Chapter 15: Stage 2
Part 1
Despite the official commencement of Stage 2 at the start of 1963, the site seemed visibly unchanged until the first pedestal was positioned in November that year. This only added to a perception that little progress was being made. In fact, the contrary was true.
As a result of building work having commenced too soon, the government was facing a bill for Stage 1 that was almost twice that of the original quote. Now, another problem arising from the premature start dramatically presented itself.
It was discovered that the podium columns designed to bear the load of the roof were too weak and needed to be strengthened - a process which took four months. Jack Zunz declared it his own fault, as he had been responsible for increasing the load by dividing the roof into three structures.
The columns had to be demolished and replaced - a process which was inevitably loud and impossible to carry out without gaining undesired attention. Michael Lewis, the supervising engineer on site, recalls how demolitions were scheduled to coincide with morning rush hour traffic, in an attempt to minimise exposure. The plan had been successful, until a piece of flying concrete landed on a nearby passenger ferry.
The Queensland-based firm Hornibrooks had won the contract to build the opera house and, led by the impressive figure of Corbett Gore, moved onto the site on March 24, 1963 to begin construction.
By all accounts, Gore was a remarkable and highly capable foreman. Under his leadership, alongside the four engineers from Arups, the paper-based design and engineering work of the previous years began to take shape.
As the superstructure developed, the space age forms gave the worksite a sculptural appearance. Because it was exceptionally photogenic, artists were drawn to the site to document progress and the spectacle evoked a reverence and even awe more commonly associated with a cathedral.
Max Dupain and David Moore were just two of the many photographers drawn to the location who regularly recorded its transformation.
During the 14 years of construction, around 10,000 workers of 90 nationalities contributed to the building. The high visibility of the worksite also meant that it became a focal point for workers' rights, especially wage disputes and compensation for injury. Translators were employed to ensure more involvement from the different language groups and seminars were run to inform workers of their rights and the outcomes of various disputes.
A "green ban", a term pioneered by Jack Mundy of the Builders Labourers Federation, was applied to the site to save three large Moreton Bay Figs in the Botanic Gardens that were due to be removed to make way for a car park to service the finished opera house.
The diversity of cultures at the worksite at any one time led to an equally diverse range of customary celebrations over the years. Fishing was also popular, and overall the site offered relatively long term employment to many of its workers.
Building the opera house was truly an exercise in working at 'the edge of the possible', as Jack Zunz described it. Individual rib components could not exceed 10 tons, as this was the maximum lift capacity of the three French cranes, at the time the strongest in the world.
Inventive solutions to problems, which by today's standards would seem dated, were at the time completely novel. One of Arups' engineers wrote a computer program that would help the surveying engineers accurately track the placement of the elements in space against their calculations. These calculations were done each night by General Electric computers and the results delivered back to the building site the following morning for the engineers to evaluate. At the time, this was indeed 'the edge of the possible'.
Despite the absence of many safety precautions that would be required today, only one death was recorded in construction of Sydney Opera House – that of a crane driver, who was off-site at the time of the accident.
Without a safety harness in sight, workers scrambled across the massive expanses of exposed concrete and 'rode the hook' hundreds of feet into the air. Theirs was a show of freedom that would no longer be tolerated in years to come.
Part 2
Note - the second part of this chapter is a 15 minute (scaled down) video of Job 1112, the excellent Arups/NSW Government commissioned documentary describing the construction and engineering processes of Stage 2.
