On Friday 5 October, radio shock jock Alan Jones publicly berated Opera House executive Louise Herron for rejecting an approach by Racing NSW to use the building’s structure – specifically the famous “sails” that make up the roof of the structure – to advertise a new horse race, The Everest. I had seen the race being advertised in Martin Place not long before. There had been portable kiosks branded with the name of a betting agency, and five-foot-high letters placed on the pavement outside the MLC Centre (another architectural feature of the city, built in the 1970s and designed by Harry Seidler). Herron said:
By the following Monday, Jones had magnanimously apologised to Herron. And the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s comedy team, The Chaser, got out during the night and projected a sign onto the Opera house’s sails that read “Advertise here”, along with Alan Jones’ mobile phone number. The rant had turned into a debacle which had turned into a meme.
On Tuesday night the drama continued when light displays were scheduled to be projected onto the building’s sails. As each barrier draw was announced the number of the barrier was projected on the middle sail and the colours of the relevant horse were projected on two smaller sails beside it. But protesters – over 1000 according to the ABC but probably closer to 5000 going by a video taken on the night – who had gathered in front of the building flashed torches onto the illuminated sails, distracting viewers who had tuned into the telecast and disrupting the smooth performance of the show.
Despite the sound and fury the episode threw up, it seemed clear to me that there was something both profoundly fitting about the premier’s decision and something disappointing about the views of the political left. Not exactly that Berejiklian was toning down the visuals, but that she had insisted that the ad go ahead. The building had been funded, originally, using a lottery, for a start. But there’s more to support her case than that fact alone.
The Opera House began in the 1960s as an idea and an international competition was run by the state Labor government to find an architect. The winner, a Dane, turned out to be an inspired choice, although he almost wasn’t chosen. But the idea itself was the interesting thing about his pitch to the judges: to build a special monument to an authentically Australian culture at the edge of the gorgeous harbour on the site of a tram marshalling yard. What characterised that moment in history was optimism, and people forget just how new that might have felt to Sydneysiders at the time. But think about it: with the New York stockmarket crash of 1929 and then the rise of totalitarianism in Germany in the 1930s, followed by a global war that only ended in 1945 that led to massive changes in governance around the planet, the world had had enough drama and now wanted to settle down and get on with the business of living.
Over 15 years of hardship and conflict were ended by halcyon days when the wages of ordinary people were rising in the post-war economic boom. People’s lives were being changed not only by better-paying jobs, many of which required university degrees to gain entry to, but by bigger houses with open plans instead of poky rooms, higher buildings in the city built to accommodate the businesses that were emerging to fill the void left by the Depression and WWII, a growing economy fuelled by higher immigration rates and inflows of foreign capital looking for a safe haven and high returns. Things were, finally, looking up.
The design that was finally chosen was itself not implemented exactly the way the architect had initially envisioned, in his early drawings, due to engineering constraints. Even so, the problem of how to assemble the vaulting structure using concrete and steel proved difficult to solve. In the end, modular pieces were strung together like beads on a cord using steel cables that were anchored to the earth. The building also has other innovative elements, including a cooling system that uses harbour water to regulate temperatures inside the buildings.
But what about those big, white sails? In a way they are emblematic of the era as well, and the idea that you can project any meaning onto them seems to me to fit the ambition of the designers, the builders, and the governments who led the project from start to finish.
They were nothing if not modern. Like the big, almost empty walls in contemporary art galleries, which featured isolated paintings hung one next to the other in a uniform series (so unlike the traditional “salon hang” where paintings are all squeezed into the available space higgledy-piggledy). Like the wide streets and front gardens of salubrious Sydney suburbs, settled in the years after the turn of the century. Like the spreading government-funded train system that reached out into areas that were still covered in grass and trees, with scattered settlements in wide expanses yet to be filled with houses. Like the Reserve Bank of Australia building in Martin Place, designed in the International style to suit the times and imbued by its founder, Nugget Coombs, when it was finished in 1965, with the same ideals that had led to the foundation of the big, global organisations that emerged to prevent another military conflict: the World Bank (1944), the International Monetary Fund (1944), the United Nations (1945) and the International Court of Justice (1946). Things, the country seemed to be saying, echoing the global community, were going to be different now.
And different the Opera House is. Almost as well-known globally as Mickey Mouse, the building contains within it an abstract, formal purity that makes it able to withstand any application of light or shadow by whatever government of whatever colour happens to be in power at any particular time in history. It has at its core this simplicity, like money itself, so that it can accommodate any message and still retain its essential character. Apart from time and youth, money can be traded for practically anything, and the world after WWII was finally over was about nothing if not the accumulation of wealth. For all. For the broader community and not just for the economic elites. Our big challenge now is not the preservation of some notional purity for the Opera House that is rooted in narrow political interests, but rather the challenge today is to recapture the egalitarian spirit of the post-war years, and to make sure that the wealth that we are creating is shared as widely as it was then and not squirrelled away in offshore bank accounts operated by members of a rent-seeking managerial class.
While in theory I disagree with using the Opera House to promote gambling, because it is bad for people and causes harm to parts of the community, for the reasons listed I feel that the campaign of protest against the ads by the political left was misplaced. The bigger threat to their interests is a growing inequality that characterises the economies of the west, with Australia being no exception. Given the right conditions, totalitarianism can easily appear again; indeed, it exists already in many countries including China and Russia. The forms it takes now are different from the ones that applied in the past, but the end result is the same: the control of the majority by a murderous and self-interested elite. This should be the focus of the left in Australia. Change-dot-org petitions are merely the opium of the chattering classes.
