Latest news with #Goossens
Vogue Singapore
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Vogue Singapore
Good catch! Vogue's edit of marine-inspired sea jewellery
The sea is big in jewellery right now. We can look easily to several collections of high jewellery to see a clutch of designers and jewellers exploring the idea. From Boucheron's categorical expressions of water in various forms to artful interpretations of the sea in art, as Singapore jeweller Simone did with an art nouveau collection inspired by Hokusai. High jewellery creations like those lead the way creatively, but there is certainly also a wealth of alternative options out there. These run the gamut from fine jewels in precious materials, like Tiffany & Co.'s Titan line designed by Pharrell Williams. Set with lustrous black Tahitian pearls and spiked gold designed like the tines of Poseidon's trident, it makes its references graphically and subtly. Fred, a maison that loves the sun and sea, has also built on its sailing cable collection—distilling its signature design elements into glamorous built-in stacks in the Force 10 Rise. Nautical and imbued with the spirit of the sea, yet designed with a modern subtlety that makes it easy to wear. Cute motifs like seashells and little fish, meanwhile, offer an easy way into the trend. A piece in a bigger size makes a fabulous, summery statement which can be paired with daintier everyday jewellery. Goossens, the Parisian maison des métiers d'art that crafts fantasy bijoux for Chanel, has a playful jewelled seashell minaudière out this summer that's as pretty as it is handy. Here, Vogue's edit of jewellery with sea motifs. Courtesy of Tiffany & Co. 1 / 13 Tiffany & Co. Titan by Pharrell Williams ring in rose gold with a Tahitian pearl and diamonds, $14,000 The May 2025 'Sonder' issue of Vogue Singapore is available online and on newsstands. Courtesy of CCWW Designs 2 / 13 CCWW Designs Ammonite earrings in carved aventurine with 14-carat gold and lab-grown diamonds, US$5,015 Courtesy of Dior 3 / 13 Dior Rose des Vents hidden watch in yellow gold with diamonds, price on request Courtesy of Fred 4 / 13 Fred Force 10 Rise ring in pink gold with diamonds, $9,700 Courtesy of Guita M 5 / 13 Guita M GE620 earrings in rose gold with grey mother-of-pearl, grey Tahitian pearls and imperial topaz, US$9,400 Courtesy of Goossens 6 / 13 Goossens Circé minaudière necklace in gold-dipped brass with freshwater pearls, carnelian, turquoise, agate and garnet, US$2,170 Courtesy of Goossens 7 / 13 Goossens Circé shell pendant in gold-dipped brass with a freshwater pearl, US$255 Courtesy of iTÄ 8 / 13 iTÄ Bahía Shell Bead pendant in 14-carat yellow gold with diamonds, $2,150 Courtesy of Brent Neale 9 / 13 Brent Neale Cancer ring in yellow gold with diamonds, US$12,250 Courtesy of Brent Neale 10 / 13 Brent Neale Pisces ring in platinum and yellow gold with diamonds, US$19,850 Courtesy of Misho 11 / 13 Misho Sirena necklace in gold-plated bronze with pearls, $346 Courtesy of Selim Mouzannar 12 / 13 Selim Mouzannar Fish For Love double-sided pendant in pink gold with diamonds, sapphires, spessartines and orange enamel, US$27,470 Courtesy of Mociun 13 / 13 Mociun fish charm in 14-carat gold, price on request
Borneo Post
23-05-2025
- General
- Borneo Post
Elephant death prompts wildlife protection plea for Pan Borneo Highway
An elephant standing besides the truck that killed its baby on May 11 in Peninsular Malaysia. KOTA KINABALU (May 23): A heart-wrenching incident on May 11 has brought renewed attention to the dangers Malaysia's road networks pose to wildlife. A five-year-old male elephant calf was fatally struck by a 10-tonne lorry while attempting to cross the East-West Highway in the Belum-Temenggor Forest Reserve. The calf's mother remained by its side for five hours, desperately trying to rescue her offspring, in a scene that has since gone viral and sparked public outcry. Professor Benoit Goossens from Danau Girang Field Centre and Dr Nurzhafarina Othman from Seratu Aatai express their concerns and implore the government to consider mitigation measures for the Tawai Forest Reserve alignment in Telupid, Sabah. 'This tragedy underscores the broader issue of human-wildlife conflict exacerbated by infrastructure development,' said Goossens, also from Cardiff University. 