Besides writing many articles about the Sydney Opera House, Robin Boyd amassed an extensive collection of written material on the subject which was kept at his family home in Walsh Street.

These two exercise books are filled with handwritten transcriptions of newspaper articles, editorials and letters to the editor covering the building of the Sydney Opera House and the treatment of the Danish architect Jørn Utzon. Robin Boyd asked his eldest daughter Mandie Eckersley (nee Boyd), who was living in Sydney, to transcribe any articles she found in the State Library of New South Wales’s Mitchell Library on the Sydney Opera House. Mandie later recalled: “It was a huge task because he wanted any mention at all in any publications to be noted. No one else had done it at that stage, not even the clippings service.” The first volume covers the period 1951 to 1962, and the second covers the period 1962 to 1966 when Utzon resigned from the project. From 1966, after Utzon’s resignation, physical cuttings continued to be collected and were recently found interleaved within the April 1966 volume of Walkabout magazine.