ANOTHER VOICE
Some leisurely meditations on the Sydney Opera House
AUBERON WAUGH
On my last visit I was taken behind stage and into its bowels, marvelling at the lack of functional justification for the design. Even judged as decoration, it ignores the first principles of artistic integrity, since in order for the huge, concrete sails to be filled with air (they contain nothing else) in the manner of real sails, the wind would have to be blowing simultaneously from opposite directions.
This time I have not ventured inside. Instead, I brood over it twinkling under- neath me in the morning sunlight, as I eat my breakfast, glimmering in the evening light as I return to change for dinner (the Australians are very formal about dress) and glowing once again by floodlight when I eventually return to bed. From this great height it looks very small and strangely vulnerable, enshrining, as it does, a last, residual hope for the future, that Modern Art was a good idea, Epstein's contortions and Moore's polished lumps expressed a vision, an alternative aesthetic, a justifica- tion for modern culture. All the nicest and most intelligent people I know have con- vinced themselves that this is the case, just as all the nicest and most intelligent Au- stralian's have convinced themselves their Opera House is beautiful.
It is not beautiful, of course. Nor is it ugly. It is merely absurd. It is a Mickey Mouse construction, straight out of Disney World. It is a harmless little joke about modern architecture rather than an exam- ple of the real thing — which would inevitably have been brutal in its desire to shock, offensive in its ugliness and sinister in its contempt for mere humanity. The Opera House is none of these things. It is purely absurd, and utterly endearing in its absurdity.
What makes it so endearing is the mystery of how a sceptical, satirically- minded nation allowed it to be built — at such prodigious cost, and with such flam- boyant disregard for any canon of good taste or common sense. It is a monument to a particular Australian quality which is seldom remarked in discussions about the country, still dominated by the stock Au- stralian expatriate joke-figures of Clive James, Barry Mackenzie, John Pilger, Charles Osborne and Germaine Greer, but one which impresses me more with every visit. At its least interesting, it takes the form of an astounding level of tolerance. Sydney's Gay Mardi Gras, when all the homosexuals of Kings Cross cavort in the streets, is an example of this. The friendli- ness with which they are received would be unthinkable in Britain, even before Aids. In Sydney, it is welcomed as another opportunity to show, good humour and friendliness.
More impressive than this tolerance, which might otherwise be mistaken for indifference, is a quality of fair- mindedness, of openness to other views: a determination, if you like, to 'let the other blouk have his sy'. This may make them suckers for committed pressure groups as with the current child-abuse frenzies, which were invented here — but it also produces such entirely pleasant absurdities as the Sydney Opera House.
I cannot explain why this should be the case, although it occurs to me that if 40 per cent of the population is descended from convicts, there might be a superfluity of double-Y chromosomes around. In convict society there are so many liars and so many bull shitters that one has to listen with an open mind to everyone, believing nothing entirely. Whatever the reason, one of the most engaging features of this friendly, intelligent, hardworking, modern, humor- ous, diffident, well-mannered society is its open-mindedness.
It is in this hospitable environment, of course. that the dreaded Pilger plant most flourishes. Pilger himself does not flourish in open debate, demanding complete editorial control whenever possible and stacking the cards where it is not. But he talks and Australia listens, half-believing some of it, always prepared to let the blouk have his sy. One of the most impressive of Pilger's achievements has been to convince a large part of Australia, using Rousseau's myth of the noble savage as his starting point, that surviving aboriginals have a just case for reparation and that large tracts of territory should be 'restored' to them. In the course of one day, I was solemnly assured by one intelligent Australian woman that the aboriginals at one time enjoyed the highest civilization then known in the world; by another that they lived in a socialist society.
If this second claim were true, it might explain how, in 40,000 years, they never advanced beyond the earliest Stone Age, never discovered fulcrum and lever, let alone the circle, never progressed to within 4,000 years of Stonehenge man. But of course it could not be further from the truth. Far from establishing a socialist society, they had no form of civil society at all, beyond whatever social organisation may be observed in a swarm of locusts.
`Le premier qui, ayant enclos un terrain, s'avisa de dire "ceci est a moi" et trouva des gens assez simples pour le croire, fut le vrai fondateur de la societe civile,' wrote Rousseau, in Discours sur l'Inegalite. No aboriginal ever fenced a territory. In 40,000 years of digging yams from the ground, it never once occurred to them to plant one. They lived in warring, nomadic packs, a hazardous and abject existence. The new generation of sentimentalists would talk of their 'magic', of their folklore wisdom and their 'art'. Their 'magic' must have been pretty feeble and their wisdom nonexistent, if it left them with infanticide for birth control and worms for food. The `art' must be judged the merest piffle by any civilised standards, even in an age determined to believe that Henry Moore is a great artist.
I air these harsh reflections for two reasons. In the first place, it seems to me that Australian sentimentality about abor- iginals may be about to do them a worse injustice than they have yet suffered, when it stops trying to integrate them and leaves them either as welfare victims in the gutter or as anthropological specimens in some hellish museum of their own and John Pilger's creation. In the second place, these are just about the only sentiments which it is forbidden to utter, however near the truth they may be, in the wonderful free society which has given us Joern Utzon's Mickey Mouse Opera House.
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