'In response, the Malaysian government has announced plans to incorporate dedicated wildlife crossings into future highway designs to prevent similar incidents. Why not acting now for the Pan Borneo Highway? I sincerely hope that it is not too late to do this for the proposed alignment in Telupid for which construction will start soon,' added Goossens. 'With Coalition Humans, Habitats, Highways (3H), we have emphasized for many years that road construction through wildlife habitats not only leads to fatal accidents but also increases the risk of poaching and habitat fragmentation,' said Othman, also from Universiti Malaysia Sabah. The proposed Pan Borneo Highway alignment, which cuts through the Tawai Forest Reserve, would endanger the elephant population in the reserve as well as other protected species such as the Bornean orangutan, the Sunda clouded leopard, the Malayan sun bear and the Bornean peacock pheasant. Events like the May 11 one will definitely happen in Telupid if nothing is done,' added Othman. 'This incident in Peninsular serves as a poignant reminder of the urgent need to balance infrastructure development with wildlife conservation. It would be a shame if that poor baby elephant died in vain. We sincerely hope that mitigation measures could be implemented immediately, such as building dedicated wildlife crossings or even better, viaducts at the two elephant hotspots that our research has identified. There is also a need to enforce speed limits and install warning signage and lighting to alert drivers of potential wildlife crossings. Finally, preventing heavy lorries to use the stretch crossing the forest reserve at night, and force them to use the existing Telupid road, would limit the chance of dramatic accidents leading to human and wildlife casualties,' concluded Goossens and Othman.
The Star
23-05-2025
- Politics
- The Star
Urgent need for wildlife protection measures on Tawai forest road, say conservationists
KOTA KINABALU: Appropriate wildlife protection measures are needed for the proposed Pan-Borneo Highway stretch that cuts through central Sabah's Tawai Forest Reserve in Telupid. Sabah conservationists said this was necessary, citing the incident where an elephant calf was killed along the East-West Highway in the Belum-Temenggor Forest Reserve. Conservationists from Danau Girang Field Centre (DGFC) Prof Benoit Goossens and Seratu Aaatai's Dr Nurzhafarina Othman reiterated their concerns and objections over road that cuts through the biodiversity rich Tawai Forest. Goossens said the incident underscores the broader issue of human-wildlife conflict exacerbated by infrastructure development. "The Malaysian government has announced plans to incorporate dedicated wildlife crossings into future highways to prevent similar incidents. "Why not act now for the Pan Borneo Highway?" he said, adding he hoped it would be done before construction for the proposed alignment starts. Goossens, said DIFC, which is part of the Humans, Habitats, Highways Coalition (3H), has been against the road cutting through Tawai forest reserve. Nurzhafarina said 3H had highlighted that roads through wildlife habitats not only leads to fatal accidents but also increases the risk of poaching and habitat fragmentation. "Events like the May 11 incident, will definitely happen in Telupid if nothing is done," she said. She said the proposed road would endanger the elephant population as well as other protected species such as the Bornean orangutan, Sunda clouded leopard, Malayan sun bear and the Bornean peacock pheasant in the forest reserve. "We sincerely hope that mitigation measures could be implemented immediately, such as building dedicated wildlife crossings – or even better – viaducts at two elephant hotspots our research has identified. "There is also a need to enforce speed limits and install warning signs and lighting to alert drivers of potential wildlife crossings. "Finally, preventing heavy lorries from using the stretch at night and force them to use the existing Telupid road would limit the chance of accidents leading to human and wildlife casualties," Goossens and Othman jointly said in a statement on Friday (May 23). In the May 11 accident, a five-year-old male elephant calf was killed when it was hit by a 10-tonne lorry along the East-West Highway in the Belum-Temenggor Forest Reserve. The incident caught national attention and sparked public outcry when viral videos showed the calf's mother staying by its side for five hours, in a futile attempt to rescue her offspring.
