In short: Before there was an Opera House, before there was a fort, and long before there was a tram shed, the eastern point of Sydney Cove was Tubowgule, a rocky tidal island that the Gadigal people knew well for its oysters and fish. The First Fleet put its few cattle there in 1788 and called it Cattle Point. The convicts burned its old shell middens for lime, so it became Limeburners' Point. In 1790 Governor Phillip built a little brick hut there for Woollarawarre Bennelong, and the name Bennelong Point has stuck ever since. A gun battery went up at the tip in 1798. Governor Macquarie had Francis Greenway build Fort Macquarie there between 1817 and 1821, and the fort stood for eighty years until it was knocked down in 1901 for a tram depot that copied its battlements. The trams left in 1955, the depot came down in 1958, and on that same ground Jørn Utzon's Opera House rose between 1959 and 1973. The Queen opened it on 20 October 1973, and in 2007 it was World Heritage listed. This is the story of that one little point of land, from Cattle Point to the Opera House.
I've walked around Bennelong Point more times than I can count, and like most Sydneysiders I've stopped seeing it. It's just there, the white sails, the tourists, the steps. But when you start digging, the point turns out to be one of the most layered bits of ground in the country. Nearly every chapter of Sydney's story has left a mark on it, and most of those marks are now under the concrete. So here it is, layer by layer.
Tubowgule – The Point Before 1788
The Sydney Opera House's own history pages describe Tubowgule as a point at the end of a long, wide ridge, ringed by rocky shoals that mostly went under at high tide. With the harbour on one side, the cove on the other, a freshwater creek and mud flats nearby, it was a rich place to live. There were oysters, mussels, fish, possums, wallabies, kangaroos and plenty of plants to eat. The shells and bones left behind built up over generations into middens around the harbour, and the point had its share of them.
The name comes down to us in a few spellings. The Opera House uses Tubowgule, the Dictionary of Sydney has Tubowgulle and Tubowghule, and other writers give Dubbagullee, Inbughalee or Djubuguli. That's normal for words first written down by English officers trying to catch Aboriginal sounds by ear, and I've used Tubowgule here because it's the one the Opera House itself uses. The local people were the Gadigal, one of the clans of the Eora around the harbour.
The important thing to get your head around is that the very tip was an island. When the First Fleet came in, the end of the point was a small rocky tidal island, cut off from the mainland at high water, with a little beach on its western side. That gap was filled in later, and the island was largely forgotten until the Opera House excavations found it again in the late 1950s.
Cattle Point – 1788
When Phillip's fleet sailed into Sydney Cove in January 1788, it brought a small herd of livestock picked up at the Cape of Good Hope. The rocky eastern point was handy, as it was separated from the bush and easy to keep animals on, so for a short time in 1788 the British put their cattle and horses out there and called it Cattle Point. The Dictionary of Sydney quotes an early account of the animals being landed there until "they had cropped the little pasturage it afforded", and then being moved on to the next cove, Farm Cove, which was being cleared for the government farm.
It didn't do them much good in the end. The colony's first cattle strayed off in 1788, and it wasn't until November 1795 that Governor Hunter's party crossed the Nepean and found a herd of more than forty of their descendants, in the country Hunter named the Cowpastures. But for a few months the little point was the colony's paddock, and that's how it got its first English name.
Limeburners' Point
A settlement needs mortar, and mortar needs lime. There's no limestone around Sydney, but there were the middens, thousands of years of oyster shells left by Gadigal women gathering shellfish. The Opera House history says the colonists crushed the middens around the harbour, including those at Tubowgule, and mixed them with water to make a lime slurry. Wikipedia's Bennelong Point article says convict women did the regathering and the shells were burnt for lime. So the point picked up another name, Limeburners' Point.
Wikipedia also says the shells from the point only gave enough lime for one building, the two-storey Government House. That's a nice detail, but it's one I've only found in that one place, so take it as a story rather than a proven fact. What isn't in doubt is that burning those middens destroyed a record of thousands of years of Aboriginal life on the harbour, in the space of a few years.
Bennelong and His Hut – 1790
The name we use today belongs to Woollarawarre Bennelong, a Wangal man whose country was on the south side of the Parramatta River. His story is a big one and I've only got room for the part that touches the point.
