500,000 make our festival a quacker MORE than 500,000 people attended this year's Sydney Festival which ended on Saturday. The month-long event hosted a mix of 66 ticketed and 26 free events stretching from Bondi to Penrith. It had 121 sold-out performances and grossed a box office of more than $7.3 million. Highlights of the three-week event included the fashion-meets-baroque project Semele Walk, performances from the Latin circus troupe Circolumbia at Parramatta and the rubber duck installation at Darling Harbour, which proved popular with children. Festival director Lieven Bertels said this year's festival embraced its catch line "This is Our City in Summer" with a "diverse and buoyant program." "The artists, the festival team and hundreds of volunteers brought to life an ambitious program that delighted our audiences with small and big surprises," Mr Bertels said. We were pleased to see that our quest to bring back opera, and highlight the joy of live music in dance and theatre as well as in concert, was well received.