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Lloyd's List Australia 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 edition
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• Geoff Beesley • Alan Bradley • Martin Dolan
• Craig Faulkner • Ken Fitzpatrick • Duncan Gay MP • Grant Gilfillan
• Fady Hayek • Elle Hilton • Maurice James • Graham Lightfoot AM • Julie Magnone
• Ross McAlpine • Ted Muttiah • Paul Nicholson • Dr Terry O’Brien OAM • Llew Russell • Iain Sharples
• Kent Stewart • Kevin Sumption • Jeremy Tadman • Jack Tomes OA • Prof Martin Tsamenyi AM • Ernie Van Buuren • Dr Michael Vertigan
2012
of
australia
n
shippingfaces
Headline Font: Corona Bold Face No2
Date Font: Myriad Pro Semibold 9pt
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3Contents – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
ContentsForeward
Publication Manager: Nicole Gooch
Sales: Luke SmithBusiness Development [email protected]
Design & Layout: Linda GunekMagazines [email protected]
Sub-editing: Stephen CroweThe Write [email protected]
Printed by: SpotPressMarrickville, NSW
Publisher: Peter Attwater
ABN 66 086 268 3325 Faces of Australian Shipping is published once a year by Informa AustraliaLevel 2, 120 Sussex Street,Sydney, NSW 2000, AustraliaPO Box Q1439, Queen Victoria Building Post Office NSW 1230Tel: +61 2 9080 4480Fax: +61 2 9299 4622Single issue price $38.50 incl. GST
Copyright ©2012 Informa Australia Pty Ltd. All rights reserved. Reproduction of the editorial or pictorial content by any manner without written permission of the publisher is prohibited. All products listed in this magazine are subject to manufacturer’s change without notice and the publisher assumes no responsibility for such changes. The publisher’s advertising terms and conditions are set out in the current Advertising Rate Card, which is available to read before placing any advertisements.
Welcome to the second annual edition of 25 Faces of Australian Shipping — a unique publication proudly
published by Lloyd’s List Australia.In establishing the parameters for this
publication, the editorial team at Lloyd’s List Australia set out to publish a snapshot of the vast cross-section of people and personalities who drive our great industry.
We have endeavoured to bring you a variety of stories about industry representatives, some of whom will be immediately recognisable, some of whom will not — but all have a story to tell.
It is not about the obvious industry attributes of our profiled subjects but an attempt to take you into their other lives.
Our writers have learned a lot during this process — for instance, who knew that Sri Lanka had a national rugby team? One of our subjects has actually played rugby for Sri Lanka.
On this entertaining journey of discovery you’ll meet someone whose pastimes include writing lyrical poetry, an Australian water ski champion, another who has become a noted historian of the
American Civil War, and another who chased dreams of wearing Australia’s baggy green cricket cap.
Not to forget another well-known industry figure whose working life started out as an apprentice photo-engraver on the Sydney Morning Herald before he found the world of shipping.
I hope you enjoy reading this publication as much as we have enjoyed compiling it — the second edition of 25 Faces of Australian Shipping.
Peter AttwaterPublisherLloyd’s List Australia
Peter Attwater, PublisherLloyd’s List Australia
Prod
uct
ion
The
Wri
ters
David is the Lloyd’s List Australia Melbourne bureau chief. He was born in Melbourne and grew up in the small Queensland town of Warwick near Brisbane. After graduating from university he worked as a reporter for several Queens-land regional news-papers, including a stint as business editor of The Cairns Post in Far North Queensland.
David Sexton
04 Geoff Beesley
08 Alan Bradley
11 Martin Dolan
14 Craig Faulkner
18 Ken Fitzpatrick
22 Duncan Gay MLC
26 Grant Gilfillan
30 Fady Hayek
34 Elle Hilton
37 Maurice James
40 Graham Lightfoot AM
44 Julie Magnone
47 Ross McAlpine
50 Ted Muttiah
53 Paul Nicholson
56 Dr Terry O’Brien OAM
60 Llew Russell
63 Iain Sharples
66 Kent Stewart
70 Kevin Sumption
75 Jeremy Tadman
78 Jack Tomes OA
82 Prof Martin Tsamenyi AM
86 Ernie van Buuren
89 Dr Michael Vertigan
Jim is the editor of Lloyd’s List Aus-tralia. He previously worked for Fairplay International Ship-ping Weekly, firstly as a reporter based in London, then as its Middle East corre-spondent in Dubai, before becoming its Asia Pacific editor in Singapore. In 1999, Jim graduated with a Law and Voca-tional Legal Practice Degree from the Northumbria Uni-versity, in Newcastle, England.
Jim Wilson Nicole GoochNicole is a freelance journalist and part-time reporter for Lloyd’s List Aus-tralia. She grew up in New Caledonia, and later worked in Noumea as commu-nications officer for the Public Health Division of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community(SPC). She graduat-ed from the Univer-sity of Technology, Sydney (UTS), with a Master of Arts in Journalism.
Jemma joined Lloyd’s List as a journalist in 2012, after working in current affairs at ABC Radio and Fairfax Media. She was also a contrib-uting writer to the Art Market Report and City News. Be-fore she began her career in journalism Jemma studied visual communica-tion and worked in the disability sector.
Jemma CastleOliver, the youngest member of the Lloyd’s List Australia editorial team, joined us in 2011. Born in London, Oliver moved to Australia in 1998, and has spent most of that time in Sydney. Before embarking on his career as a journalist, he enjoyed working in information technology. His work at Lloyd’s contributes to his media studies at the University of New South Wales (UNSW).
Oliver Probert
4
Shipping, business and golf
25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Geoff Beesley
“I have a passion for ships and the operational side of ships, I love being involved in pre-planning well before they arrive and when they do arrive setting about operating them asap to get them on the move again.”