On 25 November 1789 Phillip had Bennelong and Colebee seized at Manly Cove and brought to Government House. Phillip wanted someone to learn English and explain the colony to the Eora, and the Eora to the colony. Bennelong got away in May 1790, but later that year, after Phillip was speared at the whale feast at Manly, he started coming back to the settlement of his own accord. He and Colebee began to dine with the Governor regularly.
According to the Dictionary of Sydney, it was at Bennelong's own request that Phillip built him a brick hut "on a point of land fixed upon by himself", on the headland at Tubowgule. It was 12 feet (about 3.5 metres) square, with a tiled roof and the fireplace outside. Keith Vincent Smith's work, published in Aboriginal History, dates the hut to November 1790. Phillip also had a tin shield made for him, to ward off the spears of his enemies.
Bennelong lived there with Barangaroo, his second wife, a Cammeraygal woman and skilled fisherwoman from the north shore. She gave birth to a baby girl, Dilboong, who lived only a few months. When Barangaroo died around the end of August 1791, Bennelong cremated her remains in Governor Phillip's garden, beside Sydney Cove.
In December 1792 Bennelong sailed for England with Phillip, along with the younger Wangal man Yemmerrawanne. He saw London's museums, the theatre at Covent Garden and Parliament, and came home in 1795. Yemmerrawanne never did. He died of a lung infection at Eltham in Kent on 18 May 1794, aged about nineteen, and was buried in the churchyard of St John the Baptist there. Bennelong didn't go back to the point. He lived later at Kissing Point with his third wife, Boorong. Smith writes that the hut was pulled down in November 1795, two months after he got back, and the Opera House says the bricks were reused elsewhere. The hut was gone, but the name stayed. Today the Opera House sits on Bennelong Point, and its restaurant is called Bennelong.
The First Guns – 1788 to 1798
The point was always going to be a spot for guns, as it guards the entrance to Sydney Cove. Wikipedia's Fort Macquarie article says that in July 1788 Lieutenant William Dawes was told to build a small redoubt on this side, which held two brass six-pounders by November. It says the earthworks were given up in 1791 and the guns moved to the west side of the cove, where the Dawes Point battery grew up. I've kept that short because I haven't been able to check it against a second source.
On firmer ground is the half-moon battery of December 1798. Both Wikipedia articles say it was built at the far northern tip of the point and armed with guns from HMS Supply, the little armed tender of the First Fleet. A Mr Pern, writing in 1802, described the battery on the northern point of Sydney Cove as built on a rock of difficult access, carrying six pieces of cannon behind a trench of turf. In truth these early defences were pretty basic, and nobody seriously expected them to hold off a proper warship.
Macquarie, Greenway and Fort Macquarie – 1817 to 1821
Then came Lachlan Macquarie, the governor who wanted Sydney to look like a proper town, and his convict architect Francis Greenway, transported for forgery and made Civil Architect by Macquarie. Between them they built Hyde Park Barracks, St James' Church, the Macquarie Lighthouse and much more. In 1817 Macquarie ordered a new fort on Bennelong Point.
Macquarie laid the foundation stone on 17 December 1817. Building it took a lot of work first. Between 1818 and 1821 the tidal gap between the little island and the mainland was filled with rock cut from the point itself, and the whole area was levelled into a low platform. The Dictionary of Sydney puts the joining of the island to the mainland in 1818. While they were at it, a big slice of the rocky escarpment was cut away so a road could run around the point from Sydney Cove to Farm Cove. It was called the Tarpeian Way, after the cliff in ancient Rome, and the cut rock face is still there behind the Opera House.
The stone came from the Governor's Domain quarry close by, and convicts worked on the fort for around two years. It was finished in February 1821.
What the fort looked like
Greenway gave Macquarie a little castle. The fort was square, with three of its faces open to the water so the guns had a clear field of fire. In the middle stood a two-storey castellated tower about 27.4 metres around, with walls around one and a half metres thick at the top. The tower held a guardroom and storehouse and could house a small garrison of one officer and eighteen men. Underneath was a powder magazine big enough for 350 barrels of gunpowder. The battery had fifteen guns, ten 24-pounders and five 6-pounders. In the early years a narrow channel of salt water still separated the fort from the land and was crossed by a drawbridge, but this was later filled in to make a roadway.
A fort that never fired in anger
Fort Macquarie was more for show than anything. Its battlements were really decoration in the Gothic taste of the day, and it was never tested by an enemy. As Sydney's defences were rethought over the century, especially after the Crimean War scare of the 1850s that gave us Fort Denison, the real firepower shifted out to the heads and the harbour forts. Fort Macquarie was left as a saluting battery, a store, a barracks and, by the end, a naval drill site. Wikipedia says a naval drill shed stood on the site by 1901.