The Guardian
26-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘The killers I met in jail didn't scare me': singer Rokia Traoré on why prison was ‘a privilege'
'It's been like a kind of military training,' says Rokia Traoré of the nine months she has just spent in European prisons. 'It was very hard. I was in a bad psychological state because I was separated from my children, but at the same time it was a kind of privilege because I was learning things it's not possible to learn without being in that situation. Everything is much more intense. Sharing a small space with someone – in a week you know more about them than their mother. You know everything: when she is happy, when she cries, when she goes to the toilet, when she has a shower. You see everything.' Born and based in Mali, she is one of the most inventive and adventurous female artists in Africa; a singer who can switch from delicate acoustic styles to rock, powered by her bluesy electric guitar work. As well as putting out six studio albums she has toured the UK with the Africa Express project, collaborating with Damon Albarn, Paul McCartney and John Paul Jones. She has been an actor, performing, singing and writing the songs for Desdemona, a 2011 Toni Morrison-penned stage project in which Shakespeare's tragic heroine was given an African perspective. She has won awards including the French equivalent of a Grammy, and in 2015 she was appointed a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. She seemed unstoppable, but she hasn't released an album since 2016's Né So. Her life was then transformed by a bitter custody battle with her former partner, the Belgian theatre director Jan Goossens, which led to her being jailed in France, Italy and Belgium. 'I was really sad,' she says of her time inside, speaking by phone from Paris, where she has been living since her release on 22 January. She sounds cheerful, and happy to talk at length, but is clearly angry about her experiences. 'It was difficult for me not knowing when it would all be over and I could be with my children again.' The dispute with Goossens was over their daughter, who was born in Belgium in 2015 but went to Mali to live with her mother when she was four months old. In 2019, after the relationship had ended, Goossens demanded custody through a family court in Brussels and was granted it – though a court in Mali had already granted sole custody to Traoré. After she failed to produce her daughter in the Belgian court, a European arrest warrant was issued, accusing her of 'kidnapping and hostage taking'. In March 2020, as she passed through Paris on her way to a concert at the Bolshoi theatre in Moscow, Traoré was arrested and jailed. She went on hunger strike in Fleury-Mérogis ( 'the worst prison in France', she says) but was released after six weeks because of the Covid pandemic. She was told to remain in France awaiting extradition to Belgium, but used her diplomatic passport (a common perk for African stars) to fly back to Mali on a private jet. Traoré said she was concerned about the welfare of her daughter, and her son from an earlier relationship, during the pandemic. Back in Mali, she couldn't find work. The security situation in the country had deteriorated, with attacks by armed Islamic groups seriously damaging tourism and the local music scene, and a military government taking over in August 2020. Because of the kidnapping charge against her, international funding for her Fondation Passerelle cultural centre had stopped. 'So I had to use my own resources to help the few artists we have,' she says. 'I'm not one that spends much money. The most expensive thing in my life is my children's education.' After four years in Africa she attempted to restart her career in Europe, although in October 2023 the Belgian court sentenced her to two years imprisonment in her absence. On 20 June last year she flew into Rome for a concert at the Colosseum, and was arrested, held in prison for eight months, then transferred to a jail in Brussels. Some of her fellow inmates there had been convicted of violent offences, but she says she 'wasn't fearful of someone who had killed someone. High-level criminals didn't scare me.' Her release in January came after she signed a confidential agreement with her daughter's father, validated by the court. Later in the year, the court will reconsider the case – this time with Traoré and her lawyers present. During Traoré's incarceration, her daughter was in Mali and had never been separated from her for so long. Her son was just starting university in Paris, but it was hard for Traoré to sort out payment for his accommodation. She survived, she said, by spending much of her time writing. Not songs, but a journal in which she chronicled the lives of the women who were locked up with her. Traoré says she heard 'stories that were much more troubling than my stories. Of course I was worried about what was going to happen to me, but my fears were nothing compared with theirs. It left me time to think about their cases and forget about myself. In a way it made it easier to pass the time, writing about the others. Being in jail destroys you, and you don't understand what's happening to you, but I made it a constructive experience.' She wrote about the way prison conditions varied across Europe. Italy was best, she says, not because of the state of the prisons but the attitude of the authorities. The guards were more respectful and lawyers talked openly about the large number of prison suicides, a subject discussed far less in France and Belgium. And in Italy, unlike Belgium, prisoners were allowed to draw up petitions over their grievances. She signed two, which were both successful: 'One of them was about missing medicines the prisoners needed, and the following week all the missing medicines were there.' In Belgium, the prison was new and prisoners were allowed TV and a phone, 'which was very good', but there were complaints of long waits to see a doctor and many prisoners couldn't understand how to use the computerised appointment system. 