If you’re tired of the Sydney Opera House, you’re tired of life

Tourists stand on rocks as they take photographs in front of the Sydney Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge. Picture: AFP

The Sydney Opera House. 50, eh? And does it draw you back to the wonder of childhood, upon seeing it again; a wonder that never ages, which you have felt over a lifetime of seeing it? It gets me every time. That sense of awe I experienced as a kid, even now, walking across its vast granite forecourt then into its dark underbelly then up, up, into the cavernous heights of naked concrete to the spill of purple carpet at its lip that you just wanted to roll in, so lush it was. Is. I still get that feeling of childhood wonder, every time.

To paraphrase Dr Samuel Johnson: if you’re tired of the Opera House, you’re tired of life.

It’s the wonder I also feel at the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, each time I visit, and at Melbourne’s Royal Exhibition building, and amid the nuggety perfection of the mighty little Art Gallery of South Australia. The symphony of wonder that is this created world, our uniquely Australian created world.

Sydney’s Wonder House is a temple not to religion but to art, the greatest that humankind can produce. And at 50 it feels as timeless and ageless as it always has; as does any thing of beauty that is truly original. And long may we have this sense of wonder in us, for it keeps the destructive impulse at bay. If our sense of wonder is dimmed as we harden into adulthood, then so our capacity for desecration grows. We just do not care. Do not cherish.

No chance of that with Australia’s only building that’s become famous on a world scale, and instantly. When the Queen opened the Opera House half a century ago, she said it would contain something the pyramids never had – “it will have life”. So much life, in the 50 years since, and a lot of it free. Including the art so regularly on the curved screens of its sails, even though architect Jorn Utzon’s vision was for them to only ever be lit “as if by the moon”.

So often we’re afraid of brilliance. Denigrate,punch down, do not understand awe and the power it has over us. Yet visionaries like Utzon did. Why do so many of our domestic architects not understand this principle – that beauty gives us wonder. Lifts our hearts. As I pass yet another monstrous new box of a house, apartment building or office block I despair at the dearth of vision, enchantment, humour, dazzle, wonder. Why do our architects so greedily perpetuate the great Australian ugliness?

The sails of the Sydney Opera House are illuminated by a projection of poppies during a Remembrance Day Dawn Service on November 11. Picture: Getty

The Opera House gathers to it the hum of mystery. Bill Henson wrote of this sense of awe in a new book, Transcendence, which commemorates the House’s 50th. Among 50 artists’ memories he describes “this unfolding sense of volume, an architectural device used over the millennia and something I’d seen when visiting Chartres [Cathedral] … It was accompanied by an apprehension of entering into some kind of profound dialogue of significance. I was surprised to discover that this had found its echo – against the odds – in a modern building.”

Charles Baudelaire once wrote of two contradictory feelings he’d had as a child, “the horror of life and the ecstasy of life”. Which pretty much sums up humankind and its legacy on this planet. Life as a see-saw of horror and ecstasy in terms of what man does (for example, the terrors of war) and what we are capable of (the Sydney Opera House).

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious,” Albert Einstein declared. “…He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead – his eyes are closed.” The Sydney Opera House opens our eyes. And whenever I walk its forecourt, even now, staring into my third trimester of living, I feel closer to the child I was at eight, at ten; every single time. What a gift that building is, to all of us.