Sydney Opera House and a Peninsula

I’ve had a number of views of the Sydney Opera House while I’m here; some of them distant, some more close-up. I showed you pictures in other posts from Sydney, Australia. As per the plan for this afternoon that I concocted during lunch today—my last afternoon in Australia for this trip—I decided to take a tour of the Sydney Opera House, one of the world’s great buildings.

After the tour, I took a walk to the end of a small peninsula that juts into Sydney’s multi-bay, multi-inlet, multi-quay, beautiful harbour.

Sydney Opera House Tour

The tour of the Sydney Opera House I took lasts one hour. It’s not cheap—$43 (AUD) for non-decrepit Australian adults, $33 for decrepit Australian adults, and the full $43 adult fee for all foreigners regardless of age. I thought about telling them that tomorrow is my birthday based on the Australian calendar to see if that would get me the Australian decrepit rate as an early birthday gift, but I am too reserved to ask for that.

According to the tour guide, the Sydney Opera House loses money every year. It, along with many of the performing companies that play there, requires annual subsidies to keep operating. So, I guess I shouldn’t complain about helping to support such an amazing building.

I learned a lot about the Sydney Opera House from the guide. I didn’t get his name, so I’ll immortalize him here as “the guide.” I forget a lot of what he said, but I also remember a lot.

One of the first things the guide said is that the Sydney Opera House is misnamed. The opera company performs there only about five months of the year. The house is also home to the symphony and ballet. And several other performances take place there.

I might be the only person in the world who didn’t know this before today, but I learned that the Sydney Opera House isn’t just one big theatre. Before coming here, I can only recall seeing pictures of it from the side. From that angle, it looks like one big theatre.

When you look at the Sydney Opera House full-on from the front, it looks like two big theatres. Actually, from that angle, it looks like three big theatres, but one of the peaked parts of it is a lobby/events space, not a theatre. And from the back, as I saw on the harbour cruise the other day, it’s clear that it’s two separate theatres. So, were I not such a slow learner, I would have figured it out then.

The largest theatre is a 2,700-seat concert hall, although 700 of those seats are behind the stage and, during mass-choir performances, they are used by the choir.

The other large theatre is the ballet/opera hall, which seats only 1,500.

The opera company wasn’t resident during the complex’s first few years. The symphony was. So the symphony got its choice of which theatre it wanted. It chose the larger one. The opera company got the smaller one.

In addition to the symphony, the larger theatre also plays host to big-name performers and some other shows with varying durations of runs. There is a circus moving in there this week.

The opera/ballet hall and its stage are not particularly large as opera houses go. it can hold only medium-sized operas, not large ones.

The original design of the misnamed Sydney Opera House called for both of the larger theatres to be able to put on fully staged performances with big sets. However, the design was changed to have only the smaller of the two large theatres, the opera/ballet hall, be able to accommodate that. The larger one was redesigned to be a concert hall, which didn’t need a large backstage area and set loading and storage areas.

A later renovation opened up more space.

Originally, trucks with production sets and equipment drove into the theatre on the ground level. The theatre later dug a tunnel for them to enter under the theatre. The Sydney Opera House also put in a large freight elevator, large enough to hold a full-size shipping container, to accommodate the production move-ins and move-outs. This freed up the area where the trucks originally drove in and unloaded. As a result, there are now some smaller theatres and other performance spaces, along with more accessible entrances for theatregoers, in those freed-up spaces.

Now you know why I called both the concert hall and opera/ballet halls “larger theatres,” despite one being clearly larger than the other. There are also a few smaller theatres.

There was some controversy during the construction of the Sydney Opera House.

Planning started in the 1950s and construction took place in the 1960s. The design came about as a result of an international competition. The chosen architect was a Norwegian, Jørn Utzon, whom I’m not happy with because he forced me to find the “ø” on the virtual keyboard Macs provide if you hold down the “o” key. This required me to put my eyeball on my screen because my old eyes couldn’t distinguish between the o-variation offerings. But enough about that.

Utzon had to rework his design because neither he nor anyone else could figure out how to build it as originally designed. But that wasn’t the controversial part. He figured it out by considering a sphere and essentially carving it up into pieces and fitting some of the pieces into the design that is now the Sydney Opera House. With this reworking of the design, many of the components were able to be precast.

Here’s the controversial part. During construction, there was a change of government. The new government refused to pay Utzon his fees. Utzon tendered his resignation and the government accepted his resignation. Utzon left Australia and went back to Norway. The new government hired another architect to complete the building using Utzon’s design. Utzon never saw the finished building before he died in 2008. (He probably didn’t see it after he died either. I don’t believe in afterlives except in the civil service.)

A lot of people, not just Utzon, but a lot of Australians as well, were upset with the government for not paying him. Utzon eventually sued and won a financial settlement.

Later, I assume under yet another government, but I don’t remember the guide saying it, when the Sydney Opera House wanted to make some of the above renovations, including the truck tunnel and the changes to the areas freed up, it hired Utzon to design them. But he did all of the work from Norway. He never came back to visit his amazing building.

On the tour, we got to see a few lobbies, one of the small, lower-level theatres, and the opera/ballet hall. There was a performance going on in the large concert hall. So we couldn’t go in. But we did get to look at its stage and the seating behind the stage on a monitor in the lobby that played a closed circuit video, with sound, of the performance.

