by Scott Bevan
THE SYDNEY Opera House is one of those handful of structures around the world that is so recognisable, and so iconic, it defines an entire city in people’s minds. Yet it is a building that defies definition. When people look at it, they see sails, waves, shells on a beach, a flock of birds, nuns scurrying to church. It is at once a building that evokes many things but is incomparable. It all depends on whose eyes you are viewing the Sydney Opera House through. Which is why I want to see the Opera House through the eyes of Mika Utzon Popov. When he looks at the Sydney Opera House, he sees family.
Mika is a grandson of Jørn Utzon, the man who conceived the Opera House. He is the son of renowned architect Alex Popov and internationally recognised artist and Jørn’s daughter, Lin Utzon. Mika himself is an artist, designer and sculptor. Mika was born in his mother’s native Denmark, he attended art school in Sydney and now lives and creates on the Northern Beaches. He is a beautiful, gentle soul, kind of like the mood the harbour projects on the day we paddle from the North Shore to Farm Cove.
Mika’s gentleness comes out in his face, which is enviously youthful, even though it is dressed with a greying beard. His face is made younger by the large glasses he is wearing, accentuating his big eyes that observe and absorb. And Mika is always looking to create. Mika is to paddle my wife’s lolly pink kayak, but, before we set off, he swaps over the hatch covers. My turquoise kayak looks as though it has been kissed. His looks as though it has developed an infection.
‘That’s more artistic,’ he declares.
As we paddle out of Careening Cove, he notes how green Sydney looks from the water.
‘Even in a big city, I feel like we’re here on nature’s premises, not the other way around, like in Europe,’ Mika muses. ‘I reckon if we let it, within a decade, nature would take back the city.’
When he was at art school, Mika loved commuting on the ferries, especially at night. The city from the harbour at night, he says, ‘is not so solid, it’s more ephemeral’. Halfway across the harbour, just near Fort Denison, we stop and take in the long view of what his grandfather created.
‘It’s a great angle to see it from,’ says Mika. ‘You can appreciate the three dimensionality of it, the way shapes seem to shift as we do.’ He also points out the Opera House’s red granite-faced platform, which Jørn Utzon envisioned as an anchor for the soaring roofs. Mika says because of that base, even without the shells, it would be a substantial and impressive building.
We kayak into Farm Cove and watch the play of the sun on the ceramic-tiled shells. The effect is just as the building’s creator intended – dazzling. Mika points out how a couple of the roofs are glowing in the light, while others are in shadow, and how they speak to each other. The smaller shells reflect light onto the two larger shells, illuminating them. The sum of the parts is spectacular. In our view from the middle of the bay, the Bridge sits behind the Opera House. But Mika sees them as soulmates. He can’t imagine one without the other now.
‘The Bridge provides a beautiful perspective,’ he murmurs.
We paddle closer and further to the north, until the Opera House’s great petrified waves are cresting over us.
‘I’ve never been this close to it before,’ Mika mutters, with his head tilted back.
‘I’ve seen it from the ferry in the past, of course, but the scale of it is very different from the base of the platform. It’s like looking up at a giant ship.’
Mika points to the Opera House’s base just above us and says of his grandfather, ‘He would have stood at that level.’
When he drew the initial concept for the Opera House in 1956, Jørn Utzon had never seen Sydney. But he understood, and loved, water. Utzon lived by it in Denmark and enjoyed sailing. Yet a feeling for water was not enough; Utzon studied naval charts of Sydney Harbour, and he looked at films and photos of the sandstone-stubbled topography, to determine how to create something that would stand out yet belong in the environment. Utzon submitted his ideas, along with more than 230 other entries from around the world, in a design competition staged by the New South Wales Government. The Dane’s proposal didn’t get far until one of the overseas judges, who viewed the entries with fresh eyes, pointed to Utzon’s drawings and declared, ‘Gentlemen, here is your Opera House’.
