Pacific

by Simon Winchester

  The best that Australia could muster, and which might be seen to complement its own natural wonders, was the great “Coat Hanger Bridge” that spanned the narrow entrance to Sydney Harbour. But it wasn’t really Australian: the Sydney Harbour Bridge was more properly a monument to empire, since it was constructed by a firm in Middlesbrough, and made mostly of steel that had been shipped down from England. To regard that as an Australian monument might be akin to a Delhi resident showing off the Viceroy’s House by Edward Lutyens, instead of the Taj Mahal.

  But to see the Sydney Opera House—and yes, framed by the now venerable bridge, for together the two offer a quite incomparable spectacle—and to see its jumble of graceful white sails, its soaring peaked seashells all apparently floating beside the blue ship-busy harbor waters, is to experience the sublime lyricism of one of architecture’s greatest moments. You see it when you fly in to Sydney, you see it when you drive beside the harbor, you glimpse it peeking between the skyscrapers of the business district. And each time you see it, you notice it. It is a building impossible to take for granted. It is a masterpiece.

  One recent sighting rekindled a bittersweet memory. Just after dawn one summer’s day in Sydney, I was telephoned from a hospital in New York. Would I speak, the caller asked, some last words to a dear friend of mine, an elderly editor beloved around the world, and who now was dying in a room surrounded by friends. He was unconscious; his breath was labored. But they put the telephone to his ear, and I described to him as best I could what I could see from my hotel window: the sun gilding the top of the great bridge, the little insect-like Manly ferries skittering along on white-waked water, bringing commuters across the bay, and then, rising from between the office towers like a clutch of lilies, the soft peaks and angles in a sun-washed pink of the Opera House.

  When they took the phone from his ear, they told me his breathing had paused. They were sure he was listening to every word, for he loved Sydney as I loved it, and my sending him a farewell from there brought him serenity, if only for a moment. He died an hour later, calm and at peace.

  But there was little peace in the making of the Opera House—and the saga of its construction amply displays many of the same contradictions evident in the makings of today’s very new Australia. The dramas of the years of its building (together with one terrible, coincident tragedy and another subsequent sex scandal) were legion: there were vicious tugs-of-war between forces old and new, between provincialism and globalism, between old-school philistine Australia and twentieth-century visionary Australia. The battles spoke volumes about the process; yet the result is memorable and wonderful, and could not have been made, it often seems, anywhere else in the world

  All began peaceably enough. It was an Englishman who first conceived the need for a dedicated opera house in the country’s cultural capital: the conductor Eugene Goossens, the London-born scion of a distinguished Belgian musical family, who had been invited to Australia in 1947 after a highly successful two decades in America, to conduct the Sydney Symphony. But not long after he arrived he was heard grumbling that his new orchestra’s home, the ornate Victorian town hall, even though it had one of the world’s largest pipe organs, was far too small. Sydney, he insisted, deserved better. It could be a world-class city; it should have a world-class opera house.

  His six years of energetic lobbying eventually bore fruit in 1954, when the then–New South Wales premier, a former railway worker and insurance salesman named Joe Cahill, threw his weight behind Goossens’s idea. He agreed to clear space for an opera house by demolishing a city-owned tram depot on a delightful little peninsula, Bennelong Point, just north of the city’s beautiful Botanic Gardens. Cahill staged an international contest to find the best architect: more than 230 men and women from more than thirty countries submitted drawings. It seemed as though the entire architectural world wanted Sydney, so spectacular a city in so visually blessed a country, to have something special.

  The winner was an almost unknown architect from Denmark, a forty-year-old would-be sailor and admirer of Mayan temples, a man with not a single memorable building yet constructed, named Jørn Utzon.