5
Geoff BeesleyManaging Director
Newcastle Stevedores
by Nicole Gooch
Geoff Beesley – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
#01
Geoff Beesley is, some would say, as tough as old boots. He was born in Deniston, New South Wales, in 1939, and grew
up in the western Sydney suburb of Parramatta.
He knows the shipping industry inside and out, after starting work as a junior clerk for P&O agent MacDonald Hamilton at the tender age of 15. He began by filling ink wells, emptying bins and packing crockery and utensils for interstate AUSN company vessels. He climbed the ladder the hard way — from junior clerk to freight liaison of-ficer to stevedore supervisor, and from manager of the CCS depot at Rozelle to P&O’s shipping and stevedoring busi-ness in Newcastle.
Geoff has been on the wharves for decades. He has run his own steve-doring company for the past 15 years starting from a small workforce of 26 growing to 132 people. One could presume Geoff has seen it all and little would shock him these days.
But it is only a few weeks since the tragedy of Greg Fitzgibbon’s death — a highly respected 56-year-old stevedore working for Newcastle Stevedores, who was killed when a stow of aluminium that he had climbed on toppled down on top of him.
Emotion runs raw in Geoff’s voice and he chokes up as he tries to talk about it,
“It is heartbreaking. We are still living through it. Greg, better known as GAF, was a very highly skilled operator, and had been involved in the handling of about a million tonnes of the two million tonnes of aluminium that has been shipped through the port of Newcastle.
“Had I been asked to guess who had been involved, I would have gone through 128 of our 132 employees be-fore I would have selected him because of his skills and dedication to safety. He
was a mentor to our newer employees and made sure that they were safe and out of the way of danger. He was also a leader who led by example and was respected by his work mates.
“It is very sad and it has had a devastating impact on the team. It will take some time to get this ship back on course again.”
Geoff started Newcastle Stevedores in 1997, after he was made redundant in 1996 at the age of 57, having been with the company for 42 years. He maintains that they unwittingly did him a favour, as he had always wanted to have “a crack on his own at the stevedoring business”. After meaningful discussions with his wife they decided to give it a go.
He believed there was a differ-ent way of operating a stevedoring operation and, essentially, it was always about a differing approach to managing human resources, allowing people the freedom to work without pressure.
“So in 1997 we started our own business, Newcastle Stevedores, and 15 years later, here I am,” says Geoff. It was a big risk, although it was also thrilling,
and Geoff says he was lucky to have his wife’s support.
It has been an enjoyable journey with plenty of excitement along the way.
But Geoff’s wife had not been so supportive when they were first transferred to Newcastle from Sydney in 1984. “My wife’s scratch marks are still on the highway at Wahroonga where I dragged her up the road. But we got here, and now she won’t leave Newcastle except for the occasional holiday. She loves it,” says Geoff, manag-ing a smile despite the overwhelming sadness.
Until then, Geoff had worked on the waterfront for P&O. After his first stint as junior clerk in Sydney’s Erskine Street, Geoff was transferred to Union House into what was called the customs department, where he was responsible for clearing ships and looking after the ships’ crew matters.
“It was quite interesting and fun running around the Rocks at the time, going to the MSB at the Quay, the ship-ping office under the Harbour Bridge and the navigation department at the
Geoff Beesley and his wife in Italy.
Geoff Beesley.
6 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Geoff Beesley
end of George Street. It was an amazing learning experience,” he reminisces.
Soon enough, he found himself working as freight liaison officer for one of P&O’s shipping companies, British India Steam Navigation. “Prior to the ships’ arrival I had to arrange pre plan-ning meetings with all the operational parties, prepare everything and then go down to the waterfront to meet the ship and liaise with the officers regarding stowage” says Geoff. “Working with the waterfront groups was fascinating. It was just after the days of the Hungry Mile. Workers would start queuing down at the bottom of Erskine Street, and they went from one stevedoring company to the next trying to get a job, along all the finger wharfs that lined the way to the Harbour Bridge.
“And if they didn’t get a job by the time they got to the end of the road — the Hungry Mile — they often did go hungry.”
Geoff pauses. They were difficult times and those who worked on the waterfront were doing it tough.
He eventually left British India Freight when offered the position of stevedore supervisor with Sydney Austral Port Stevedoring, part of the P&O group.
“It was a big step as in those days in this company supervisors were ex-masters and for me being a land lubber it was quite an honour. After three years at stevedoring I was asked to take on the management role at CCS depot at Rozelle.
The managing of that depot was quite a task and had no fewer than eight different unions covering approximate-ly 100 employees who worked there.”
Geoff stayed in that position for four years, packing and unpacking containers, managing the storage of containers and the delivery of the cargo unloaded from the containers, until he was transferred to Newcastle.
It was Geoff’s father who led him into shipping in the first place.
“My father was an electrical fitter and turner, but there was enormous
industrial unrest in the ’50s, so he sug-gested that I not get involved in that, and his mates at work were suggesting ‘the wool game or the shipping game’. So I went to Sydney, read the posi-tion vacant adverts in the Herald at Wynyard Park and commenced in the shipping business.”
It was a difficult period for Geoff who played Rugby League for Par-ramatta and, whilst it gave him a good rapport with the wharfies, he missed too many training sessions because of the ships and eventually had to quit the sport.
But shipping has become his pas-sion — one in which he says there is little time to relax, but neither is there ever a dull moment.
“I have a passion for ships and the operational side of ships, I love being involved in pre-planning well before they arrive and when they do arrive set-ting about operating them asap to get them on the move again.”
Geoff enjoys the exhilaration of ste-vedoring, the intensity and drama of it.
“You just can’t turn your back on a ship’s operation until it has been completed and is out of the port. There is no putting it off until tomorrow. You have to attend to a ship’s needs as fast as possible.”