It made a lovely picture, though. Just about every artist and photographer who came to Sydney had a go at it, with Government House on the hill behind and the North Shore across the water. From Conrad Martens in the 1830s to the stereo photographers of the 1850s and the Kerry studio later on, the fort turns up again and again, and those pictures are how we know it today.
One of the fort's guns has travelled. Two 42-pounder muzzle-loading cannon from Fort Macquarie were taken to Newcastle in 1903 to make a memorial in Gregson Park, Hamilton, where they were refurbished in 2006 and are still standing today. Wikipedia says another sits in Hyde Park.
The Fort Comes Down – 1901
By 1900 Sydney's trams were going electric and the government needed somewhere to keep them near Circular Quay. Bennelong Point was government land and right at the end of the line. In 1901 the New South Wales Minister for Works decided Fort Macquarie had to go. The fort and the naval drill shed were both demolished to make way for a tram depot.
It's easy to be cranky about that now. Fort Macquarie was one of Greenway's buildings and one of the oldest in the colony. But in 1901 nobody talked about heritage the way we do, and an old fort with no military use was just in the road. At least the builders of the depot had the decency to remember it.
The Fort Macquarie Tram Depot – 1902 to 1958
The Fort Macquarie Tram Depot opened on 10 August 1902. It was built like a fortress, with a battlemented front parapet and a tall turret, as a deliberate nod to the fort that had stood there. The rest was solid working brick, with false windows hiding vents and a twelve-road car shed with the roof turned to the south.
It was a big building. The Wikipedia figures give a width of 131 feet, a car shed 250 feet long, the whole building 307 feet from end to end, and the turret 80 feet high. A loop line ran around the outside, and the sidings on the western side were a handy lay-over spot for trams, taking pressure off Circular Quay at busy times. A signal box beside the tracks controlled entry to the depot and loop.
For half a century "Fort Macquarie" was a name on the front of Sydney trams. Services ran from there to Rozelle, Drummoyne, Gladesville and Ryde, to Forest Lodge, Balmain and Birchgrove, to Haberfield, Five Dock and Abbotsford, to Leichhardt, Glebe Point, Kensington and Rosebery. My grandparents' generation would have known "Fort Mac" as just another stop, not a fort at all.
The point also saw some sad days in those years. When the ferry Greycliffe was run down by the Tahiti on 3 November 1927 with the loss of 40 lives, many of the survivors, and the bodies of those who died, were brought to the Man o' War Steps on the eastern side of the tram depot. It became a makeshift casualty station, with ambulance men, police, passers-by and depot workers helping the injured, and Sam Hood's photographs from that day show an ambulance and injured passengers at Fort Macquarie. I've written about Sydney's ferries and trams elsewhere, and the link is at the bottom.
By the 1950s the trams were on the way out. The depot closed on 22 October 1955, with most of its services moved to the Dowling Street depot. By then the site already had a new job waiting for it.
Goossens and the Dream of an Opera House
The man who started it all was Eugene Goossens, an English conductor who came out in 1947 to lead the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and run the NSW State Conservatorium of Music. Goossens thought the Sydney Town Hall, where the orchestra played, wasn't good enough, and he started lobbying for a proper home for opera and concerts. The National Museum of Australia says he met Premier Joseph Cahill in 1954, and the two agreed Sydney needed a major performance venue.
It was Goossens, too, who wanted Bennelong Point. Cahill's people had been thinking about a site near Wynyard railway station, but Goossens held out for the point, with the tram depot due to go and harbour all around. It's hard to imagine the building anywhere else now.
Goossens didn't get to see it built. In March 1956 he was stopped at Mascot airport by customs officers who found what was then called indecent material in his luggage. He was fined, lost his posts and left Australia under a cloud. He died in London on 13 June 1962. The Opera House he fought for opened eleven years later.
The Design Competition – 1955 to 1957
Cahill launched an international design competition on 13 September 1955, with a first prize of £5,000. The brief asked for a large hall seating 3,000 and a small hall for 1,200, for full-scale opera, orchestral and choral concerts, mass meetings, lectures, ballet and more. It drew 233 entries from 32 countries.