Utzon’s design was announced as the winner in 1957. Through the late 1950s and into the next decade, Utzon kept refining his ideas, working out where the lines of geometry and engineering and inspiration intersected, plotting how to fill his fantastic sails and turn his shape-shifting dream into concrete. In 1963, just as his creation was about to seemingly rise out of the harbour, Utzon and his family moved to Sydney. Mika tells me how much his grandfather and grandmother loved living here, that they had made a commitment to stay.
Yet commitments can crumble when politicians get involved. While art at its finest is uncompromising, politics is about the art of the possible; in other words, learning to live with compromise. Utzon designed something that seemed to have few corners, but politicians and bureaucrats managed to find corners to cut anyway, as they hacked at his vision. A change of government and a budgetary squeeze imposed untenable pressures on Jørn Utzon and his creation. In 1966, he and his family left Australia. Utzon never returned, so he never saw the building, which was officially opened in 1973. Yet it was never completed as he imagined it. Like politics itself, the Opera House’s gleaming shell distracts you from a stack of compromises, particularly inside it.
So what Mika and I are looking up at is not just his grandfather’s imagination and courage set in concrete and glass and tiled in ceramics but also a symbol of the myopia of politics. It was the French writer Gustave Flaubert who said you can’t have fine thoughts without beautiful forms. I’m looking at the most beautiful form, but my thoughts about those who squandered what this could have been, and the hurt that brought its creator, are less than fine.
Yet Mika says within the family, around the table, talk is rarely about the ‘daily politics’ that affected the building. Instead, it is about how architecture can have a dialogue with nature, with society, and with everything else around it. He tells me how he walked across the Bridge, stopping every ten or so metres to take a photo of the Opera House, to appreciate the movement of the building, so that it is like rotating your hand before your eyes, observing your fingers and thumb from different angles.
‘Because of what it is, you always notice it, you see that movement, and you don’t see that with most buildings,’ Mika explains. ‘The building is in dialogue with itself, not just with the environment.’
Although he died in 2008, Jørn Utzon, through his creation, is also in a dialogue with the future. He’s conversing with a city, indeed, the entire globe, through his Opera House, and perhaps we’re listening more attentively now than we did when it was built.
The building is also in conversation with a grandson. Mika has a beautiful way to describe what the Opera House means to him, to his own ambitions, and how it shapes his own dialogue with what he makes. He squints up at what his grandfather created and says, ‘It’s no longer a goal post’, meaning it is not something he has to live up to. Mika pauses and smiles.
‘It’s a starting line.’
13
BENNELONG POINT TO BARANGAROO
WHEN THE Opera House project was crawling through controversy in the 1960s, many wondered when – and how – it would be completed. The building’s skeleton hung on Bennelong Point, as if it were some allusion to the bones of Francis Morgan that swung for years from a gibbet on Pinchgut just across the water. While the Opera House’s bones were waiting to be fleshed out, some feared it was already a corpse, a dream that was as good as dead on the water. Just as Morgan’s skeleton was meant to warn all who sailed into the harbour in the early colonial days to behave, the Opera House was shaping as a cautionary tale in concrete that the state shouldn’t have taken such a risk and spent so much on art. As some Sydneysiders protested at the time, they didn’t need the Opera House. Wh
o needs culture when you have that harbour?
Now Sydney, and the world, can’t imagine the harbour without the Opera House. Former Prime Minister Paul Keating has said the impact of Utzon’s building, like all great art, never weakens, no matter how often you see it, from what angle, or in what light. He reckons it is the greatest building of the 20th century and one of the greatest in history.
This extraordinary piece of art has itself spawned and gifted us so much more art. Comparatively few may attend what is created and performed within the building, but people turn out in droves to see the art projected onto it. Each year for the Vivid festival, when city buildings are used as canvases for eye-popping light installations, the Opera House’s shells become giant screens. In 2016, Aboriginal images were a feature of the exhibition. Desert art bloomed on the Opera House’s skin, lizards crawled over it, magpies perched on it, and a spirit of place radiated from it.
