It was 10 years ago that the curator of Light for Vivid, then a nascent festival stop-gap in Sydney's winter months, held his breath as driving rain washed out its opening nights.
On Macquarie Street, the then premier, Nathan Rees, had been copping political flak for having passed up the opportunity to have the world's number-one golfer Tiger Woods play the Australian Masters.
Woods went to Melbourne and Rees brought British musician Brian Eno to Sydney to curate the music component of the first Vivid Sydney Festival.
Whereas people would line city blocks to watch Woods ''essay a few practice drives without a club in his hands'', The Daily Telegraph editorialised that Eno ''could walk from Parramatta to Palm Beach without once being asked for an autograph''. The choice brought similar derision from Max Markson who thought NSW should have aimed for Michael Jackson.
''The first five nights it rained sideways,'' remembers Anthony Bastic, who has been directing the Light Walk since its inception. ''The last weekend we had one of those great Sydney winter long weekends ... and hundreds of thousands of people turned out.''