  The story goes that Utzon’s vaguely realized sketch, all elliptical shells and curves that seemed to burst organically upward and outward into the harbor like spinnaker sails, or like a huge billowing flower, was initially rejected—but that Eero Saarinen, the Finnish jury member already known for his futuristic designs in the American Midwest, pulled Utzon’s sketch from the reject pile, declared it a work of total genius, and said he would support no other competitor. “So many opera houses look like boots,” he said, a little oddly. “Utzon has solved the problem.” The Sydney city assessors, who had the final vote, were equally enthusiastic: “We are convinced that they present a concept of an Opera House which is capable of becoming one of the great buildings of the world.”

  Utzon was sent a telegram informing him of his success. His ten-year-old daughter, Lin, intercepted it and brought him the news, pedaling her bicycle furiously across the flat Danish countryside to his studio, and then demanding, “Now, can I have my horse?” He could well afford it: Sydney wired him the prize money of five thousand pounds5 and told to come on down and get weaving.

  The weaving, though, proved to be something of a trial. Like so many of architecture’s stars—Gehry, Calatrava, and Frank Lloyd Wright come to mind—Utzon was big on vision, short on details. For example, he was never quite certain that it was possible to make the ogival shells for the roofs—especially because of their different sizes, with varying arcs and angles. The cost of all the eccentrically shaped wooden forms that would be needed to support the drying concrete for each one was going to blow a massive hole in the budget. Moreover, the total weight of these extraordinary roofs exceeded the strength of the concrete pillars that were to support them—a potentially lethal problem for audiences, a death knell for the building.

  As the costs mounted, the project slipped behind, and the state government organized an emergency lottery—first prize, one hundred thousand pounds—to help raise further funds. Morale was helped in 1960 by the impromptu appearance on-site of the American singer Paul Robeson, who gave an unexpected concert among the cranes and scaffolding towers. He sang “Ol’ Man River” to a throng of Italian and Greek construction men, his dark face and their olive complexions prefiguring Australia’s future of multiculturalism.

  Then, in 1961, the design teams came up with the technical breakthrough, the aha! moment, that finally made Utzon’s dream possible. All the shells, the technicians declared, could be thought of as parts of a single enormous sphere, like segments of an orange. Since they would all now have a common radius, they all could be cast from a common mold, and then cut down to smaller sizes in those places where Utzon wanted them. It seems such an obvious solution now, but in 1961 it took hundreds of computer hours (when computers were rarely used to solve architectural problems) to come up with the final answer to a taxing technical conundrum. There has been some controversy over whether it was Utzon himself or some other mathematically inspired architect who enjoyed the necessary epiphany. But in either case, the project was then promptly freed to race toward completion.

  Jørn Utzon, the unassuming Danish architect plucked from obscurity to design Australia’s best-known structure, the Sydney Opera House, never saw it opened, but was honored posthumously for the creation of one of the world’s greatest public buildings.* [Newspix/Getty Images.]

  Or it should have been—but then the old Australia briefly reared its head. In 1965 a new state government took office, with the Opera House still a long way from being finished. Two of its most senior figures happened to be politicians who, in terms of their deep disdain for high art and culture, could give Les Patterson a run for his money. They were the new leader, Bob Askin; and, more notoriously, his public works minister, Davis Hughes, a figure described by the Australian critic Elizabeth Farrelly, in Utzon’s obituary, as “a fraud and a philistine,” a man who false
ly claimed to have a university degree and who had “no interest in art, architecture or aesthetics.”

  Hughes wanted Utzon out, denouncing the architect as a foreigner, a prima donna, and in the very worst sense of the word, an artist. Using the want of taxpayer money as the excuse, the minister gradually pared down the budget, slicing away at the architect’s ability to pay his bills or, indeed, his staff. “How can you alter everything against my advice?” Utzon bleated pathetically during one meeting. “Here in Australia,” Hughes responded tartly, “you do what your client says”—the voting people of New South Wales, of course, being collectively the client.

  Day by day through the southern summer of 1966, Utzon’s situation worsened; and when, in February, he totted up the figures to show that the government owed him some one hundred thousand dollars6 in fees, and threatened to resign, Davis Hughes called his bluff and accepted.