“Ships and the people who sail and work them form a very special industry,” says Geoff. “Not many people outside of the industry understand it.”
His wife does, however, and Geoff says she has played a key role in helping to entertain clients, captains and other visitors. They have been married for 37 years, after meeting in Sydney on one of Geoff’s birthdays.
They have two adult children, a son and a daughter, who live in Sydney, and a brand new grandson, to whom his wife is already “completely devoted”.
Both Geoff and his wife are also in-volved in a host of charity organisations throughout Newcastle, and are keen members of the local community.
Looking back on his life, Geoff recounts, “The combination of ship-ping, running a business and the occasional game of golf on a Saturday means every day has been different, and it has been a great way of meeting people of differing nationalities and personalities. It has been a great life. However the fatality has certainly put a dampener on it.”
A deeply shaken Geoff says, “This is probably the time to hang up my hat. I have been in the business a long time, so I will pass the baton down at some time soon. I may give it a couple more years.”
Geoff Beesley in Africa on safari.
“The combination of shipping, running a business and the
occasional game of golf on a Saturday means every day
has been different...”
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On the road
8 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Alan Bradley
“I work with a great team of people and am passionate about the product that we sell, and I am passionate about the company I work for and the values they have because they align very closely to my values.”
Alan BradleyDirector & Chief Commercial Officer
SVITZER Australia
by Nicole Gooch
9Alan Bradley – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
#02
Alan Bradley is 49, but he jokes that he likes to think he is “still a 25-year-old”. And who wouldn’t? Except that
Alan quite possibly does have more en-ergy and passion than many who really are 25 years old.
If he is not away on a business trip involving half a dozen countries in one week — which most dread, but he loves — Alan hits the road before six every morning and rides his pushbike for 40 minutes into Svitzer’s Sydney office, from his home in East Ryde.
“It’s a great way to start the day, rid-ing over the Gladesville Bridge, looking at the city as the sun rises. It is much bet-ter than sitting in a car in a row of traffic getting frustrated.”
So far he has been knocked over by cars three times, and fears that if his wife gets another call from the hospital he may be forced to give up his six beloved pushbikes, but for now, touch wood…
Heading off for a 100 kilometre ride while his wife runs 20-30 kilometres is a routine Sunday outing for the couple. Or entering mountain bike races and adventure races — for Alan, it is all about keeping healthy and having fun.
Both Alan and his wife, Kim, who runs her own “roaring little business” as a personal trainer, love the outdoors. Alan initially trained as a biologist at Murdoch University in Perth, and his first job was as quarantine inspector for the Department of Primary Industries. He was posted to Dampier, covering the Pilbara region. It was 1984 and he spent much time working on numerous projects, including preventing the incur-sion of diseases from Indonesian fishing boats, and using helicopters while help-ing to eradicate brucellosis tuberculosis in cattle.
It was what Alan wanted. His parents had migrated from Ireland when he was four, in 1967.
“My sister and I got seasick along the way, and the ship’s first port of call was Fremantle, so that is where we ended up,” laughs Alan.
His father got a job working for BP and they eventually moved to Port Hedland, which became home for the family and, after finishing his degree in Perth, he was impatient to return north.
“I loved the atmosphere up north with its wide open spaces, and it offered all sorts of opportunities — be it four-wheel driving, fishing or diving,” says Alan, who also climbed the ranks of scuba diving to become an instructor while he was there.
And in 1987, while still working as a quarantine inspector, Alan opened a restaurant too. A Chinese restaurant owned by the Mission to Seafarers was up for grabs. The wife of one of Alan’s colleagues was looking for a partner to take it over, and Alan thought, “Why not, let’s have a go at it!”
The Chinese restaurant became the “Captain’s Galley” seafood restaurant, much to the joy of “the 5,000 guys at the Woodside single quarters eating camp food”.
“They were pretty keen on the sea-food at the very successful Galley, and so we created a bit of a monster.”
Alan prepared for the kitchen at the restaurant early in the morning before going to his job as quarantine officer, and in the evenings he went back to cook.
“The plan had been that my col-league’s wife would run the place and we’d employ a cook to help her out, and my colleague and I would go in the evenings so there would be four of us there at night,” says Alan.
But it was not long before they ended up employing a large staff and were turning over 400 covers on a Sun-day, their busiest day.
“They were long days, which we did for two years. Then one day someone literally walked in off the street and said, ‘I want to buy this business’. He made us an offer we couldn’t refuse, so we sold up,” he laughs.
Somehow, Alan still found time during that intense period to meet his wife, and after selling the restaurant he decided to settle down and not travel as much. A friend, who ran Burns
Alan Bradley and the ATB Team SVITZER.
Alan Bradley.Photography by
Nicole Gooch.
10 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Alan Bradley
Philp Shipping Agencies in Dampier, happened to need a replacement staff urgently, so Alan took the job for what was supposed to be “just a little while”. A year later he was promoted to man-ager, based in Port Hedland, and three years later, Alan, his wife and two young children moved to Papua New Guinea, where he had been offered the position of general manager for Burns Philp, just prior to its purchase by Adsteam.
“Papua New Guinea is a fantastic place. It gets a bad rap, and security issues are real, no doubt about it, but from a cultural point of view, it is just a fantastic place,” says Alan.
The family enjoyed their time in PNG and set aside at least two weeks’ holiday every year to explore the country. Their most memorable trip was a New Year’s Eve excursion up the Sepik River on a luxury catamaran, which happened to also have aboard Sir Michael Somare and the vessel’s owner, Sir Peter Barter. They became the improvised tour guides, and Alan says it was one of the best trips they have ever done. “Seeing PNG in its raw form, and in such company, was fantastic.”
Working in Papua New Guinea, however, was challenging, with poor communication systems and about 50 Adsteam staff spread across five offices throughout the country.
