off.