Imagine Agra without the Taj Mahal, New York without the Empire State or Paris with no Eiffel Tower. Impossible. And so it is with Sydney and our Opera House. It’s such a part of the fabric of our city, it is difficult to remember a time without the giant, white-tiled sails.
The boat Regalia, from which a young Helen Pitt watched the Sydney Opera House opening day celebrations on October 20, 1973.Credit: Fred Murray - Fairfax Archive
I was an eight-year-old girl on the wooden boat Regalia on October 20, 1973, the day Queen Elizabeth II officially opened the Sydney Opera House. I can still remember the fanfare of that glorious spring day. The sea of balloons, white doves and pigeons, the Indigenous actor Ben Blakeney playing his ancestor Woollarawarre Bennelong atop the big shell, and the huge hooray from the assembled crowd when the red ribbons on the shells were cut.
After decades of buying those rice-paper-thin Sydney Opera House lottery tickets which largely paid for the building’s construction, my parents, like many Australians at the time, had barely believed it would ever open and wanted to see it for themselves. Although we never won a lottery – unlike our neighbours, who splashed out on a swimming pool with their winnings – it felt like all of us were winners that day. And have been every day since. Before then, Sydney was a colonial outpost, at best a town; it has since evolved into an international city.
Boats on the harbour for the Sydney Opera House opening.Credit: Alan Purcell
The Opera House and its creation story have alternatively beguiled and delighted the people of Sydney, a drama as engrossing as anything ever performed on its stages. From its beginnings as Tubowgule, a tidal island before British settlement where Indigenous Australians met to eat and dance, Bennelong Point became the site of the first theatrical performance by convicts, more than 230 years ago.
Then, from the 1950s, the nearly two decades of trouble-plagued construction, with the spectacle reaching its crescendo with the departure mid-build of its Danish designer, Jørn Utzon. It’s no wonder that by the time it opened, it was declared “the eighth wonder of the world”.
The Sydney Opera House under construction in April 1966.Credit: SMH
It’s certainly a wonder it was begun at all, let alone completed. What if the NSW Labor premier Joe Cahill hadn’t listened to the Sydney Symphony Orchestra conductor Eugene Goossens on the need for a cultural centre and been convinced of its merits? What if Utzon hadn’t entered the subsequent 1956 international competition to find a design for it? What if a competition judge, Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, hadn’t retrieved Utzon’s entry from the pile of rejects and convinced his fellow judges to declare the Dane the winner? What if the women’s committee at the 1957 NSW ALP state conference had not convinced the party to endorse the Opera House proposal, or premier Cahill had not pledged to pay for it with state lotteries? What if Australian architect Peter Hall had not picked up the pieces after Utzon’s departure, completing it with the help of 10,000 workers from more than 90 countries?
Fortunately, we will never know. Now, on Bennelong Point, we have Australia’s most recognisable man-made structure. But it’s much more than just that. This monument to modernism, built by multicultural Australia, a European idea completed by Australians, has been a muse for many.
It has inspired artists ranging from Martin Sharp, Peter Kingston, John Olsen, Brett Whiteley and Ken Done through to Quandamooka artist Megan Cope, whose work Whispers, using tens of thousands of oyster shells, celebrates the building’s 50th birthday. Photographers Max Dupain and David Moore have captured every crevice with their cameras. Opera singers such as Joan Sutherland and Jonas Kaufmann, actors Cate Blanchett and Richard Roxburgh, and bands such as Crowded House have wowed audiences with world-class performances.
The Sydney Morning Herald’s letter-writers were stirred into voicing their opinions in the days after the January 1957 announcement of the winning design, calling it variously “nuns in a scrum”, “a haystack covered with several tarpaulins”, “a sink with plates stacked in readiness for washing” and “New South Whale”.
Twenty-eight views of the Opera House (1998-1999), hand-woven 100 per cent Australian wool on cotton warp designed by Ken Done.Credit: Powerhouse Museum
The emotion it aroused lingers today, like the backwash from a ferry on Sydney Harbour. The Sydney Opera House is a triumph on the scale of an Olympics, America’s Cup or Matildas win. That squiggle, dreamt up and drawn in far-off Denmark, fashioned into one of the world’s architectural masterpieces, has reshaped everything. Not just the silhouette of a city, but the way we feel about ourselves as Australians, and how the world views us. Back when it began, we were laughed at on the world stage: “There’s more culture in yoghurt than in Australia,” detractors derided.
As the building emerged, however, its elegance silenced the critics, creating a symbol that automatically says Sydney. Today it’s a sacred space that takes pride of place in our photo albums, social media feeds and, most indelibly, in our hearts. After half a century, we’ve grown up together. Our Sydney Opera House is now more a home than a house. Take a bow, all who’ve been involved over the past five decades and more.
Helen Pitt is a senior writer with The Sydney Morning Herald and author of Walkley Award-winning book The House.