“I learnt the hard way, but it was great grounding from a general man-ager’s perspective, and I saw a side of the world one wouldn’t otherwise ever see,” says Alan.
But during the family’s fourth year in Port Moresby, Alan was held at gun-point and robbed on the golf course. “That made me put into perspective the very real dangers of being there with a family, so we decided to come home.”
Back in Australia in 2002, Alan was appointed regional manager for Adsteam Marine NSW, and that was his first foray into towage, as well as into life in a big city.
“When I came to Sydney, I had nev-er worn a tie before,” he laughs. “On our way there to find a home, we dropped the kids off in Perth with my parents, and my Dad tied six ties, slipped them off the top of his head and I put them on a hanger to bring to Sydney.
“But you know, you come home late and you undo the tie without thinking, and for me it was, ‘Bugger, that’s one less tie’. Eventually I had to learn how to do it.”
But Alan has never looked back on his time in the shipping industry.
“If you’d told me 15 years ago, when I was living in the north of Western Australia, that I would be in this position now as director and chief commercial officer of a global towage operator, I would have just laughed at you,” he says. “But I work with a great team of people and am passionate about the product that we sell, and I am passionate about the company I work for and the values they have because they align very closely to my values.”
In high school, Alan was a keen golfer, and had a biology teacher who inspired him too. He was good at both, and when he reached the end of school he had to make a decision — biology won.
“But I was still finding my way, and it was not until I lobbed into the ship-ping industry that things started to gel,” says Alan. “I enjoy it immensely, and feel very lucky. It’s a little bit like some-one who is passionate about sailing, and they get offered a job sailing a yacht.”
Alan held a couple more positions with Adsteam/Svitzer before taking up his current role in 2007. His career highlight is the recent contract he and his team secured, after six years of negotiations, for towage and piloting at Chevron’s Gorgon LNG project, for the next 20 years.
“It is a great achievement all round and, as it has been a large part of our focus over recent years, it is most satisfy-ing,” he says.
Alan says that behind his success is his wife, who is “his rock”.
“My wife is amazing. I could go home and say to her: we are going to Afghanistan tomorrow, and she would say ‘Oh, fantastic’.”
Alan is equally proud of his two children, Emma and Sam, and new granddaughter, Lily Louise.
“It was a shock to become a grandfa-ther, but I would not swap it for anything now,” he says.
Emma’s partner Nick is in the army and the family has recently returned to Sydney from Brisbane, so more time can now be spent with Lily. Alan’s son is already working for a tug and barge com-pany, currently on a fly-in/fly-out project in Gladstone, has his coxswain’s ticket and is determined to earn his Master’s ticket.
“He is loving it,” says Alan. “He has taken a different path to me, but the message there is that you don’t neces-sarily have to go to uni to be successful. On the contrary; if you are passionate about something, you need to follow that passion, because it will have the best results.”
Heading off for a 100
kilometre ride while his wife
runs 20-30 kilometres is a
routine Sunday outing
for the couple.
Alan Bradley racing through the mountains.
11Martin Dolan – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
“When you have a job working for the government, where every day you can see that what you are doing is making a difference, it gives you a different perspective from what many people think the public service is.”
Poet, singer and Chief Commissioner – all in one
Martin DolanChief Commissioner
Australian Transport and
Safety Bureau (ATSB)
by Nicole Gooch
Martin Dolan never set out to be the Chief Commissioner of the Australian Transport and Safety Bureau
(ATSB). Having migrated from Scot-land at the age of four, Martin grew up in a family of academics in Armidale, in country New South Wales, where his father lectured in history at the Univer-sity of New England.
Later, half way through his own degree in modern languages at New England, Martin decided he’d become a high school teacher. But then, he had a “moment of clarity”.
“I was doing practice teaching at a Coffs Harbour school and I looked at the class, and the class looked at me, and I think there was this realisation that this wasn’t going to work,” laughs Martin. “I don’t think I was cut out to be a teacher.”
So he looked to other possibilities, and found jobs advertised in the Com-monwealth public service at the time. He applied and towards the end of his Honours year at university was offered a position in the organisation that is now AusAID.
“I took the job, although I was a bit like a GenY figure of today — I wasn’t looking for the long term. I was just looking for a job that seemed interest-ing, but I got sucked into the idea of public service,” says Martin. “I have this strange old-fashioned commitment to the public service, I think.”
Martin says it was the series of following positions in AusAID that created that, including a two-year stint in Bangladesh with, by then, his young wife Cynthia and two small children.
“When you have a job working for the government, where every day you can see that what you are doing is mak-ing a difference, it gives you a different
#03
12 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Martin Dolan
perspective from what many people think the public service is,” says Martin.
“I was able to see that by working for the government, you can make a difference to society. And that is some-thing that has stuck with me ever since. And I suppose when I have looked at other jobs and taken various oppor-tunities in government roles, I always have at the back of my mind that this is a job where I can make a difference.”
Martin was appointed Chief Com-missioner of the ATSB on 1 July, 2009, after roles as Chief Executive Officer of Comcare and of the Australian Energy Market Commission previously. From 2001 to 2005, he was the Executive Director, Aviation and Airports, at the Department of Transport and Regional Services, with responsibility for airport sales and regulation, aviation security, aviation safety policy and international aviation negotiations.
Until then, Martin had undertaken various corporate management roles in the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, including Chief Finance Officer and then Head of Corporate Management. And prior to that, he worked for AusAID for more than ten years.
Martin says he could have returned to academia, but he has never had “itchy feet”, since the “great beauty or privilege of my career is that it has always been interesting or challenging”.
