Don’t be fooled by this book’s splendid appearance; it’s not to be left on the coffee table. It is an excellent compendium of cultural, political and social history, complementing Philip Drew’s The Masterpiece (2001) and Françoise Fromonot’s superb study, Joern Utzon et l’Opéra de Sydney (1998).  It also establishes Anne Watson as a distinguished historian, both in her own contributions and in her orchestration of others. She has understood that there can be many sides to such a story; the way politics and culture have been entangled in this building’s history gives rise to questions worth unpacking indefinitely.          

Sarah Gregson begins her chapter with Bertolt Brecht’s lines: ‘Who built the seven towers of Thebes? / The books are filled with the names of kings. / Was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?’ She records that between 1959 and 1973 some ten thousand people, of thirty-two different nationalities, worked on the Opera House, and that Bennelong Point, like the Snowy River a decade earlier, was a place where Australians of many origins learned to live together. It wasn’t far up Macquarie Street to the state Parliament House, and in a period marked by incessant political and industrial action, ‘[that] short distance’, Gregson comments, ‘was a road well-trodden’.