The four judges were Professor Henry Ingham Ashworth of the University of Sydney, Cobden Parkes, the NSW Government Architect, Professor Leslie Martin of Cambridge, who had worked on London's Royal Festival Hall, and the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen.
Saarinen and entry 218
This is where the most famous story comes in, and it needs a bit of care. The National Museum of Australia says there's no record of how the judges reached their decision. The story goes that Saarinen turned up after the other three had already shortlisted their favourites, wasn't impressed, went through the rejected pile and found entry number 218 by a 38-year-old Dane, Jørn Utzon. He is said to have argued for it until the others agreed. Wikipedia puts it a bit differently, saying Saarinen picked Utzon's design from a final cut of 30. Either way, everyone agrees Saarinen was Utzon's great champion on the panel. The winner was announced on 29 January 1957.
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Utzon's drawings were famously sketchy, little more than a few sheets of plans and ideas. The judges said so themselves in their January 1957 report:
"The drawings submitted for this scheme are simple to the point of being diagrammatic. Nevertheless, as we have returned again and again to the study of these drawings, 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 had won seven of the eighteen competitions he'd entered, but had never seen any of his designs built. He came to Sydney for the first time on 29 July 1957, and a new model was shown at a public meeting in the Town Hall on 7 August.
Paying for It – The Opera House Lottery
The government didn't want the building to come out of the general budget, so it turned to a lottery. Tickets in the first Opera House Lottery went on sale on 25 November 1957, and there was a queue down Barrack Street on the first morning. Tickets were £5 each, a lot of money then, and the first prize was £100,000, the richest lottery ever held in the state. The first draw was on 10 January 1958.
The lottery ran for almost thirty years, with the last draw in 1986. According to NSW Lotteries, it sold more than 86 million tickets over 496 draws and raised $102 million, which paid for most of the building. So in a real sense the people of New South Wales paid for the Opera House a fiver at a time.
Building It – 1959 to 1973
The tram depot was demolished in 1958 and work started on 2 March 1959. Cahill wanted it under way quickly, before public opinion or a change of government could kill it, even though Utzon hadn't finished the design and the big structural questions were still open. That early start caused trouble for years.
The job was done in stages. The usual way of describing them is the podium, then the roof shells, then the glass walls and interiors, but different sources give slightly different dates for each.
Stage I – the podium
The builders Civil & Civic started on the podium in March 1959, with the engineers Ove Arup & Partners overseeing the work. By January 1961 it was 47 weeks behind. There had been bad weather and trouble diverting the stormwater, and construction had started before proper drawings were ready. The podium was finished in February 1963. It later turned out that its columns weren't strong enough for the roof that was going to sit on top of them, and they had to be rebuilt.
It was also during the podium work that the diggers found the old island and the convict rubble fill from Macquarie's day, so for a moment the Cattle Point layer saw daylight again.
There's a lovely story from those early years. In 1960 the American singer Paul Robeson climbed up on the site and sang "Ol' Man River" to the construction workers at lunch, so he became the first artist ever to perform at the Opera House.
Stage II – the shells and the spherical solution
Utzon's competition sketches showed sweeping shells with no fixed geometry, and nobody knew how to build them. From 1957 to 1963 the architects and Arup's engineers went through at least twelve versions, trying parabolas, ellipses and circular ribs, without finding a shape that could be built at a sensible cost. Every shell was different, which meant custom formwork or custom precast pieces for every one.
The answer came in mid-1961: make every shell a piece cut from the same sphere. With one constant curve, the ribs could be cast from standard moulds in pieces of common length and fitted together. It's why the shells look the way they do. The sphere has a radius of 75.2 metres, and you can still see a model of the idea at the Opera House showing how all the shells fit back into one ball.
Who thought of it first is still argued about. Utzon has long been given the credit, and Ove Arup himself wrote that Utzon came up with the idea of making all the shells of uniform curvature. But Arup's biographer Peter Jones says the engineers remembered talking about spheres themselves, while Yuzo Mikami, who worked on the design team, takes Utzon's side in his book Utzon's Sphere. Most writers settle on the view that Utzon, Arup and Arup's partner Ronald Jenkins all played a big part.
The builders Hornibrook took on the shells, setting up a factory on site to cast about 2,400 precast ribs and 4,000 roof panels. Hornibrook's engineer Joe Bertony designed an adjustable steel erection arch to hold the sections in place. It was one of the first big building jobs to use computers for the structural analysis, and the arches were surveyed at the end of every day so the next could be placed correctly. The tiles came from Höganäs in Sweden, more than a million of them in glossy white and matte cream, and it took three years to get the "Sydney tile" right.