“I love to learn something new every day, and I hope to continue that forever,” he says. “And certainly, if you have a look at the range of things we do at the ATSB — from exploding A380 engines to groundings on the Great Barrier Reef or major train derail-
ments — each time I look at one of our reports I am learning something new, and I have to understand enough of a technical issue to know whether or not this report has done the right job, iden-tified the problems and brought them to the attention of people who can do something about it.
“It’s great. I love it.”Other highlights of Martin’s career
include, of course, achievements in Bangladesh, especially in “making a practical difference on the ground”.
On the sub-continent Martin was responsible for running a range of programmes, such as family planning, assistance to the airline, rehabilitation of the sugar industry, and a series of small-scale activities delivered through local organisations.
But another of Martin’s “real high-lights” includes building from scratch the Australian Energy Market Commis-sion. A new organisation with just three staff when he joined, it employed over 40 people when he left.
Martin says he also thoroughly enjoyed working as part of the team that helped the government to privatise Australian airports. “My job was to ensure that public safety was protected in doing that, so the team work under-taken in order to get the best return for government while looking after various public interests was another highlight.”
However, the most challenging and stressful time of Martin’s career came
in 2001. Martin laughs as he recalls the day, towards the end of that year, “when my boss told me that my next job was to be running aviation security, dealing with the consequences of 9/11. That was when I finally began to think that maybe there was a challenge that was too big for me.
“It is the only job which did keep me awake at night. The consequences of failure were unthinkable.”
Martin adds that this is in contrast to his current responsibility as Chief Commissioner of the ATSB, “which has the potential, when you think of what can go wrong in safety, to keep me awake at night, but by and large it doesn’t because I have since learnt that there are a lot of people working on the same thing.
“I have got very capable, very competent managers, and I can rely on them for a lot of it. An organisation like ours has to run essentially on the basis of trust. You’ve got to trust that people share your commitment to safety, know what their job is, and get on with it.
“And if you start from there, it is amazing how many good things you can get done, and how rarely you are disappointed by someone not meeting that expectation.”
Martin says he has been very lucky, as he sees work as a being a “fundamen-tal part of life”, and as such he doesn’t agree with this concept of work/life balance.
Martin is an
accomplished lyrical
poet, having already
had a book of poetry
published, and some
magazine publications.
Martin Dolan.
13 Martin Dolan – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
“Work, in the best of worlds, makes you who you are, gives value to your life. So, this idea that you balance this thing called work, against this thing called your life, to me is just dumb. Your challenge is to say work is part of your life, but it is not all of your life, and you just have to remind yourself of that,” he says.
Martin enjoys going for long walks through the beautiful countryside around his present home town of Can-berra. Before starting with the ATSB, he and his wife spent six weeks hiking through the Scottish highlands.
“That sense of walking through beautiful, or interesting country, is what I like,” says Martin. “The walking itself is not the thing, it is what you are walk-ing through. And that’s one of the ways I try to keep sane.”
Another way, he says, is by writing poetry. In fact, Martin is an accom-plished lyrical poet, having already had
a book of poetry published, and some magazine publications.
“Lyric poetry, such as I write, doesn’t require large amounts of time, you’ve just got to set aside some time and put your brain in a different place. And so it works well for that. But it is a different way of crafting words, and thinking about words — what they mean and how they express particular feelings — and I think that is an impor-tant part of who I am too.”
But Martin says his wife, who is Deputy Head of a primary school in nearby Queanbeyan, is no great fan of his poetry. Despite this, Martin confesses he is “soppy enough to have written the occasional love poem to her, but they are the ones that are only for her. I wouldn’t publish those. Wearing your heart on your sleeve can only go so far, I think.”
Martin also has the first few draft chapters of a detective novel set in
Sydney after World War One in “the bottom drawer” of his desk.
He has always been passionate about music too.
“I used to sing as a reasonably trained tenor in choir, and solo to some extent, and again, it is one of those things I had to give away because at the moment I just don’t have time, but going to concerts, particularly classical music, is one of my favourite things.”
And while “very Australian”, Martin laughs as he admits that the Scottish part in him tends to “come to the fore watching rugby matches”.
“Occasionally I have to cheer on Scotland, even though I know I am Australian,” says a sheepish Martin. “And when Scotland beat Australia in Newcastle recently I must admit I was cheering them along. But that is partly the Australian view of cheering on the underdog.”
Martin never thought he would end up living the life he has led so far, and remembers once thinking, when Chief Finance Officer, “It’s amazing what you can do with a degree in modern languages…”
“I have this strange old-fashioned
commitment to the public service.”
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14 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Craig Faulkner
From cricket to shipping, from Ulverstone to Melbourne
Craig had serious plans to become a professional cricketer, and played for 15 years at the highest level in Tasmania against people such as David Boon.
15Craig Faulkner – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
#04
Craig Faulkner.
Craig Faulkner was born in Ulverstone, a tiny rural town in Tasmania, 50 years ago. Sitting west of Devonport, at the mouth
of the Leven River on Bass Strait, it has a population of about 10,000. For Craig and his three older brothers, growing up there was a great experience.
“Tasmania on the beach,” laughs Craig. “A lovely rural place to be brought up.”
But despite witnessing the constant coming and going of ships across Bass Strait, the maritime industry had not been on the cards for Craig. “I fell into it; it was all by accident.”
Indeed, Craig had serious plans to become a professional cricketer, and played for 15 years at the highest level in Tasmania against people such as David Boon.
But while Boon went on to make a career of cricket, Craig says he just wasn’t quite good enough. “Discovering alcohol and women” during summer when he was 18 didn’t help either, he adds with a chuckle.
So instead, Craig finished Year 12 and started a degree in pharmacy at the University of Tasmania. But he lasted only two weeks there, returning home to work in Ulverstone as a tyre fitter for Beaurepaires. “I did try to go back to university later, this time to study ac-counting, and I lasted six weeks!”
