In the December 13 Australian edition of the UK’s The Spectator, Eric Ellis claims that until he interviewed the late Sydney Opera House architect, Jorn Utzon, in 1992, Utzon had not “spoken to the Australian media since being hounded from Sydney by the bitter philistine Sir Davis Hughes in April 1966.”

Yet in 1973 Peter Luck’s dramatic, televised encounter with Utzon in Majorca went to air shortly before the official opening of the Opera House.

I first interviewed Utzon in 1978 for the Sydney Opera House Monthly Diary. I was then editor of the publication and the Opera House’s press officer. I spoke with the architect by phone. He was in Honolulu at the time. When I asked him why he had declined the NSW Government’s invitation to the official opening of his Opera House by the Queen, he suggested he had done so to avoid embarrassing Her Majesty. He explained that if he had returned for the ceremony, past controversies would have been resurrected by the media which might have overshadowed the celebrations. He did say, though, that he would like to return to Australia to design another public building for Sydney.

He was not in such a sunny mood when I interviewed him again in 1980. I asked him then if he had received any offers to work again in Sydney. “No,” he said. “And none will be made. In Sydney I have been presented too often as a man who could not cope.” He spoke to me then by phone from his home in Denmark. The main reason for my call was to ask him to comment on an idea put forward by the then chairman of the Australian Opera, Claudio Alcorso. He had proposed that there was room on the eastern side of the “uniquely beautiful” Opera House for another shell roof to cover an additional theatre. Utzon wondered what Mr Alcorso would have to say if he, Utzon, suggested that a new movement be added to Beethoven’s third symphony.

In 1983 I visited the architect at his holiday home in Majorca. I gave him a letter from the NSW State Library asking him to make his designs for the interior of the Opera House available to researchers. At the time the architect’s critics were still claiming that he had left no designs or only very sketchy designs for the interior. Utzon immediately signed the library’s release form. He said he had no idea that boxes of his papers had ended up under embargo at the library.

He also gave me an interview which was published in The Weekend Australian in December, 1983. In that full page story he recalled that when Joan Sutherland had publicly wondered about the acoustics of his “concrete” building, he had felt like saying “Mrs Sutherland when you sing in my Opera House you’ll be singing as good as Mrs Callas.” He insisted that the then NSW minister for public works, Davis (later Sir Davis) Hughes, had forced his resignation when he refused to pay for his designs for the interior of the Opera House. “I had to go,” said Utzon. “I could no longer pay my staff.”

Although Eric Ellis refers to Davis Hughes as a “philistine”, Utzon told me that Hughes was determined to become the man most closely associated with the completion of the Opera House. Most ministers for works commission hospitals, fire stations and sewers, he explained. “Davis Hughes wanted to be associated with an opera house.”

In 1992 Ellis and I were both working at Fairfax. At the time I remember hearing that he had been sent to Majorca to try to get an interview with Christopher Skase. That apparently proved difficult. The next I heard was that Ellis was trying to track down Utzon in Majorca. What I clearly remember was being asked by a member of the management for a copy of a book I had published in 1988. It included a chapter about my encounters and interviews with Utzon. I believe that chapter was photographed and faxed to Ellis, so I was peeved some weeks later to find his interview with the architect heralded as the first given by Utzon since he had left Australia in 1966.

Yet even if that fax was never sent, Ellis must surely have checked the library files in the interim, especially before filing his recent story for The Spectator. So why persist with the claim that he was the first member of the Australian media to interview Utzon following the architect’s sad 1966 exit from Sydney? That claim perpetuates the still quite widespread belief that for over a quarter of a century (1966-1992) Utzon refused to talk to the Australian media and nursed a bitter grudge against Australia. After all, in the mid-1980s the Hawke government awarded the architect the Order of Australia, which he graciously accepted.