The politics, and Utzon's resignation – 1965 to 1966
Cahill died on 22 October 1959, but Labor stayed in government and the project went on. Then at the May 1965 election Robert Askin's Liberals won, and Askin had been a loud critic of the Opera House. His new Minister for Public Works, Davis Hughes, was even less friendly.
Hughes wanted the architect, engineers and contractors each reporting directly to the government, and wanted contracts put out to tender. Utzon wanted everything to go through his office and to pick suppliers he trusted, such as Ralph Symonds for the plywood interiors. Costs were climbing and the interiors weren't resolved. By February 1966 Utzon was owed more than $100,000 in fees, and Hughes held the money back. The National Museum of Australia gives the figure as $103,000.
On 28 February 1966 Utzon met Hughes. The government minutes record him saying, "If you don't do it, I resign," and Hughes answering, "I accept your resignation. Thank you very much. Goodbye." Over the next days architects, artists and unionists marched on Bennelong Point and called for him to be brought back. Hughes offered him a lesser job as "design architect" under a panel, without any control over construction, but Utzon said no. He and his family left Sydney on 28 April 1966. He never came back.
The Sydney Morning Herald wasn't sure who to blame at first. One editorial said: "No architect in the world has enjoyed greater freedom than Mr Utzon. Few clients have been more patient or more generous than the people and the Government of NSW." By 17 March 1966 it was saying it "was not his fault that a succession of Governments and the Opera House Trust should so signally have failed to impose any control or order on the project".
Stage III – Hall, Todd and Littlemore
To finish the job, Hughes and the Government Architect Ted Farmer brought in three Australian architects. David Littlemore handled construction supervision, Lionel Todd handled the contract documents, and the design work fell to Peter Hall, a young architect who had won the Sulman Medal in 1964. At least two well-known Sydney architects had already turned the job down, and Hall had himself signed the petition calling for Utzon to be reinstated. He took it on in April 1966 and found far more unresolved than he'd expected. The seating numbers, acoustics, glass walls and the brief itself all still had to be settled.
The biggest change was inside. Hall's team decided opera and concerts couldn't share the one hall. The major hall became a concert hall only, the Concert Hall, and the minor hall took the opera and ballet, as the Opera Theatre, renamed the Joan Sutherland Theatre in 2012. The stage machinery already built for the big hall was pulled out. Utzon's plywood interiors and his acoustic designs for both halls were dropped. Ever since, people have argued about whether the halls would have been better his way, and the cramped orchestra pit in the Joan Sutherland Theatre has been a sore point for decades.
Hall guided the project for more than five years. The Australian Heritage Database notes that he kept talking with Utzon about the design for at least eighteen months after Utzon left.
There was one more twist on site. In 1972 the builders' labourers, affiliated with the Builders Labourers Federation, were sacked after a dispute. They broke back into the site and ran it themselves for five weeks under "workers' control", and they ended the work-in only when management agreed to a 25 per cent pay rise and the right to elect their own foremen.
The Opening – 20 October 1973
Before the official opening there were a few firsts. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra gave the first public concert in the Concert Hall on 5 September 1973, an all-Wagner night under Charles Mackerras with Birgit Nilsson. The first opera in the Opera Theatre was Prokofiev's War and Peace on 28 September 1973.
Then on Saturday 20 October 1973, Queen Elizabeth II formally opened the Sydney Opera House. A large crowd packed the forecourt and the harbour, the ceremony was on television, and there were fireworks and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
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You'll often read that Utzon wasn't invited and wasn't mentioned. That isn't right. He was invited but stayed away, so the row over his leaving wouldn't overshadow the day. The Queen's speech didn't name him or any of the architects, but Premier Askin did give him credit.
The cost
The figure everybody remembers is the blow-out. The 1957 estimate was £3,500,000, or $7 million, with the building to be finished by Australia Day, 26 January 1963. It came in ten years late at $102 million. That's the same figure as the lottery's total, which is why people say the lottery paid for the lot. In October 1966, after Utzon left, the spending to date was only $22.9 million, less than a quarter of the final bill. Hornibrook's director Sam Hoare broke the total down roughly as $5.5 million for the podium, $12.5 million for the roof shells, $56.5 million for completion, $9 million for stage gear, lighting and the organ, and $16.5 million in fees and other costs.