Less ephemeral visual art has been displayed within the Opera House. Abstract tapestries of John Coburn were commissioned as mesmerising proscenium curtains for the main halls. And through the years, the House has been an inspiration for Australia’s best-known artists, from William Dobell depicting the uncompleted building in the late 1960s as a phantom floating in a Turneresque atmosphere to the dazzling, colour-infused iconography of Ken Done’s paintings and drawings. Ken has told me of his sustained love of portraying the Opera House, saying, ‘It’s a game for me, finding new ways to paint it’.
John Olsen’s enormous mural Salute to Five Bells was born because of the Opera House. John was commissioned in 1972, before the building was finished, to paint the mural for the main foyer of the concert hall. It was to be about 21 metres long and about 3 metres high. What’s more, it was to face the harbour. So in scale and positioning, this was an enormous assignment. John had already been depicting the harbour for years, transposing its squiggling foreshores and the cross-current rhythms of its life on and below the surface onto canvas, creating rambunctious, free-form poems in paint. So it seemed appropriate that when John received the commission, he looked not just to the water but into the depths of Kenneth Slessor’s poem ‘Five Bells’ for guidance.
From Slessor’s words for a drowned friend, John created something quiet and contemplative. You can get lost in John’s harbour, with its wash of blue-purple, and creatures and shapes floating across it. You become another being underwater. When I look at the work, I get a similar feeling to when I’m scuba diving. On the surface, your breath quickens as you flap about. Then, as you descend, you feel the water press in, sounds are dulled and compressed until all you hear is your slowing breath and bubbles, and your view through the mask is simplified and uncluttered. Life underwater becomes elemental, restful yet mysterious. Just as it feels when I look at Salute to Five Bells.
But for John, the mural was the result of a lot of restlessness and wrestling with ideas and logistical challenges. He drew on his own relationship with the harbour and his life beside it at Watsons Bay. He remembers while doing some preparatory sketches, ‘one of the fishermen at Watsons Bay picked up a squid and held it in his fingers and said, “Put that in the mural, John!”’
‘Did you?’ I ask him.
‘Yes! If you look at the mural, there are several squid actually.’
John also wrote to Jørn Utzon in Denmark. ‘I told him what I was doing and what would his suggestions be. “Oh,” he wrote, “just swing it left and right to the harbour.” So that blue colour that the mural is, it joins up, particularly in moonlight, to the harbour.’
Musing on Slessor’s poem of loss as a reference for the mural, John also read in the verse ties to the Opera House.
‘Wonderfully enough, the opening lines of “Five Bells” is almost a predictive story of the building of the Opera House itself, with the complaints about how long it would take,’ John says, before he recites, from memory, the poem.
Time that is moved by little fidget wheels
Is not my Time . . .
As he recorded in his journal, John finished the mural on 21 April 1973. ‘Strange how small it looked,’ he noted. ‘It really comes into its own at night, when it picks up the lights and movements on the harbour. There is the harbour, there is the mural. It questions “Which is reality?”’
John also wrote that he thought the mural was his finest work and ‘Sydney Harbour will never be looked at the same way again’. More than four decades on, John deflects my question about that statement. He’s not about to say what others might see. But Salute to Five Bells does give you a perspective of the harbour that is different to the one through the Opera House’s windows. And if you can’t go diving or snorkelling in the harbour, John Olsen’s mural offers a creative alternative.
AS WELL as inside and on it, art is created outside the Opera House. Rock concerts have been staged on its forecourt, and so has Sydney Opera House – The Opera, or The Eighth Wonder. The drama of how this place came to be, and the impact that had on the lives of those involved, was shaped into an opera by composer Alan John and librettist Dennis Watkins. I have seen the opera performed both inside and outside the building that inspired it; the outdoor experience was particularly moving, as words, music, architecture and place harmonised to create a profound sense of connection.
The ‘stage’ was set on the monumental steps that lead up to the Opera House, while we, the audience, sat under a perfect sky in late spring, looking at what was being sung about: the building’s lit concrete ribs inside; the pointed yet fluid lines of the shells; its skin of tiles that chilled in tone as the sun set. Once the night arrived, the ribs glowed, as though we were peering into a magical, beautiful monster that cradled music in its belly.