Craig now believes his father’s death, shortly after he finished Year 12, shaped his life, particularly “in wanting to go out and have a look around, at a younger age”.
“I think that if that hadn’t happened I wouldn’t be in shipping. I would have a white coat on and be behind a counter in a chemist shop.”
So back in Ulverstone, Craig worked as a rates clerk for the local council, before eventually heading off to London for 18 months, at the age of 20. He worked in bars and did clerical work.
“It was an eye-opening experi-ence, to go from a town of 10,000 people and land in the middle of London,” he says. “And on the first day I went to Lord’s, to watch a World Cup Cricket game, so that was a good start!”
Home once again in Ulverstone, his first job was selling real estate for a year, then Craig landed a job with Edgells, which at the time was the largest manufacturer of potato chips in Australia. “That’s when I decided I should get a university degree, and started studying again,” says Craig.
Three years later, half way through his Bachelor of Business from the Uni-versity of Tasmania, Craig applied for a job, advertised in the local paper, as accountant for the Port of Devonport Authority. “I discovered that the people at the port were very social, so that suited me!” says Craig, laughing again.
“But it was actually quite an interesting experience, because after about 12 months I became the second-in-charge to the CEO of the Port, and so there were these two young men running a reasonable sized port, and we learnt a lot together and developed
Craig FaulknerChief Executive Officer
Australian Amalgamated Terminals (AAT)
By Nicole Gooch
Craig Faulkner and his family high in the mountains in the north of Vietnam.
“The shipping and ports industry offers something different every day and,
certainly in Tasmania, you need to be able to be a jack-of-all-trades, and an expert at none, but know enough to be dangerous.”
16 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Craig Faulkner
some quite significant facilities there.“The shipping and ports industry
offers something different every day and, certainly in Tasmania, you need to be able to be a jack-of-all-trades, and an expert at none, but know enough to be dangerous,” says Craig.
“And once you understand the art of finding a beer coaster and writing things down, you can usually find that, in negotiating deals, people stick to what they have to say.”
In 1994, Craig was then offered the position of deputy general manager at the Port of Launceston Authority, and ended up becoming its CEO at the age of 35.
“And about ten years ago, I got a phone call from one of the characters in the shipping industry, a gentleman by the name of Richard Clarke, from Thompson Clarke Shipping, who asked me if I knew anybody who wanted to manage the Adsteam tug boats in Victo-ria. I said I might!” says Craig.
“I was 40 at the time, and we had two boys, who were 11 and six, and we decided that we either made the move to the big smoke now, or we should stay. So we came. We have never had any regrets. We have really enjoyed it.”
The following year, in 2004, Craig was appointed Victorian and South Australian regional manager for Adsteam Australasia, and remained in that position after Adsteam was sold to Svitzer in 2007.
“I survived the takeover, and learnt quite a number of things during my time with Svitzer. Then in 2009 the op-portunity arose to move back, more or less, into the ports industry with AAT,” says Craig.
“It was perfect. AAT is a combina-tion of all those things I have experi-enced over the years — dealing with the ports, which I know very well, dealing with the shipping lines, and of course dealing with the stevedores.”
Craig says there have been many highlights so far in his career. “And obviously the biggest highlight in my life was getting married to Maria and having our sons, Seb and David!”
Second to that, of his time in Tasmania, Craig still recalls with great pride the day in 2001 when, under his leadership, the Port of Launceston won the Australian Port of the Year Award.
Another major highlight was being able to move to Melbourne, “the sport-ing capital of Australia”. “I am a great AFL fan and a supporter of the Geelong football club, and love my cricket of course, so that’s been good for us all.”
His other passion is travel. “Luckily, in this industry you are able to travel quite a bit, and I have also been able to travel for leisure to most parts of the world, and hopefully some more travel-ling will come soon!” says Craig.
A couple of years ago the entire Faulkner family spent three weeks in Vietnam, which included time trekking in the far north of the country.
Maria and Craig have been happily married for 25 years, says Craig, adding, “The boys get on together, and they get on with us, and that is always a bonus!”
Their elder son Seb is doing a graduate work programme with ANL, while also completing a marketing degree, and their younger son, David, is in Year 10.
Both boys still live at home and Craig grumbles that he doesn’t think
they will ever leave. “Typical boys!” Juggling family life and work is, for
Craig, about “having an understanding partner and finding the right work/life balance”.
“I have always tried to do that,” he says. “Certainly, I have made it clear to the people I work with that family comes first. And hopefully I can keep doing that.”
Maria is a hairdresser, and contin-ued to work while bringing up their children. Craig is glad she was able to do that, but jokes, “You wouldn’t know she’s a hairdresser from looking at me!”
More seriously, Craig says he has been very fortunate to find himself in this industry and work “with any number of intelligent and interesting people”.
“And there are still plenty of challenges to come. AAT has a lot of interest in what is going on in the Port of Melbourne at the moment, with the changes there, and that will keep us occupied for many years to come, so we are looking forward to that.”
Asked if he has ever regretted not pursuing cricket, Craig replies, “Cricket was a big part of my younger life, and thanks to it I also met a lot of interesting characters, but I have never regretted it. I am lucky enough now to work with a great team of people and to be involved in a vibrant business. I have been driven most of my life to succeed, so I want those around me to succeed with me, and we are being set some pretty challenging goals by our owners and directors, so there is always something there to get me out of bed. That’s not a problem for me!”
“Once you understand
the art of finding a
beer coaster and
writing things down,
you can usually find
that, in negotiating
deals, people stick
to what they have
to say.”Craig Faulkner kayaking.
full page ad
18 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Ken Fitzpatrick
It’s all in the challenge
“A lot of people, when they look at the frustrations and challenges, ask me how I put up with it every day. And I think the driver is that if I didn’t have those every day I’d be sitting here bored.”
