Sydney Opera House

You are looking at a building that almost never existed. When the international design competition closed in nineteen fifty-six, two hundred and twenty-three entries came in. A young Danish architect named Jorn Utzon submitted entry number two-eighteen -- twelve drawings, no model, no detailed plans. The judging panel passed it over. It was sitting in the reject pile when the legendary Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen arrived late, pulled it out, and insisted it was the winner. One stubborn judge saved the whole thing.

Now here is the part that really gets you. The site you are standing on is called Bennelong Point, but the Gadigal people knew it as Tubowgule. In seventeen-ninety, Governor Phillip built a small brick hut here for Woollarawarre Bennelong -- the first Aboriginal man known to have sailed to Europe and returned. Bennelong wrote a letter in seventeen-ninety-six that is now considered the first English text ever written by an Indigenous Australian. So this spot went from a single Aboriginal man's hut to the most recognisable building on the continent.

The first person to perform here was not an opera singer. In nineteen-sixty, the American singer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson climbed the construction scaffolding during a lunch break and sang Ol' Man River to the workers. The building would not be finished for another thirteen years.

Utzon himself never came back to see it completed. He left Australia in nineteen sixty-six after a bitter dispute with the government, and even after the Opera House was declared a World Heritage Site in two thousand and seven, he never returned. He died the following year. His son finished the interior renovations.

Oh, and there is a safety net above the orchestra pit. They installed it after a live chicken walked off the stage during a production of Boris Godunov and landed on a cellist.