Western Broadwalk

On November ninth, nineteen sixty, the builders of the future Sydney Opera House stopped work for lunch. There were still no white shells above the western side of the point. People settled on scaffolding and stacks of boards, while Paul Robeson climbed onto the concrete foundation of the future Concert Hall.

This African American bass-baritone came to Australia to regain his audience and his income. He made his living performing in theater, films, and concert halls, but in nineteen fifty, during the anti-communist campaign in the United States, the U.S. Department of State revoked his passport. Concert venues stopped inviting him, and studios stopped recording him. For eight years, Robeson could not travel abroad to his listeners. Only after his passport was returned did he go on tour again; the trip through Australia and New Zealand was meant to make up at least part of his lost income.

Union organizer Tom McDonald brought him to the construction site. The builders wanted the first professional singer at the future opera house to be an artist they considered one of their own. Robeson sang without an orchestra. Among the songs was “Ol' Man River,” the famous song sung by Joe, a Black dockworker, in the musical Show Boat. Over years of performing it, Robeson turned the lament of an exhausted man into a song of resistance.

When he finished, the workers climbed down from the scaffolding and gave him a hard hat with the name Paul on it. One held out a work glove for an autograph; the others lined up behind him. Robeson stayed until he had signed a glove for every one of them.

Australia and New Zealand became his last concert tour. A few months later, serious illness took him off the stage, and he never returned to performing. The scaffolding and rough concrete platform have long since disappeared as well. Large western shells now rise above that spot, and the Concert Hall is inside them. The Concert Hall's first professional song was sung on its foundation thirteen years before its official opening.