Defying simple definitions, the Sydney Opera House encapsulates the contradictions of the country it has come to symbolise.
Long before I had ever stepped foot in Australia, the Sydney Opera House exerted a magnetic pull. As a child, I dreamt of becoming an architect. Until the penny dropped that my creations were both aesthetically unappealing and structurally unsound, it was the subject I studied at university. Even after changing course, Jørn Utzon’s opus continued to be an object of fascination and delight.
This was a house built with lottery funding, proof of the centrality of gambling in Australian life. In the mid-50s, the conductor who pushed for its creation, Sir Eugene Goossens, was prosecuted for possessing indecent books, pictures and films, which spoke of the wowserism and censoriousness of the postwar years.
True to this “people’s house” ethos, its programming has always strived to be all-encompassing.
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