In the smaller theatre we visited, the guide wouldn’t let us take pictures because there was a crew busy setting up for the next show. I guess he was concerned about privacy issues.

In the opera/ballet hall, after he gave his spiel in there, I couldn’t see any crew and I asked if we could take pictures. He looked around, back and forth a few times, and said, “uuuummm, errrr, I’m not sure. But just to let you know, I’m walking this way.” He pointed to the exit, turned his back on me, and began to walk out. Hence, I took a picture and posted it here. Nice guy. Thanks.

There is a room in the Sydney Opera House that they usually rent out for receptions. It has a long abstract mural created by Utzon. There were no restrictions on picture-taking in there. I posted a shot here.

Getting back to the full-frontal shot I posted at the top of this section. See those many, wide steps in front of the Sydney Opera House? The theatre sometimes puts on outdoor shows and uses the stairs for seating.

Oh, there’s one thing I almost forgot to mention. The Sydney Opera House might be in Sydney, Australia, but there’s a lot of Scandinavia in it. As I mentioned, the architect was Norwegian. In addition, the tiles on the surface of the building were all made in Sweden and shipped to Sydney. According to the guide, the tiles are actually cream-coloured, not the white the building looks in pictures. The glaze on the tiles reflects the light and makes them look white.

Today, the Sydney Opera House is a UNESCO World Heritage Building. They are still renovating it to improve accessibility, but the opera house first has to get approval from UNESCO before they make any changes.

What a truly amazing building.

Mrs. Macquarie’s Point

After the Sydney Opera House Tour, I went for a walk to and around Mrs. Macquarie’s Point. It’s a tree-filled peninsula on the other side of the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney from the Sydney Opera House. If you read my opening post from Sydney, I said in there that I thought the garden was beautiful and I might go back again during my time here.

Walking to Mrs. Macquarie’s point forced me to walk through and endure all of the beauty and tranquillity of the Royal Botanic Garden all over again. (I don’t like to experience too much bliss because it sets too high an expectation for the future.) The gardens were just as beautiful today as they were the first time, although there were more people today, Sunday, than there were that first day, Wednesday. But the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney is big enough that it didn’t feel crowded.

Mrs. Macquarie’s Point is immediately adjacent to the gardens. In fact, I’m not entirely certain that it’s not considered to be part of the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney. I would have walked over the other day, but the most convenient path, which is immediately adjacent to the waterfront, was blocked off for construction.

It still was today, but I walked up the hill in the gardens, out one of the garden gates, and directly onto a higher-level path along the point. Once I got past the construction zone, I walked down to the path along the waterfront.

Mrs. Macquarie was the wife of Lachlan Macquarie, who was Governor of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821. She enjoyed the views from and walking around the peninsula so much that it was named after her. There are a few things on the peninsula, beyond just the point itself, named after Mrs. Macquarie. For example, there’s Mrs. Macquarie’s Road and Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair.

And to think, Mrs. Macquarie enjoyed the views even without the incredible structures that are visible today, like the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Sydney Opera House, and Sydney’s amazing skyline. All she had to enjoy was nature and a few farshtunken buildings. I’m joking. Kind of. Nature can be beautiful in its place. But Sydney is breathtaking.

Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair is not an actual chair. It’s a rock at the end of the peninsula that juts out unnaturally. The reason why it looks unnatural is that it was carved, by convict labour. Those were the days of the convict settlements in Australia.

Sorry, I forgot to take a picture of her “chair.”

And with that, I walked back to my hotel, drawing to a close my activities on this trip to Australia.

Sydney Summary

If you’ve been following along, you probably guessed by now that I love Sydney. And if you haven’t been following along, I’m insulted.

I’m no good at choosing favourites on anything—movies, food, cities, nail clippers, or anything. I usually like a few things in each category for different reasons. So it’s difficult to pick a favourite. But, now that I’ve visited, Sydney is definitely in the upper echelons of my favourite city list.

I could have spent longer here without getting bored. I didn’t get to the zoo, which is supposed to be a good one. There are a couple of parks in the main part of the city that I didn’t visit. There are districts in the core that I didn’t explore. And I never left the core. For example, I didn’t go to the other side of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. So I don’t know anything about what’s in North Sydney.

Plus, there are day trips that I could have taken from Sydney that I didn’t take. The most popular appears to be Black Mountain, which is supposed to be very scenic. Several companies run day tours out there. The problem is that most of them leave at 7:00, 7:30, or 8:00 in the morning. That’s way too early for me.

And the shortest of the Black Mountain tours I saw is nine-and-a-half hours. Some are as long as 11 hours. I found one tour that left at, I forget if it was 11:00 or 11:30, which would have been great for me, but I didn’t want to get back that late. Plus, I didn’t have enough time to finish seeing all of Sydney. I would have seen even less if I spent a full day on a day trip.

Short story long, I would have enjoyed a few more days here. At my age, I don’t know if I’ll get back. But I’d like to. And there is an immense chunk of Australia that I didn’t even get close to on this trip.

So, if I were to write an Australia summary in this post (I thought about it, but I’m getting too tired to start on it), I’d definitely like to come back, revisit some of the places I got to on this trip, and explore more of the country as well.

I haven’t yet decided where my next journalized trip will be, but I’ll catch you then.