19Ken Fitzpatrick – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
#05
Ken Fitzpatrick.Photography by SAL.
Ken FitzpatrickDirector
Asia World Group
Ken Fitzpatrick likes a chal-lenge. Part of the fun, he says, is working out how to overcome it. However, there is something he
hasn’t quite achieved yet. He’s still not reached his ambition to get down to a single figure handicap in golf. “I got down to 11 once, but I didn’t quite make it to single figures,” he says.
It’s a good thing he thrives on the obstacles placed in front of him, because at work every day is a challenge for him.
“You can walk into the office thinking you’ve got a nice easy day ahead and it turns out to be an absolute shocker,” he explains. “Something goes wrong, strikes happen, ships hit some-thing, ships turn over, cargo moves. And although you can plan for a lot of these things, you can’t engineer some things out of the business. A lot of peo-ple, when they look at the frustrations and challenges, ask me how I put up with it every day. And I think the driver is that if I didn’t have those every day I’d be sitting here bored.”
Ken has been in the shipping indus-try for 45 years now but he never really set out to enter it. He enjoyed chemistry and science while he was at school and then studied chemistry for 18 months before realising it wasn’t what he wanted to do.
“I actually studied pharmacy for some time. We were learning to make all sorts of medicines and draughts, and then at the shop all they were doing was counting pills out of a packet and prescribing them,” he says.
It wasn’t the excitement he was looking for, he says. He wanted a chal-lenge.
“The thing I like about shipping more than anything else is that you come into the office and you’re not go-ing to do the same boring thing today as you did yesterday. Every day there is a different challenge.”
In 1967, after his stint with pharmaceuticals, he signed up with Wesfarmers in Fremantle and started as a ship agent. It wasn’t such a great leap, since his father had been in the grain industry as the shipping superintendent at Cooperative Bulk Handling. Growing up in the beachside suburb of Cottesloe he used to go down to the port with his dad and watch them load grain onto ships.
“That’s probably where my interest in shipping came from. When I was knee-high to a grasshopper I spent a fair bit of time going aboard ships and seeing how it all worked,” he recalls.
While he started his career in ship agency, what attracted him most was ship chartering, in which he booked the cargo for the ships going overseas.
“That eventually saw me go to my boss and say, ‘Look, I want to go to London next year. I know we have a London office; can you squeeze me in?’”
Eventually the opportunity arose and he went to work on the Baltic Exchange as a ship broker for two years, leaving life as he knew it in Perth behind.
It was 1970 and he travelled to London on a bulk carrier. “That was something else. We were probably in about the worst weather you could imagine for the first 25 days, through the Bass Strait and around the Cape of Good Hope, because in those days the Suez Canal was closed,” Ken says. Fortunately, he didn’t get seasick.
Working on the old Baltic Ex-change, he learnt the trade as he went. He enjoyed working as a ship broker
more than being an agent as he began to see how the markets worked.
“For me it was more challenging,” he says. “In London we could go from the office and onto the Baltic Exchange and in half an hour you knew all the latest trans-Atlantic grain freights, ore freights, coal freights, and time charter rates on various sizes of ships. That’s something that as a good broker in London you had to know offhand.”
Partial to a challenge, one of Ken’s prouder business achievements was successfully negotiating a better freight rate in a tender against 15 Egyptians. He knew the rate was too low so he’d put in a lot of terms and conditions. After winning the first round it came time to negotiate.
“Over the terms and conditions I put in I reckon we got another $3 or $4 back in the freight rate. But I had a very, very interesting time, with 15 Egyptians and I working on this tender, and they gave me absolute hell,” he says. “It was scary at first but really funny after I left Cairo.”
Ken travelled a lot with his work and while he didn’t realise it at the time, it once nearly cost him his life.
“I’d been booked on a flight that crashed,” he says, but fortunately, he didn’t catch it and lived to tell the tale. “That was a Bangkok flight that didn’t make it across the Bay of Bengal,” he says. He hadn’t been able to book a seat on the Amman flight so he decided to fly directly to his next destination. Bangkok. As luck would have it, at the last moment a seat was available on the Amman flight so he changed flights. It
By Jemma Castle
“When I was knee-high to a grasshopper
I spent a fair bit of time going aboard
ships and seeing how it all worked.”
20 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Ken Fitzpatrick
was before the days of instant commu-nication, so at home everyone thought he was booked on the flight that crashed. “When I arrived home they said, ‘Oh, you’re alive’, and I said, ‘Of course I’m alive, why shouldn’t I be?’”
He returned to Australia with Wesfarmers and worked in Melbourne for three years. In 1974 he headed to Sydney, where he met his wife of 37 years, Colleen.
“We married in Sydney and then afterwards we went to Tokyo for a year. That was a very exciting time. We both enjoyed that,” he recalls with nostalgia. Colleen spent most of her career work-ing in the insurance and finance indus-try. “She’s blissfully retired now,” he says. “She’s worked hard all her life.”
Once their two adult daughters decided to move overseas, they moved to Pyrmont in the inner city of Sydney, to soak up the lifestyle. “I don’t regret that at all. It would be hard to move me out of Sydney now,” he says.
What he misses most about his home town of Perth is being close to a large part of his family. As for the city itself? Places like Mandurah, which once seemed so far away, and places they visited for holidays are now just southern suburbs of Perth.
“It’s so long ago that Perth’s prob-ably changed a lot more than I have in the time I’ve been away from it,” he says. “I find that a bit hard to accept when I go there and see all those places developed.”
Today, he’s the director at Asia World, having stepped down as manag-ing director late last year, a post held for the past 15 years. He’s also the director of the International Cargo Handling Coordination Association and the chairman of Shipping Australia. “I’m trying to see if I can retire,” he says, but Shipping Australia is busy at the moment with so many policy changes occurring.
