Miraggio, a bronze statue by Pino Conte of a lone woman, sits on the sloping lawn overlooking Melbourne’s Sidney Myer Music Bowl in the Kings Domain Gardens. With her hands folded in her lap, she waits quietly for a performance at the venue.

Today there are three cones at her feet, the work of a health and safety conscious grounds keeper perhaps, though I like to think that perhaps in the night Miraggio gets up from her seat and goes into the city for a few drinks with other woken statues. Maybe after her big night out she wobbles her way back to the music bowl with a last drink in her hand and a cone on her head while she drunkenly sings through another cone that she holds to her mouth like a megaphone. We think she’s a quiet Italian girl, but she’s a long way from home, so when she parties, she doesn’t hold back.

Of course, that image is probably the last thing Claudio and Lesley Alcorso would have had in mind when they (likely) donated the sculpture to the Sidney Myer Music Bowl Trust and Melbourne City Council back in 1964.

Miraggio won’t be waiting much longer to hear music at the venue. In just two weeks she’ll be sitting among hundreds of people listening to ‘Dvořák Under the Stars,’ the first of three free concerts by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra at the venue.

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See Miragio on the hill using Google Street View, then (just as I did after taking today’s picture) Stand on the stage of the Sidney Myer Music Bowl.