Since taking the helm of the Sydney Opera House in 2012, Louise Herron has overseen a decade of transformation at one of the world’s most iconic cultural landmarks.
Florian Riem learns how the former lawyer and corporate adviser reshaped the Opera House through its ambitious Renewal programme, marked its 50th anniversary with a year-long celebration, and set her sights on making it truly “Everyone’s House”
The Sydney Opera House was completed in 1973, when you were just 14. Where were you at the time?
I was living in Switzerland, just outside Geneva near a little village called Mies, where I was enrolled in a boarding school. I had a wonderful host family who took me to concerts and museums – something I’d never really done in Australia. I also remember seeing the Magic Flute at the opera in Bern when I was 12 years old. It was marvellous.
You spoke French at the time?
French and Swiss German, yes! I still do.
What’s your first memory of the Sydney Opera House?
My first memory of the Opera House was in about 1966 when I was seven years old and was visiting Sydney from where I lived in Brisbane. I remember seeing it from the Sydney Harbour Bridge and being amazed by how huge, prominent and covered in scaffolding it was.
My first memory of the completed Opera House was seeing it from a ferry in 1977, when I had moved to Sydney right before starting university there. We lived just across the harbour, and I remember catching the ferry into Circular Quay, seeing the Opera House, and being so struck by its form. As you go past, the shape changes completely, from being very narrow front on to appearing almost like a cathedral from the side, or like a huge whale. In fact, we recently had whales in the harbour, and I was looking at them thinking: Wow, the curve of your back looks like the curve of the Opera House sails from a certain angle – another example of Opera House architect Jorn Utzon’s statement that his forms were inspired by nature.
You visited performances at the Opera House and loved them, but nevertheless you went into law.
My father insisted. He said I had to do it because I had the grades to get into law, because my great-uncle was the Chief Justice, because one brother was an accountant and another was a doctor. He said: “And now we need a lawyer.” I didn’t want to study law, but those were the days when you did what your parents told you to do.
And so you became a lawyer?
Yes, and I loved being a lawyer. I also loved being a corporate adviser and an investment banker. But I never loved the subject matter itself, whereas I have always loved the arts. A decisive moment for me came on 31 December 1999. I was standing on the Champs-Élysées on New Year’s Eve with my husband. We had arrived in Paris after a trip with our children to Vietnam and Egypt as part of a six-week (Australian summer) break.
We had spent a lot of time on the Y2K project and were preparing for the Sydney Olympics. Y2K was a huge deal, and the bug – the fear that computers would not operate when the date changed to 2000 – was about to hit.
But at midnight, as fireworks blasted off the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower was sparkling with an incredible light display, I thought: My God, how incredible that we spent so much time on this problem! What a waste! I decided right then, at that moment, to change my career. It was literally a light-bulb moment.
You went into finance after that, but it still took another 10 years before you arrived at the Opera House…
My children had both finished school, one was at university, the other was taking a year off. I thought: You know what? I can do something really different now. My husband told me, okay, you’ve got a year to find a job you love. And I made it! About 10 years earlier, I had been walking down the Champs-Élysées when I’d experienced my light-bulb moment. This time, I was on Fifth Avenue when something major happened. Out of the blue, a friend called and said: “Look, I’ve just spoken to a headhunter and proposed you for the CEO of the Sydney Opera House.” I said: “You’ve got to be joking!” But before long, I had a new job.
The Opera House is such an iconic and important place. What is it like to be in that position?
Above all, it’s exhilarating – seeing the building still excites me and fills me with awe every day. It sets the standard for everything we do.
The expectations are massive: the Opera House is Australia’s most visited tourist destination with 11 million visitors a year. We are the busiest performing arts centre in the world with 1,800 performances and events a year, including those by our eight resident performing arts companies, and millions of food and beverage transactions. It’s quite a lot to manage if you haven’t had business and stakeholder management experience.
In the beginning, it was hard. But I guess you shape the job, and people shape it for you, so you eventually find a way. Having a very clear goal helped enormously: to renew the Opera House for future generations. Our 40th anniversary in 2013 marked the beginning of a decade of renewal, which concluded with the 50th anniversary in 2023. That single, clear vision was very important and made things easier.
Renewal included the largest and most transformative series of building works since the Opera House opened in 1973. The programme, totalling more than AU$300 million, has touched all corners of the building and opened new spaces to the public – from the removal of vehicles on the Forecourt to the new Centre for Creativity and refurbishing the Concert Hall, as well as significant improvements for visitors with limited mobility.
Except that within these ten years, the world changed a lot… and as a CEO, you had to account for many other elements, including digital strategy, environmental concerns and social issues.
Definitely. But with all that aside, I always felt that the one thing people know most about the Opera House is the building itself. I didn’t feel enough attention was being paid to it. Inside, people talked about it as a performing arts centre, whereas outside, people think of it first as an architectural icon. Therefore, initiatives like environmental sustainability were very important to us. The Opera House has always been a sustainable building. For example, we still rely on the original Grundfos heat pump system from the 1960s that uses seawater as part of the cooling and heating system for the building. Today, we have a six-star Green Star rating, which may be the highest environmental sustainability rating for any World Heritage building. We spent a lot of time on these things, long before the Covid-19 pandemic.
How do you divide your time between artistic programming inside the Opera House and the overall visitor experience?
I spend about 20 per cent of my time on artistic programming. I spend a lot of time on running the business, raising money through philanthropy and corporate partnerships, and on government relations, ensuring we’re completely aligned with the government’s objectives. In fact, I chair a group called the Creative Communities Council for the Minister for the Arts, which is about bringing all the arts together in New South Wales, something I really love.
Looking back to when you first started, how has the visitor experience changed?
It has changed a lot. Public interest in the building has grown exponentially… about 700,000 people a year now take a paid guided tour of the Opera House and 1.4 million go to a ticketed performance. That means almost half as many people pay for a tour as buy a ticket to a performance, which I think is incredible. Even more people visit our restaurants and cafés.
That said, there are some things we haven’t fully cracked yet: pre-ordering interval drinks online; bundling a meal in a restaurant with a ticket to a show; selling parking along with a performance… there are too many organisations and complicating factors involved in what you would hope could be simple for customers.
In 2023, the Opera House celebrated its 50th anniversary. Now in its 52nd year, what is its vision for the future?
My vision for the future is for the Opera House to be “Everyone’s House”. The Opera House was built for the community, with the intention of shaping “a better and more enlightened community”. But in the 1980s and 1990s, it came to be seen as a place of privilege that had somewhat turned its back on the city. Through our decade of renewal, we tried to open it up to more of the community. We’ve changed a lot of the programming. We want this place to be for the community, and we love the idea of it being “Everyone’s House”. People are noticing. We are leading and inspiring positive change in environmental sustainability, social impact, First Nations and many other areas of programming. We are preparing to be ready for the future.