Bringing Utzon Back – 1999 to 2008
For more than thirty years the building and its architect stayed apart. In the late 1990s the Sydney Opera House Trust got back in touch with Utzon, and in 1999 he was appointed design consultant for future work. That year he agreed to set down the Utzon Design Principles, guidelines for how the building should be cared for and changed while keeping to his original idea. His son Jan, also an architect, worked alongside him.
The first space rebuilt to his design opened in 2004 and was named the Utzon Room in his honour. It holds his tapestry Homage to C.P.E. Bach, 14 metres long. In 2006 a colonnade was added along the western side, opening nine big windows in the old solid wall. Utzon received the Pritzker Prize, architecture's highest honour, in 2003, with the citation calling the Opera House "his masterpiece".
World Heritage – 28 June 2007
On 28 June 2007, UNESCO's World Heritage Committee inscribed the Sydney Opera House on the World Heritage List under criterion (i), as a masterpiece of human creative genius. The committee's statement calls it "a masterpiece of 20th century architecture" and notes that "Ove Arup's engineering achievements helped make Utzon's vision a reality." It was one of the youngest buildings ever listed, and Utzon was still alive to see it. It had already been on the NSW State Heritage Register since 2003 and the National Heritage List since 2005.
Jørn Utzon died in Denmark on 29 November 2008, aged 90, without ever having seen the finished building. A state memorial was held in the Concert Hall on 25 March 2009, with his son Jan and daughter Lin there.
The Decade of Renewal – 2017 to 2022
By the 2010s the building was showing its age, and the old problems with the halls had never gone away. The Opera House ran what it calls its Decade of Renewal, almost $300 million of work largely paid for by the NSW Government. The Joan Sutherland Theatre closed in the second half of 2017 to have its stage machinery replaced. The Concert Hall closed in February 2020 and reopened in July 2022 with improved acoustics, better access and new staging, which went a long way towards fixing the sound problems that had hung around since 1973. In 2016 the Opera House also finally hung the Le Corbusier tapestry that Utzon had commissioned back in 1959 for the building, after buying it at auction.
Fifty Years – 20 October 2023
On 20 October 2023 the Opera House turned fifty. The 2023 architecture awards included a NSW Architecture Medallion and the Greenway Award for Heritage for the renewal work, which is a nice touch, as Francis Greenway's name comes back to the point two hundred years after his fort.
When you stand on the forecourt now, it's worth remembering what's underneath you. There's a tidal island where the Gadigal fished and gathered oysters, a paddock for the First Fleet's cattle, the lime kilns, the place where Bennelong's little hut stood, a 1798 battery, Greenway's castle, half a century of trams, and then Utzon's sails. Not bad for one small point of land.
Timeline
- Before 1788 – Tubowgule, a tidal island and point used by the Gadigal people; shell middens build up over generations.
- 1788 – The First Fleet arrives. The point is briefly used to hold cattle and horses and becomes Cattle Point. Shells burned for lime give the name Limeburners' Point.
- July–November 1788 – A small redoubt with two brass six-pounders is reported on this side of the cove (Wikipedia).
- 25 November 1789 – Bennelong and Colebee are captured at Manly.
- November 1790 – Phillip builds Bennelong a 12-foot-square brick hut on the point.
- About end of August 1791 – Barangaroo dies.
- December 1792 – Bennelong sails for England with Phillip.
- 1795 – Bennelong returns. His hut is demolished in November.
- December 1798 – A half-moon battery is built at the tip, with guns from HMS Supply.
- 17 December 1817 – Macquarie lays the foundation stone of Greenway's Fort Macquarie.
- 1818–1821 – The tidal gap is filled and the Tarpeian Way is cut.
- February 1821 – Fort Macquarie is completed.
- 1901 – The Minister for Works decides to demolish the fort, and it comes down.
- 10 August 1902 – Fort Macquarie Tram Depot opens.
- 1903 – Two of the fort's cannon go to Gregson Park, Newcastle.
- 3 November 1927 – Greycliffe disaster. Survivors and the dead are brought to the Man o' War Steps beside the depot.
- 1947 – Eugene Goossens arrives in Sydney.
- 1954 – Goossens and Premier Cahill agree Sydney needs a performance venue.
- 13 September 1955 – The design competition is launched.
- 22 October 1955 – The tram depot closes.
- March 1956 – Goossens is caught at customs and leaves Australia.
