critic of white-minority rule in Apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia, concluding the Gleaeagles Agreement in 1977. The arts also diversified and flourished over the period – with Australian cinema, literature and musical artists expanding their nation's profile internationally. The iconic Sydney Opera House opened in 1973 and Australian Aboriginal Art began to find international recognition and influence. Western culture: 1945–1980 The West went through a series of great cultural and social changes between 1945 and 1980. Mass media created a global culture that could ignore national frontiers. Literacy became almost universal, encouraging the growth of books, magazines and newspapers. The influence of cinema and radio remained, while televisions became near essentials in every home. A new pop culture also emerged with rock n roll and pop stars at its heart. Religious observance declined in most of the West. Protestant churches began focusing more on social gospel rather than doctrine, and the ecumenist movement, which supported co-operation among Christian Churches. The Catholic Church changed many of its practices in the Second Vatican Council, including allowing masses to be said in the vernacular rather than Latin. The counterculture of the 1960s (and early 1970s) began in the United States as a reaction against the conservative government, social norms of the 1950s, the political conservatism (and perceived social repression) of the Cold War period, and the US government's extensive military intervention in Vietnam. With the abolition of laws treating most non-whites as second-class citizens, overt institutional racism largely disappeared from the West. Although the United States failed to secure the legal equality of women with men (by the failure of Congress to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment), women continued working outside the home, and by 1980 the double-income family became commonplace in Western society. Beginning in the 1960s, many began rejecting traditional Western values and there was a decline in emphasis on church and the family. Rock and roll music and the spread of technological innovations such as television dramatically altered the cultural landscape of western civilisation. The influential artists of the 20th century often belonged to the new technology artforms. Rock and roll emerged from the United States from the 1950s to become a quintessential 20th-century art form. Artists such as Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash and, later, The Beach Boys developed the new genre in the Southern United States. Cash became an icon of the also newly emerging popular