  Utzon, shattered, left Australia six weeks later, traveling under an assumed name to avoid the press. A thousand protesters marched to the half-completed building, many of them architects. A local sculptor went on hunger strike to demand that the Dane be invited back. And though he expected to be recalled, he never was.

  Instead, several Australian architects were hired in his place, and they took seven further years to complete the building’s initially drab and uninspiring interior. While the outside sailed itself into architectural history as one of the great creations of the twentieth century, the inside was riddled with imperfections and crabbed spaces—early operatic orchestras had to have their percussion sections cordoned off behind plastic screens so the violins could hear themselves; ballet dancers exiting the stage had to have catchers stationed in the wings to stop them from hurling themselves into the walls.

  Jørn Utzon never came back to Australia, and he never saw the completed Opera House in person. When the queen opened the building in October 1973, twenty years after it was first conceived, ten years later than scheduled, and 1,400 percent over its original budget, Utzon was not invited; nor was his name mentioned. Publicly, he was an unperson; privately, he remained stoic and unembittered. His most sardonic comment was simply to call his experiences in Australia an example of “Malice in Blunderland.”

  And he continued to believe that history would eventually judge him more kindly. His faith would be borne out in his later years, when Australia effectively apologized to him. He was given an award, the Companion of the Order of Australia, in 1985. But then, more important, he was given work. The inadequacies of his building’s interior were deemed so egregious that, in 2000, Utzon was approached to help undo the botches of the Sydney architects, and to redesign it. He said he was minded to accept the commission—though on hearing him say so, a clutch of guardians of the old Australia briefly stirred themselves to life once more. The ever-querulous Davis Hughes, for instance, swiftly went to the papers: “There’s obviously a need to upgrade the place,” he allowed, “but why do we need Utzon? Why can’t we get a competent Sydney architect?”

  Yet, in the end, the Dane did do the work, though from long distance, by airmail and couriered blueprint. The city was so duly delighted with the result that the Utzon Room (light, airy, sparely furnished, and with views of the sparkling harbor below) was named in his honor. The old man, now unwell and living in Mallorca, was thrilled beyond measure to receive the news, and reacted with undeserved magnanimity. “The fact that I’m mentioned in such a marvelous way, it gives me the greatest pleasure and satisfaction. I don’t think you can give me more joy as the architect. It supersedes any medal of any kind that I could get and have got.”

  The queen came back once again, in 2006, to open the refurbished interiors that Utzon had designed. Utzon himself was by now too ill to travel so far, but his son was there, and he made a wistful speech in which he said that his father “lives and breathes the Opera House, and as its creator just has to close his eyes to see it.”

  Utzon died in Copenhagen two years later. A year after his passing, the city of Sydney staged a concert, as both memorial and official reconciliation. An apology, if you will. But the event paled before the world’s recognition of what he had accomplished. Shortly before he died, Utzon heard that UNESCO had declared his creation a World Heritage Site. The proclamation was lengthy, as befits a structure of such complex design and tortured history. Its preamble was eloquent: Jørn Utzon’s building, a gift from Europe to the Pacific, and thence from the Pacific to the world, was “a masterpiece . . . its significance is based on its unparalleled design and construction; its exceptional engineering achievements and technological innovation and its position as a world-famous icon of architecture. It is a daring and visionary experiment that has had an enduring influence on the emergent architecture of the late 20th century.”

  As befits so troubled a passage to completion, there were two codas to the Opera House story, both of them melancholy—one quite tragically so, the other more curious and bizarre.

  The first related to the lottery, which had been staged in 1960 to raise additional funds for a project whose costs were at the time beginning to spiral beyond control. The prize offered was one hundred thousand pounds; and on June 1, the winner’s name was announced in the newspapers: a Mr. Bazil Thorne, who lived with his family in Bondi, where the surf famously pounds in from the South Pacific Ocean. There were no privacy laws at the time; the family’s full address was listed in the paper.