- 29 January 1957 – Utzon's entry 218 is announced as the winner.
- 25 November 1957 – Opera House Lottery tickets go on sale. The first draw is on 10 January 1958.
- 1958 – The tram depot is demolished.
- 2 March 1959 – Construction begins with Stage I, the podium.
- 1960 – Paul Robeson sings for the workers.
- Mid-1961 – The spherical solution for the shells is found.
- February 1963 – The podium is finished and Utzon moves his office to Sydney.
- May 1965 – The Askin government is elected and Davis Hughes becomes Works Minister.
- 28 February 1966 – Utzon resigns.
- April 1966 – Hall, Todd and Littlemore are appointed, and Utzon leaves Sydney on 28 April.
- 1972 – The builders' labourers' work-in takes place.
- 20 October 1973 – Queen Elizabeth II opens the Opera House. The final cost is $102 million.
- 1986 – The last Opera House Lottery draw.
- 1999 – Utzon is re-engaged and agrees to write the Design Principles.
- 2003 – Utzon wins the Pritzker Prize, and the building goes on the NSW State Heritage Register.
- 2004 – The Utzon Room opens.
- 28 June 2007 – World Heritage listing.
- 29 November 2008 – Utzon dies in Denmark.
- 2017–2022 – The main renewal works, with the Concert Hall reopening in July 2022.
- 20 October 2023 – The 50th anniversary.
Where the Sources Disagree
- The Aboriginal name. It's spelled Tubowgule (Sydney Opera House), Tubowgulle and Tubowghule (Dictionary of Sydney), and Dubbagullee, Inbughalee or Djubuguli (Wikipedia).
- When Bennelong's hut was built. The Opera House says 1790, and Keith Vincent Smith gives November 1790. One Dictionary of Sydney picture caption says 1789, but he was only captured in November 1789 and didn't come back to the settlement of his own accord until later in 1790, so 1790 is the safer date.
- "Built in 1798". Wikipedia's Fort Macquarie article opens by saying the fort was built in 1798. That's the date of the earlier half-moon battery. Greenway's Fort Macquarie was begun in 1817 and finished in 1821.
- Lime for one building only. Wikipedia says the point's shells only made enough lime for Government House. I haven't found that in a second source.
- The 1788 redoubt. Only Wikipedia's Fort Macquarie article places Dawes' 1788 redoubt on this side of the cove, so I've reported it as that article's claim.
- When the trams left. The depot closed on 22 October 1955, but it wasn't demolished until 1958. You'll see both years given as "the end of the depot".
- How Saarinen found Utzon's design. The National Museum of Australia says there's no record of how the judging went and calls the rejected-pile story a rumour. Wikipedia says Saarinen chose it from 30 finalists.
- Planned completion date. Wikipedia gives Australia Day, 26 January 1963. The National Museum of Australia says December 1963.
- Stage dates. Wikipedia gives Stage I as 1959–1963 (podium), Stage II as the roof and Stage III as the interiors from 1963. The Australian Heritage Database gives the podium as 1958–1961, the shells as 1962–1967, and the glass walls and interiors as 1967–1973.
- Who found the spherical solution. It's credited to Utzon by Utzon's side and by Mikami. Arup's biographer Peter Jones says the engineers were also canvassing spheres. Nobody can settle it now.
- Utzon's unpaid fees. Wikipedia says "more than $100,000", and the National Museum of Australia says $103,000.
- Was Utzon snubbed at the opening? He's often said not to have been invited. Wikipedia, citing the record, says he was invited but declined, and Askin credited him in his speech.
