After telling people I worked there, I may have paused for dramatic effect, allowing the listener’s mind to click through the possibilities.
"Yes, I could see her on the stage there," is what I wanted them to think.
I doubt they did, unless their vision ran to the back end of a pantomime horse.
Soon, I would have to explain. I was a table clearer at a restaurant there.
Not the posh one, although I occasionally peered through the windows at the starched white-clothed tables and wondered what happened there.
I was at the family-friendly, much cheaper Harbour Restaurant, my podginess encased in an orange uniform with a button-through design featuring a white placket. That placket was soon 50 shades of tea as I slopped my way around tables removing diners’ detritus. I was not a good advertisement for the fledgling establishment.
When it got low, I just topped it up with water. By the end of the evening whatever people were drinking bore little resemblance to coffee. Eventually someone complained, I was told off and the rudiments of changing the filter were explained.
While I mastered the pass-through dishwasher, the bread-buttering machine was another matter. Slices would throw themselves hysterically off the conveyor belt for no reason.
One memory of my workmates has stuck with me: a teenager wrestling with coming out. Sick of feigning attraction to women to fit in, at the same time he feared how he might be judged by male co-workers if he was honest about his sexuality.
I thought it unfair and sad he should feel in such a predicament. I still do. I regret not keeping in touch.
During the few months I worked there, I never entered the performance spaces. I am not sure 19-year-old me fully grasped the newness of the building which only opened the year before.
Nor was I aware of the many dramas that preceded its opening 50 years ago.
I have been getting up to speed by reading Peter FitzSimons’ The Opera House: the extraordinary story of the building that symbolises Australia — the people, the secrets, the scandals and the sheer genius.
It reads like a whodunnit. As the book blurb says of the opera house "ambition, dispossession, betrayal, professional rivalry, sexual intrigue, murder, bullying and breakdowns are woven into the creation of this masterpiece of human ingenuity".
Danish architect Jorn Utzon controversially resigned seven years before the building was completed, never returning to see how others finished it. Shortly after his resignation he expressed confidence in his team’s ability to handle technical, artistic and such problems.
"The only thing we can’t overcome is human stupidity. Human stupidity defeated us."
The worst of many sadnesses in this story was the 1960 death of Sydney 8-year-old Graeme Thorne, kidnapped on his way to school. His parents had won £100,000 in the regular lottery run to help fund the new opera house and their address was published with the lottery results.
Graeme’s killer sought a ransom and may not have meant to kill him, but that distinction would mean little to his bereft parents.
Maybe it is human nature to attach more significance than is deserved to our fleeting involvement with anything famous or even infamous. In trying to make sense of something, does it help to link our little life to something bigger by seeing ourselves somewhere in the story, however irrelevant?
Mostly this is harmless. It doesn’t much matter if every time the opera house is mentioned I remember my table-clearing stint.
But in other cases it can be self-serving, misleading, or downright dangerous. Think of wannabe kingmaker New Zealand First leader Winston Peters’ inaccurate rants about who knew what at the time of the Christchurch mosques’ massacre when he was the deputy prime minister.
It might be easy to dismiss this as just a perpetuation of his well-worn narcissism/Fomo (fear of missing out) and disdain for facts.
But is it something more sinister, designed to rally those of his supporters already up to their eyebrows in disinformation, particularly if it has anything to do with former prime minister Dame Jacinda Ardern?
Whatever it is, I hope National Leader Christopher Luxon is taking note, even if he has been too gutless to call Mr Peters out.
If National does find it necessary to have Mr Peters in the tent, further down the track will it find itself echoing Mr Utzon’s sentiments on human stupidity?
- Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
