Architects in the Government Architects Branch saw it happen: political mismanagement, staff lured to work on the house kept on the public payroll and paid a salary by the consortium. Worse, the criminal conduct of the Askin government and police was outrageous. Returning to Denmark, Utzon found himself ostracised, refused work on government projects, and his career ruined by innuendo. The entire affair split the architectural profession over expediency versus ethics in a situation where 40 per cent of private professional income was government work.

Architecture always involves a political component. Decisions to build and what to build are sensitive public expenditure matters. The Sydney Opera House was political from its outset and became even more so. Pericles’ Parthenon, the Berlin Reichstag renovation, and our beloved General Post Office all involved high politics.

After he was told his career was over, Les Reedman later designed Earle Page College at the University of New England, a pet project of Davis Hughes, and was appointed assistant government architect. When Davis Hughes became NSW agent-general in London, Reedman went to England and managed the no-expense-spared upgrade to Australia House in the Strand.

His grandfather Reedman from Adelaide represented Australia at cricket, touring England at personal expense. Les’ father, Arnold John Reedman, married Mabel Lillian Bacon, an adoptee family name (originally Manning), carriers operating from Civic Park, while he conducted a hardware business.

He moved to Newcastle during the Great Depression and conducted “gospel wagon trips” south to spread the message as “brothers and sisters in Christ”.

Les Reedman was a John le Carré George Smiley-type character, working quietly behind the scenes to fix the leaks and faults on the new Opera House forecourt. At the height of the Cold War, he was assigned to identify potential nuclear bomb fall-out shelter sites in Sydney for civil defence that were never acted upon.

A quiet, highly competent professional, Reedman helped make the Government Architects Branch one of the finest functioning architectural offices in Australia and one of the best public offices in the world. In the early 1950s, Harry Rembert arranged an Architectural Traineeship scheme to encourage the cream of high school matriculants to enter the public service and inject new talent into the special projects section, which was rewarded with numerous design awards.

Reedman was a tireless mentor and motivator who looked after, nurtured, and ripened the early careers of colleagues too numerous to name, who remember him as a friend.

Les retired to a fisherman’s shack on Dangar Island among the gum trees. The dining floor tilted dangerously downhill; to level the table, Reedman raised the lower legs on chocks. The crockery didn’t slide off, but diners ate sloping downhill. The main artwork was a ceiling frieze in the style of the Parthenon of the fish catch, each fish drawn in fine pencil detail full-size, that was updated much like an Aborigine sandstone gallery. Visiting English author Leslie Geddes-Brown singled it out as most authentic in her house survey, Waterside Living (2006).

In quiet retirement, Les revisited the 19th-century German-born Newcastle architect Frederick Burnhardt Menkens with 2008’s Early Architecture of the Hunter Region: A Hundred Years to 1940, easily the most thorough and informative history of Hunter Valley architecture.

Reedman had picked Menkens – best known for Newcastle’s Wood’s Chambers – as his undergraduate topic. There was no National Library Trove in those days, so Reedman spent month after month at the Newcastle Herald searching for Menkens items.

With his wide environmental interests, Reedman also served on the board of the Warragamba Dam Water Catchment Authority and was an examiner on the NSW Architects Registration Board. The rural lobby pressured the Water Catchment Authority to lease out land in the catchment for cattle. Already under threat from invasive feral animals, the introduction of cattle herds would add the carcasses of dead beasts to contaminate the catchment and the water supply. Reedman resigned.

Architecture is more than building: it is courthouses, gaols, schools and universities, hospitals, planning cities and national parks – the environment we live in, all the essential services we call civilised life.

Architecture is the clearest marker of society, what it stands for, its values and beliefs. Les Reedman did his utmost to ensure public architecture in NSW was of the highest quality.

Les Reedman is survived by children Mark, Glenn, Lisa, Kylie and their families.

Phil Drew is an architectural historian.