My Earlier Posts
- Bennelong Point – Circular Quay East – Australia's First Stock
- Fort Macquarie – Eastern Point of Sydney Cove / Western Point of Farm Cove – Bennelong Point
- Woolaware Bennelong
- Wuganmagulyav Creek – Farm Cove
- Farm Cove – Next to the Royal Botanic Gardens
- Sydney Cove – 1788
- Semi-Circular Quay – Port Jackson – Sydney Harbour
- Dawes Point – Tar-ra – The Rocks
- Government House – Royal Botanic Gardens – Macquarie Street
- Francis Greenway's Residence – George Street, Cnr Argyle Street – The Rocks
- South Head – The Macquarie Lighthouse
- Hyde Park Barracks – Macquarie Street
- Sydney Trams – From Horse Trams to Light Rail
- Fort Denison – Pinchgut Island – Sydney Harbour – From 1788 to Today
- Captain Arthur Phillip & The First Fleet Arriving At Botany Bay – January 1788
Sources
- Sydney Opera House, "Tubowgule" – https://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/our-story/tubowgule
- Sydney Opera House, "Conserving and celebrating our heritage" – https://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/our-story/conserving-and-celebrating-our-heritage
- Sydney Opera House, "Renewing an icon" – https://stories.sydneyoperahouse.com/renewing-an-icon/
- Dictionary of Sydney, "Bennelong Point" – https://dictionaryofsydney.org/natural_feature/bennelong_point
- Dictionary of Sydney, "East Circular Quay" – https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/east_circular_quay
- Dictionary of Sydney, "Woollarawarre Bennelong" (Keith Vincent Smith) – https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/woollarawarre_bennelong
- Keith Vincent Smith, "Bennelong among his people", Aboriginal History vol. 33, ANU Press – https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p74631/pdf/ch0156.pdf
- National Museum of Australia, "Defining Moments: Sydney Opera House" – https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/sydney-opera-house
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, news, 28 June 2007 – https://whc.unesco.org/en/news/360/
- UNESCO World Heritage Committee, Decision 31 COM 8B.31 – https://whc.unesco.org/en/decisions/1329/
- Australian Heritage Database, Sydney Opera House (place 105914) – https://environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/ahdb/search.pl?mode=place_detail;place_id=105914
- Museums of History NSW, "10 Jan 1958 – first Sydney Opera House lottery" – https://mhnsw.au/stories/on-this-day/10-january-1958/
- The Lott media release, Opera House 50th anniversary partnership, 2023 – https://mediacentre.thelott.com/media-releases/the-lott-to-join-the-opera-houses-50th-anniversary-celebrations-with-new-partnership/
- ArtsHub, "Kiss and sell: The story of the Sydney Opera House" – https://www.artshub.com.au/news/features/kiss-and-sell-the-story-of-the-sydney-opera-house-256285-2360482/
- Wikipedia, "Sydney Opera House" – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Opera_House (incorporates NSW State Heritage Register text, CC BY 3.0 AU)
- Wikipedia, "Bennelong Point" – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bennelong_Point
- Wikipedia, "Fort Macquarie" – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Macquarie
- Wikipedia, "Fort Macquarie Tram Depot" – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Macquarie_Tram_Depot
- NSW State Heritage Register, Sydney Opera House (listed 2003) – https://www.hms.heritage.nsw.gov.au/
- Peter Jones, Ove Arup: Masterbuilder of the Twentieth Century (Yale, 2006), as cited by Wikipedia
- Yuzo Mikami, Utzon's Sphere (Shokokusha, 2001), as cited by Wikipedia
- Peter Murray, The Saga of the Sydney Opera House (Spon, 2004), as cited by Wikipedia
- Peter Webber, Peter Hall: The Phantom of the Opera House (2012), as cited by Wikipedia
- NSW State Archives and Records, NRS 12825, Utzon competition drawings
- Dictionary of Sydney, "Yemmerrawanne" – https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/yemmerrawanne
- First Fleet Fellowship, "First Fleet Cattle" – https://firstfleetfellowship.org.au/library/first-fleet-cattle/
- Monument Australia, "Cowpastures Memorial" – https://monumentaustralia.org.au/themes/landscape/settlement/display/102538-cowpastures-memorial-
- David Salter, "Goossens, Sir Eugene Aynsley (1893–1962)", Australian Dictionary of Biography – https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/goossens-sir-eugene-aynsley-10329
- David Clune, "Cahill, John Joseph (Joe) (1891–1959)", Australian Dictionary of Biography – https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/cahill-john-joseph-joe-9659
- World Socialist Web Site, "Sydney Opera House architect, Jørn Utzon dies", December 2008 – https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/12/utzo-d10.html
- Australian Police, "The 1927 Tahiti-Greycliffe Disaster" (Steve Brew) – https://australianpolice.com.au/nsw-police-history-index/water-police/the-1927-tahiti-greycliffe-disaster/
- Dictionary of Sydney, "Greycliffe shipwreck 1927" – https://dictionaryofsydney.org/event/greycliffe_shipwreck_1927
- State Library of New South Wales, photographs and paintings of Fort Macquarie (Martens, Hetzer, Moresby, Kerry & Co., Bischoff) and Jack Hickson's opening photographs, via Wikimedia Commons