Hairy Maclary author Dame Lynley Dodd declared herself humbled and overwhelmed when statues of her world famous story book characters were opened on Tauranga's downtown waterfront today.
The gala occasion attended by Prime Minister John Key featured huge tributes to the perseverance of Creative Tauranga CEO Tracey Rudduck-Gudsell who led the five-year fundraising campaign to raise $660,00.
Dame Lynley told the 300-strong crowd that when she came down to The Strand to look at progress earlier this month, it suddenly hit her what all the effort and sheer hard work by so many people had been about.
"My book characters! It was a humbling and overwhelming moment."
The nicest part of the process for her had been liaising with sculptor Brigitte Wuest who had took her two dimensional creations and re-created them in three, she said.