'I made two demands for my cellmates, and neither had been answered by the time I left.' All of which made her question what the prisons were hoping to achieve. 'There's no point in being in jail if it's not for the person to repair something inside, to understand that what they did was bad, and learn things that would be useful when they start a new life. But what happens in jails is not like that.' She says it seems as if 'people are there to be broken, to feel fear and pain and sadness. It's about so many things – except reconstruction'. In all three prisons, she says, 'some women got very close to me and supported me and talked to me as a friend. And the few times I was really sad they supported me, saying, 'Don't cry. You are going to be out, because you are different from us, you did nothing. But please, when you are out, talk about us – about our needs to see our children, to be treated as normal people when we are out.'' So she is doing just that, planning a book and a stage show based on her prison experiences. The live project will be 'a piece of musical theatre, as I used to do in the past', and will include monologues taken from the book, along with new music. She says the music will encompass both the classical Mandinka music of west Africa and 'probably something more modern showing the connection between Mandinka, blues and classical styles'. The approach sounds similar to that of Damou, her 2012 words-and-music project in which she demonstrated her compelling storytelling in a reworking of the Epic of Soundiata, a poem from Mali's ancient oral tradition. For the new project, she has yet to decide if she will perform all the spoken and musical passages herself or be joined by another musician. Titled À Huis Clos, the show will open in France, where Traoré has been discussing staging and choreography with Moïse Touré, director of the company Les Inachevés. An English version, titled In Camera, will follow. But for all that she is keeping busy, and remains a well-loved and successful artist, Traoré says that, like other former prisoners, she is still anxious about her return to the outside world. 'Because even for me, it's hard to restart life after prison. It can't be the same as it was before. The fact that you have been in prison impacts on all your life.' In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@ or jo@ In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at
BBC News
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
'It stirred the people to breathless wonder and scalding abuse': The tumultuous history of the Sydney Opera House
The building of the Sydney Opera House began on 2 March 1959. But when BBC Tonight visited the construction site in 1965, it was plagued by technical problems, soaring costs, vacillating public opinion and political infighting. In 1965, BBC reporter Trevor Philpott sat overlooking Sydney Harbour as he tried to find the right metaphor to describe the vibrant, arching structures of Jørn Utzon's roof design for the Australian city's Opera House. "It was a score of towering shells. It was a cluster of seagulls spreading concrete wings. It was a huddle of sailing boats with billowing concrete sails," said Philpott. He then added the caveat: "And it was an unmitigated bitch to build." The fraught saga of the Sydney Opera House's construction began on 2 March 1959, 66 years ago this week. Six years after that, when BBC Tonight's Philpott went to see the building's progress, it was already years behind schedule, mired in spiralling costs, changing designs and escalating political tensions. To say it was having a difficult birth would be an understatement. The idea to build an opera house for the city had been proposed in the late 1940s by an acclaimed English conductor, Sir Eugene Goossens. At the time, Goossens was something of a celebrity in the classical music world, having carved out a successful career in the UK and the US. After World War Two, he had been lured to Sydney to become the director of the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music with the promise of a salary greater than that of the Australian Prime Minister, musicologist Dr Drew Crawford told the BBC podcast A Very Australian Scandal in 2023. The creation of a new, world-class music performance venue was the conductor's passion project. He had spied from his office window what he believed was the ideal site for it – the tram depot at Bennelong Point. Known to the local indigenous Gadigal people of the Eora nation as Tubowgule, it was a place where Aboriginal celebrations had been held for thousands of years. Throughout the 1950s, Goossens lobbied hard, trying to turn his dream into a reality. "There were very few other people who could have that vision, articulate that vision, and have the ear of the Premier [of New South Wales], have the ear of the Prime Minister, be able to talk to people to get it going," said Dr Crawford. Goossens convinced the Premier of New South Wales, Joseph Cahill, that an opera house would reshape the world's view of Australia, that he had found the perfect site for it, and that they should launch "a grand competition, open to the architects of all the world, to decide exactly what manner of a building they should put there", said Philpott. "They made only one condition, that nothing quite so remarkable should have been ever built before." Goossens himself would not get to see his ambition realised. In 1956, having just picked up his knighthood in the UK, he was