As we listened to words about sails swirling, billowing, we gazed up. The breath of the singers seemed to fill those sails with even more meaning, while the architecture, in turn, accentuated the beauty of the voices.
We watched ‘the architect’ sit on the steps, talking to his daughter about sailing to the other side of the world, to the port of dreams. We listened to the architect outlining what he wanted to create – ‘A place of meaning, a palace of music, a wonder of the world.’
And we heard our own harsh voices. This must be the first opera to ever have in its libretto lines such as, ‘It’s crook, I tell you, bloody crook’, ‘the lamingtons are melting’, and ‘it’s a bloody white elephant’. But just as surely as that sounds Australian, this building is now part of the vernacular of our nation. The Sydney Opera House is a part of us. It has achieved what the architect sang on that warm November night by the harbour: ‘I want the people to feel the power of a special place that belongs to them.’
THE PLACE of belonging was in the early days of the colony a point of cultural dislocation. After the livestock was unloaded from the First Fleet onto the promontory, it was called Cattle Point. From 1790, it came to be known as Bennelong’s Point. In a bid to improve relations with the original harbour people, and to keep his intermediary close, Arthur Phillip had a small house built for Bennelong and his wife Barangaroo.
The hut and its pretensions to diplomacy were shoved aside in the name of defence. Governor Lachlan Macquarie ordered a fort be built to defend Sydney Cove and prevent what he called clandestine departures, or convicts escaping. But within a couple of decades, Fort Macquarie was being derided as perfectly useless. Still, it remained, serving for a time as the headquarters of the New South Wales Naval Brigade, until it was replaced in 1902 by a tram depot, which was constructed to look like a fort. When the Opera House was taking shape, some wished the tram shed had remained, arguing that was a much more useful public building.
The debate about what was best for the people on Bennelong Point predated the Opera House. In 1910, that passionate defender of public access to the harbour foreshores, W.A. Notting, wrote a letter to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, opposing plans for a large wharf. ‘The closing of Bennelong Point to the public would be an irreparable loss to the public, who
have little enough accessible harbour water frontages left at their disposal,’ thundered Mr Notting. The battle of public access versus development along the waterfront echoed through the years around Sydney Cove. In 1998, in his National Trust Heritage lecture, expatriate writer Robert Hughes roasted the new development just along from Bennelong Point at East Circular Quay. In particular, he lashed the luxurious apartment block nicknamed the Toaster. In that mellifluous voice of his, Hughes demanded that the Toaster be torn down, so that what he called the country’s greatest building, the Opera House, could be fully appreciated without being obscured, and for East Circular Quay to be restored to the people of Sydney. The Toaster remains, with people paying millions of dollars to live there and assure themselves of uninterrupted harbour views.
LONG BEFORE Jørn Utzon, this cove beguiled another dreamer.
‘The different coves were examined with all possible expedition,’ wrote Arthur Phillip of his first excursion into Sydney Harbour. ‘I fixed on the one that had the best spring of water, and in which the ships can anchor so close to the shore, that at a very small expense, quays may be made at which the largest ships may unload.
‘This cove, which I honoured with the name of Sydney, is about a quarter of a mile across at the entrance, and half a mile in length.’
Lord Sydney, or Tommy Townshend as he was known to his friends, was Home Secretary and a chief architect of the idea of a penal colony in New South Wales. He was also a great supporter of Phillip.
Once Phillip had returned to Botany Bay on 23 January 1788, after his exploratory excursion into Port Jackson, he ordered the fleet to head north. Supply was first into Sydney Cove on 25 January, and the other ships dribbled in the following day. By the end of 26 January, the fleet was moored in the cove. Those on board the ships shared their leader’s enthusiasm for the harbour. Newton Fowell, who was on board Sirius, recorded on 26 January that ‘here you are intirely Land Locked and it is impossible for any Wind to do you the least damage’. Fowell noted a couple of weeks later when the master of his ship, John Hunter, had completed a survey of the harbour that ‘he says it is the finest harbour in the known world’.
