The Icons That Define Sydney: More Than Postcards

Sydney's two great icons have a relationship with the city's identity that is simultaneously obvious and worth examining. The Harbour Bridge, opened in 1932 after a decade of construction through the Depression years, gave Sydney a crossing that unified the north and south shores and an engineering achievement that became inseparable from the city's self-image as a place capable of ambitious things. The Opera House, opened 41 years later after one of the most fraught construction histories in architectural history, gave Sydney a building that changed the world's perception of what architecture could be.

Climbing the Harbour Bridge has become one of the most popular urban adventure tourism experiences in the world, with visitors from more than 130 countries ascending the arch for views that are genuinely unlike any other perspective on the city. The success of BridgeClimb has demonstrated that iconic infrastructure can be monetised as a tourism experience without diminishing its primary civic function.

The Opera House's programming under its current artistic leadership has attempted to reassert the building's role as a genuinely ambitious performing arts institution rather than primarily a tourism attraction whose stages happen to present performances. The tension between these roles is real: the building's tourism revenue subsidises its arts programming, but the primacy of the visitor experience can crowd out the operational requirements of world-class arts presentation.

Vivid Sydney, the annual winter light and music festival that uses the Opera House and surrounding harbour foreshore as its canvas, has become one of the world's most successful urban arts festivals, attracting millions of visitors and providing Sydney with a peak tourism event at what had previously been a shoulder season. The festival's success has influenced similar events in cities globally.

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