detained upon his entry back into Australia, where his bags were searched and found to contain, among other things, smuggled pornography, compromising photographs and rubber masks. The resulting scandal, which involved affairs, erotica and witchcraft, completely scuppered the conductor's career in Sydney. He fled the country for Rome, traveling under the alias of Mr E Gray, never to return. However, the design competition went ahead as planned, with a panel of judges evaluating some 233 submitted entries. At the start 1957, the government announced that a largely unknown Danish architect, Utzon, was the unexpected winner. Part of the surprise at Utzon's success was that his entry had largely consisted of preliminary sketches and concept drawings. "As far as building anything of any scale, he hadn't really done very much," Sir Jack Zunz, who worked on the project for the civil engineering firm Arup, told BBC Witness History in 2018. An optimistic start The judges' choice of Utzon's bold and imaginative design was not without controversy. "From the first, it stirred the people of Sydney to breathless wonder and scalding abuse," said Philpott. "It was called the Sydney Harbour monster, a piece of Danish pastry, a disintegrating circus tent." Premier Cahill, worried that the project might be derailed by adverse public opinion or political opposition, pushed for construction work to start early. This was despite the fact that Utzon was still finalising the building's actual design, and had yet to resolve critical structural issues. Although Utzon's design was thought to be one of the cheapest, there were still problems raising money for it, so a State Lottery was launched in 1957 to help fund the project. The initial estimate of the final cost of the Sydney Opera House was put at A£3.5m or A$7m – at the time, Australia's official currency was the pound, but was replaced by the dollar in 1966. The building was set to open on 26 January 1963: Australia Day. Both of these predictions would prove to be wildly and hopelessly optimistic. "Right from the beginning, the house was full of trouble: human, mechanical, structural," reported Philpott. The building of the Opera House was divided into three distinct phases: construction of the podium, the roof shells, and the interior. Cahill, having persuaded the Minister of Transport to agree to the tram depot being demolished to build the podium, "found the site was neither big enough nor strong enough to carry that structure that seemed on paper light enough to fly away," said Philpott. To bear the weight of the Opera House, the whole site needed to be extended and reinforced by driving over 550 steel-cased concrete shafts, each three feet in diameter, into land in and around Sydney Harbour. This extensive work, which had not been accounted for in either the construction's budget or its timescale, dragged on, hampered by bad weather. The podium would only be completed in January 1963 – the original date for when the Opera House was meant to open. But this would merely be the first of the project's delays and eye-watering extra costs. The Opera House's most distinctive feature, its roof shells which mimicked a ship's sails, were to present a whole other set of engineering headaches. Initially, the plan had been to make the roof out of steel coated with concrete. However, that design presented unwelcome noise problems for any performance taking place. "The Opera House stars would have been singing above the sirens of the tugboats on the water outside, and the temperature variations would have caused the metal and concrete to rumble and crack like tropical thunder," said Philpott. An unbuildable building Nobody had also fully understood the scale of the engineering challenge that the Opera House's daring curved roof surfaces presented. Since Utzon's entry lacked detailed engineering plans, civil engineering firm Arup had been brought in to work out how to construct the roof's complex shell structure. But despite trying multiple different redesigns, they could not make the structural calculations add up. "The first thing Arup did when they were asked to collaborate, they took these free shapes and developed a series of mathematical models which, near as possible, matched Utzon's competition design. None of these shapes appeared buildable," Zunz told BBC Witness History. Another issue was that, because the roof was curved, each concrete rib that supported it would be different. That meant that instead of having just one mould that could be reused to cast all the supporting beams, each individual rib would need a separate one. This was prohibitively expensive. The answer, Utzon would later claim, came to him while he was peeling an orange. The architect realised that all segments of the roof could come from the geometry of a single sphere. By identifying which part of the sphere best suited the shapes they needed, a series of triangles each with one curved side could be cut from it, creating a variety of shells. These spherical shell segments could be broken down into individual components, which could be uniformly pre-cast in concrete and assembled onsite. "He came back a week later and said, 'I've solved it.' And he made the scheme out of a sphere," said Arup's Zunz. "But in so doing, he had changed the architecture quite radically." This elegant solution simplified the roof's construction and reduced waste, enabling the building of the vaulted roof to begin in 1963. But as the contractors worked on executing Utzon's vision, the project was dogged by labour disputes, design changes and rising material costs, making its budget balloon and its potential completion date disappear into the distance. "By 1962, the cost had risen to A£12.5m, and now everybody admitted they were only guessing," said