  A week later, the Thornes’ eight-year-old son, Graeme, was picked up at a street corner near his home, to be taken to school—only, he never arrived. That night a man called the house demanding twenty-five thousand pounds in ransom. A massive police search began, ending a wretched month later when the child was found bludgeoned and suffocated.

  The killer was captured three months later, after a triumph of forensic detection that involved pink paint chips, mismatching flower types, stolen cars—and the discovery that the man allegedly involved had just left Australia aboard a London-bound P&O passenger ship, the SS Himalaya. Australian federal police were waiting for the vessel when she arrived in Colombo; and after much legal complication (since the Sri Lankans did not at the time have an extradition treaty with Australia), the man, a Hungarian immigrant named Stephen Bradley, was arrested and returned to his adopted country. Aboard the plane, he confessed to the child’s murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, and died in his cell eight years later.

  The other coda is more simply bizarre, and involved a train of events that provide their own commentary on the fifties Australian zeitgeist. For Sir Eugene Goossens, the towering and talented figure of English music7 who, while conductor of the Sydney Symphony, had begun the process that led to the building of the Opera House, turned out to be a man of highly exotic sexual tastes. And that, to the Australia of the time, was most decidedly not on.

  While in Sydney, Goossens became romantically involved with a woman named Rosaleen Norton, who was a pagan, a keen practitioner of the occult, and a lady who had a liking for both flogging and unusual kinds of misbehavior with animals, mostly goats. The popular press in Sydney—then, as now, eager for London-style sensation—liked to call Miss Norton the Witch of King’s Cross, and her studio and place of work were very much a cornerstone (a socially unacceptable cornerstone) of this louche and seedy Sydney neighborhood.

  Goossens, who himself was an admirer of the British occultist (and would-be climber of Kanchenjunga) Aleister Crowley, would occasionally bring Miss Norton gifts from London. In March 1956, after he had returned from being awarded a knighthood at Buckingham Palace, customs rummagers at Sydney airport found in Goossens’s suitcase large numbers of dubious photographs, together with rolls of film and what were described as “ritual masks.” He was promptly arrested, and threatened with the serious charge of “scandalous conduct.” He was not unreasonably terrified by the prospect of spending a lengthy time in prison, and eventually agreed that he had violated a section of the Customs Act that banned the import of “blasphemous, indecent or ob
scene works” into Australia. His crime carried the lesser penalty of a fine, and he eventually was obliged to pay up the not insubstantial sum of one hundred pounds.

  But what he didn’t reckon on was the publicity, which was immediate and merciless. The event, and its prominence in the more raffish newspapers, brought to an abrupt end what had been a glittering musical career. Goossens, now utterly shamed in public, immediately resigned from both the symphony and the New South Wales State Conservatorium, and fled to London on his sixty-third birthday. Just as Jørn Utzon would do ten years later, Goossens chose to slink out of the country under a pseudonym and in disgrace. He was subsequently described by friends back in England as having been “absolutely destroyed” by the affair. He was dead six years later.

  Yet, as with Jørn Utzon and the room now dedicated to his memory, there would in time be a more kindly end to Goossens’s story, too. The Opera House, the grand realization of his long-ago vision, was opened ten years after his death. And when it opened, the foyer held a commanding sculpture of the conductor, honoring the contribution that he had made to the building of one of the great monuments to music in the twentieth century.

  One television journalist in Sydney later wrote that Goossens had surely been a victim of the times, of what she called the wowserish,8 churchly, prudish, censorious, hypocritical, and deeply conservative Australia. His offenses were, by today’s standards, entirely venial, unworthy of remark. Though the law that Goossens broke remains, technically, on the books, no case has been brought under its strictures for many decades. The Australia of those times, one can be certain, has now been all but submerged, almost forgotten. On the surface at least, Australia is a liberal and tolerant society, multicultural in nature and cosmopolitan in attitude, its politics progressive and forward-looking, and with a reputation and a standing that in consequence have changed in the past half century almost beyond recognition.