recently commemorated its 50th anniversary. The iconic design is one associated with the Australian city the world over, along with the steel arch bridge, which spans the harbour. Considered a triumph of 20th Century architecture, it very nearly didn't get built in the international search to find a design. This vision of modern beauty, with its famous curves covered in more than a million bright white ceramic tiles, was initially placed in the reject pile.
What I have failed to appreciate before coming to live here was how the Opera House was also a structure of such multiple meanings, and how it encapsulates the contradictions of the nation it has come to symbolise. The country's most instantly recognisable building is a landmark to Australian ambiguity. The most obvious interpretation is that it represents Australia's rising post-war self-confidence.
So many strands of the Australian story come together in this building. New immigrants from southern Europe provided much of the manpower for its construction, which speaks of Australia's post-war multiculturalism. In November 1960, Paul Robeson, the Black American opera singer, even performed an impromptu concert amidst its scaffolding and cranes – his sonorous Old Man River, a musical foreshadowing of the end of the, which for decades that limited non-European migration here.