The Giants of Mandurah

Update: We have now also found Ulla, the Giant of Santiago!

Mandurah sits some 70km from Perth, south down the coast. There’s a beautiful harbour area as well as marinas and plenty of chic and expensive looking waterside properties with berths for ones yacht or two. To be honest there is one particularly niche attraction at Mandurah which means we may have stopped by anyway (more on this later), but news that GIANTS HAVE INVADED meant we absolutely had to visit.

As you would imagine with an invasion of giants, we first heard about it on the local news. Very recently discovered (our timing on this was very fortunate), hidden at each of six secret locations is a wooden giant.

How the Giants of Mandurah hunt works

After going to the visitor centre in central Mandurah to pick up our map (which you can also find online) with clues to the giant’s locations, it was a good full day to collect the first five giants and then get to the special sixth. Each giant has a necklace with a clue symbol. Once the symbols are gathered from five of the giants you then return to the totem of symbols outside the Mandurah visitor’s centre. Align the five symbols on the totem and the grid reference of the sixth extra special one is then revealed by entering the code from the totem into a web page.

Here are the giants – we won’t be revealing the locations!

It was a really good way of exploring some wonderful locations around Mandurah that we would have been very unlikely to have stumbled upon ourselves. Each giant also has a story associated with the particular location, and the locations themselves as well as the giants are very varied as well. The artist that led the project, Thomas Dambo, can be very proud of what he has built here.

Top tip #1: especially for the last and secret giant location, cover up or lather yourself in bug spray / deet. We were eaten alive by mossies there in the mid to late afternoon.

Top tip #2: If at all possible, go giant hunting midweek. The giants are very popular. Several of the giants had small places to park nearby, and besides it would be best without big crowds.

The geological bonus

With Helen being a geologist, she delighted in the discovery that just to the south of Mandurah is one of the world’s foremost and scarce sites of living thrombolites. These are living colonies of micro bacteria that form boulder-sized mounds in the shallow waters, and are some of the very first forms of life to emerge from the primordial soup. While often found in the fossil record, there are far fewer living sites worldwide.