Philpott. "The opening day was postponed and postponed again. It had been planned for Australia Day 1963, it was put off until early 1964, then until sometime in 1966, and now no one is bold enough even to predict the year the doors may eventually open." The project's biggest government supporter, Premier Cahill, had taken ill just months after building work had started. On his deathbed in 1959, he had made his Minister for Public Works, Norman Ryan, promise not to let the Opera House fail. Ryan, when interviewed by the BBC's Philpott in 1965, gamely made a spirited defence of the project, but by this time frustration with its mounting costs and endless delays was palpable. "I wasn't sure whether to admit to working on it at the time," admitted Zunz. "If you went into a taxi, you got an earful of all the money that was being wasted, and God knows what." Adding to this contentious atmosphere, a few months after Ryan's BBC interview, Robert Askin, who had vocally opposed the project, was elected the New South Wales Premier. He appointed Davis Hughes as the new Minister for Public Works, who clashed repeatedly with Utzon. Hughes, determined to rein in spending, began to challenge the architect's costs and schedules, demanding a full set of working drawings for the interiors – the next stage of the project. "The whole situation started going downhill," said Zunz. "Utzon couldn't, wouldn't, anyway didn't produce the documents his client desired." In retaliation, Hughes refused the payments demanded by the construction team, which left Utzon unable to pay his staff. In 1966, the Danish architect resigned from the project and left Australia, never returning to see his Opera House completed. Utzon's resignation led to a public outcry, with 1,000 people taking to Sydney's streets on 3 March 1966 to demand that he be reinstated. Instead, Hughes appointed a new panel of Australian architects to complete the interior as well as the glass walls. But if Hughes thought this would reduce costs and speed up the project, he was very much mistaken. Overcoming the odds The new team scrapped most of Utzon's plans for the interior and radically redesigned it. Utzon had envisioned a dual purpose for the main hall, as an opera venue and a concert hall, but this was now viewed as unworkable, leading to the already installed stage production machinery having to be demolished. The new design also meant that each of the hundreds of pieces of glass in the interior walls needed to be cut to a unique size and shape, which continued to pile on the costs. The Sydney Opera House's spiralling bill was pushed even higher when a labour dispute by union workers, over the dismissal of a worker and demands for better wages, culminated in a sit-in strike at the site in 1972. But the following year, the monumental undertaking that was the construction of the Sydney Opera House was finally completed. Ten years late and 14 times over its initial budget, it came in at a cost of A$102m (£51m). It was formally opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 20 October 1973. The monarch praised the stunning building that had "captured the imagination of the world" while also wryly mentioning that "I understand that its construction has not been totally without problems". Utzon declined to attend its opening, writing to Premier Askin that he couldn't "see anything positive" in the interior work done by the Australian architects and it would not be possible for him "to avoid making very negative statements". More like this:• The first ever video game console• How the fall of the Berlin Wall reshaped Europe• How music saved a cellist's life in Auschwitz The Danish architect did end up making peace and reengaging with the Sydney Opera House project in 1999, agreeing to work on the A$66m (£33m) renovation of its interior. In September 2004, the Reception Hall was renamed the Utzon Room in his honour after being redesigned by him. In the years since its completion, acclaim for Sydney Opera House's visionary architecture has only grown. Its distinctive sculptural form has made it one of the most immediately recognisable buildings in the world. More than 10.9m people visit it annually, and it has come to epitomise the Australian national identity, its soaring roof a celebration of creativity, culture and ambition in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. As a venue, it has played host to everyone from Bob Dylan, Ella Fitzgerald and Sammy Davis Jnr to The Cure, Björk and Massive Attack. In 1980, Arnold Schwarzenegger won his final body-building title there, and 10 years later anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela made one of his first major speeches from its steps following his release from prison. In 2004, Cathy Freeman, the first Aboriginal athlete to win an individual Olympic gold medal, opened the Olympic torch relay from outside the building. Its eye-catching roof is illuminated every year as part of Vivid Sydney, the city's festival of light, music and ideas, and in 2017, stories of Indigenous Australia told in vibrant animations were projected onto it. In 2007, the building that had been brought about by a combination of art, engineering and sheer bloody-minded perseverance was formally recognised as a World Heritage Site by Unesco. On recommending its inclusion, the International Council on Monuments and Sites declared: "The Sydney Opera House stands by itself as one of the indisputable masterpieces of human creativity, not only in the 20th Century but in the history of humankind." -- For more stories and never-before-published radio scripts to your inbox, sign up to the In History newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights twice a week. For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