What we won't do is put text or videos of horses running or horses’ numbers or names or the Everest logo on the Opera House sails.The prime minister, a member of the conservative Liberal Party, made his views public: the Opera House was Australia’s largest billboard and should run the ads. And the Liberal NSW premier, Gladys Berejiklian (also a Liberal), stepped in to announce a compromise. On Sunday she said, "There'll be no logos or names -- the only words on there [will be] the words of the trophy itself." But still Sydney simmered with resentment. Or large parts of it. Over 300,000 virtual signatures protesting against the move were collected on a website. Parts of the community were ropeable, voicing their complaints on Twitter to anyone who would listen. Some people in Melbourne were enjoying the spectacle: the hated rival to the north was being humbled by Capital. Well, good, they thought.
By the following Monday, Jones had magnanimously apologised to Herron. And the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s comedy team, The Chaser, got out during the night and projected a sign onto the Opera house’s sails that read “Advertise here”, along with Alan Jones’ mobile phone number. The rant had turned into a debacle which had turned into a meme.
On Tuesday night the drama continued when light displays were scheduled to be projected onto the building’s sails. As each barrier draw was announced the number of the barrier was projected on the middle sail and the colours of the relevant horse were projected on two smaller sails beside it. But protesters – over 1000 according to the ABC but probably closer to 5000 going by a video taken on the night – who had gathered in front of the building flashed torches onto the illuminated sails, distracting viewers who had tuned into the telecast and disrupting the smooth performance of the show.
Despite the sound and fury the episode threw up, it seemed clear to me that there was something both profoundly fitting about the premier’s decision and something disappointing about the views of the political left. Not exactly that Berejiklian was toning down the visuals, but that she had insisted that the ad go ahead. The building had been funded, originally, using a lottery, for a start. But there’s more to support her case than that fact alone.
The Opera House began in the 1960s as an idea and an international competition was run by the state Labor government to find an architect. The winner, a Dane, turned out to be an inspired choice, although he almost wasn’t chosen. But the idea itself was the interesting thing about his pitch to the judges: to build a special monument to an authentically Australian culture at the edge of the gorgeous harbour on the site of a tram marshalling yard. What characterised that moment in history was optimism, and people forget just how new that might have felt to Sydneysiders at the time. But think about it: with the New York stockmarket crash of 1929 and then the rise of totalitarianism in Germany in the 1930s, followed by a global war that only ended in 1945 that led to massive changes in governance around the planet, the world had had enough drama and now wanted to settle down and get on with the business of living.
Over 15 years of hardship and conflict were ended by halcyon days when the wages of ordinary people were rising in the post-war economic boom. People’s lives were being changed not only by better-paying jobs, many of which required university degrees to gain entry to, but by bigger houses with open plans instead of poky rooms, higher buildings in the city built to accommodate the businesses that were emerging to fill the void left by the Depression and WWII, a growing economy fuelled by higher immigration rates and inflows of foreign capital looking for a safe haven and high returns. Things were, finally, looking up.
The design that was finally chosen was itself not implemented exactly the way the architect had initially envisioned, in his early drawings, due to engineering constraints. Even so, the problem of how to assemble the vaulting structure using concrete and steel proved difficult to solve. In the end, modular pieces were strung together like beads on a cord using steel cables that were anchored to the earth. The building also has other innovative elements, including a cooling system that uses harbour water to regulate temperatures inside the buildings.
But what about those big, white sails? In a way they are emblematic of the era as well, and the idea that you can project any meaning onto them seems to me to fit the ambition of the designers, the builders, and the governments who led the project from start to finish.
They were nothing if not modern. Like the big, almost empty walls in contemporary art galleries, which featured isolated paintings hung one next to the other in a uniform series (so unlike the traditional “salon hang” where paintings are all squeezed into the available space higgledy-piggledy). Like the wide streets and front gardens of salubrious Sydney suburbs, settled in the years after the turn of the century. Like the spreading government-funded train system that reached out into areas that were still covered in grass and trees, with scattered settlements in wide expanses yet to be filled with houses. Like the Reserve Bank of Australia building in Martin Place, designed in the International style to suit the times and imbued by its founder, Nugget Coombs, when it was finished in 1965, with the same ideals that had led to the foundation of the big, global organisations that emerged to prevent another military conflict: the World Bank (1944), the International Monetary Fund (1944), the United Nations (1945) and the International Court of Justice (1946). Things, the country seemed to be saying, echoing the global community, were going to be different now.
And different the Opera House is. Almost as well-known globally as Mickey Mouse, the building contains within it an abstract, formal purity that makes it able to withstand any application of light or shadow by whatever government of whatever colour happens to be in power at any particular time in history. It has at its core this simplicity, like money itself, so that it can accommodate any message and still retain its essential character. Apart from time and youth, money can be traded for practically anything, and the world after WWII was finally over was about nothing if not the accumulation of wealth. For all. For the broader community and not just for the economic elites. Our big challenge now is not the preservation of some notional purity for the Opera House that is rooted in narrow political interests, but rather the challenge today is to recapture the egalitarian spirit of the post-war years, and to make sure that the wealth that we are creating is shared as widely as it was then and not squirrelled away in offshore bank accounts operated by members of a rent-seeking managerial class.
While in theory I disagree with using the Opera House to promote gambling, because it is bad for people and causes harm to parts of the community, for the reasons listed I feel that the campaign of protest against the ads by the political left was misplaced. The bigger threat to their interests is a growing inequality that characterises the economies of the west, with Australia being no exception. Given the right conditions, totalitarianism can easily appear again; indeed, it exists already in many countries including China and Russia. The forms it takes now are different from the ones that applied in the past, but the end result is the same: the control of the majority by a murderous and self-interested elite. This should be the focus of the left in Australia. Change-dot-org petitions are merely the opium of the chattering classes.
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