“It’s interesting. I’ve enjoyed dealing with government, and dealing with policy issues,” he says.
Despite his workload he manages to keep a healthy work-life balance. “As I get older I get it better balanced. You just get wiser. What stress I do have I take out on the little white ball on the golf course whenever I can. The other thing I do to get rid of stress is get into the kitchen,” he says. He has a flair for curry, with his beef vindaloo a specialty.
It’s so good, in fact, that when he was president of the Rotary club they held an east meets west dinner. It was so chaotic that just about everything
went wrong, but was ruled a success nonetheless. “It was one of those nights when I don’t think anybody stopped laughing the whole time. Sometimes the things that go wrong are the most memorable. People still talk about that night.”
And he’s had some laughs on the golf course too. He once managed to score the gig of caddying for legend-ary English cricketers Fred Trueman and Brian Statham. Ken’s father was a member at Fremantle Golf Club, and when they arrived to play a round, the English team was playing. “I had a very funny day with Freddy looking for his ball all over the place in the bush,” he remembers. “It was a hoot; I don’t think I’ve laughed so much during a golf game in my life.”
Of his golf game these days, he says he’s scored a couple of eagles, “which isn’t bad”, but he’s concerned about the fact that he’s never scored a hole in one.
As for his battle for a single-figure handicap? “There’s still time,” he says.
Ken Fitzpatrick in London with his daughter. “What stress I do have
I take out on the little
white ball on the golf
course whenever I can.
The other thing I do to
get rid of stress is get
into the kitchen.”
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SVITZER A4 11-12.eps 14/11/12 10:41:02 AM
22 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Hon. Duncan Gay MLC
At the helm of the NSW ship
“... people, on both sides, are mostly trying to do the right thing, although more on my side of course!"
23Hon. Duncan Gay MLC – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
Hon. Duncan Gay MLCMinister for Roads and Ports
NSW Legislative Council
#06
Duncan Gay was born 62 years ago in the pictur-esque town of Crookwell, near Goulburn, in the southern tablelands of
New South Wales. In autumn the trees lining its elegant streets are coloured with leaves of a vivid orange, and in winter, it snows.
“Crookwell is the cold country. We have real seasons there,” laughs Duncan, who grew up on his family’s grazing property. “It is gorgeous countryside and for us, as children, it was fabulous.”
Duncan is proud to have attended the local school, which included infants, primary and secondary students. What Duncan didn’t like so much, though, was the bus trip to school.
“It was a long run on the bus, especially for a five-year-old. It used to take an hour and a half to get to school. And they had a strange way of operating it. The bus route changed on the way home, so the first ones to get on used to be the last ones to get off. I used to think, as a child, that it was unfair, and as an adult, I still can’t understand the logic,” he says with a wholehearted laugh.
And when the time came to “get an education”, boarding school was the only alternative, and a “pretty tough” alternative, as he recalls it meant a huge sacrifice for his parents.
Duncan boarded at Newington College, in Sydney’s inner west. Each school holiday he and his sister re-turned home to help with work on the farm.
“Boarding school certainly opened my eyes. Coming from a small family farm and mixing all of a sudden with people from all kinds of different socio-economic backgrounds, was a bit of a shock at first,” he says.
But he enjoyed it, and made friends there that he has kept for life. “That is
terrific. I didn’t regret one moment of it,” says Duncan.
Crookwell is still home to Duncan and his family. The farm itself is now leased to neighbours as working on it became too much, but when Duncan and his wife, Kate, aren’t in Sydney, they can most likely be found relaxing at the farm’s homestead.
“The farm gives me a break. My mobile phone doesn’t work there and I can only get emails via satellite,” he says.
He jokes that in fact his farm “looks like NASA. We have dishes to pick up broadband, dishes to pick up television — we are only three hours away from Sydney but we can’t pick up anything!”
After finishing school, Duncan went on to study accountancy and wool classing, while also working in the motor trade. Looking back, he is be-wildered by his choice of subjects, and says, “I know, it is an eclectic mix. Who knows how that came about? I am not sure how wool classing helps me now, except I worked in a lot of shearing sheds, which gave me an understanding of people.”
Duncan eventually returned to the farm full-time as its manager, while also running a small trucking company.
He says his venture into politics was purely coincidental. “I only accidently became involved in politics, because a very good friend of mine, with whom I’d gone to school, Robert Webster, asked me to be his campaign director in 1984,” says Duncan, who had joined the National Party in 1974.
Webster was successful in his bid to become the member for Goulburn and went on to be a state minister. But Dun-can says even with Webster in politics, “I didn’t think it was for me”.
But the campaign did pique Dun-can’s curiosity, especially since at the time he was involved in “agri-politics”, as they were “tough economic times in farming in those days”. He was part of the “Rural Action Movement”, but then decided that there was “a better way of doing things, and that’s how it happened”.
After assisting Webster into parlia-ment in 1984, Duncan helped another friend, John Sharp, in 1987, and then both Webster and Sharp helped Dun-can in 1989.
And that was the start of it all. “It’s been great. Last year, I tipped
over — I have now been in politics longer than in what some people would call ‘the real world’. So it’s all downhill from here,” he says, punctuating his sentences with more laughter. “I’ve enjoyed every minute of it,” he adds.
He concedes that being in the Up-per House is fortunate because it allows for more family time.
“You do work at weekends, but you have a chance to be with your family. They are long days, but it is no different to what anyone else works.”
Politics for Duncan is about people — that’s what he loves most about the gig. “People are all different, but they are mostly all nice. I think I can only count half a dozen nasty people I have
Hon. Duncan Gay MLC.
“The key is getting the infrastructure
chain to work. That is what I am
concentrating on.”
By Nicole Gooch
24 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Hon. Duncan Gay MLC
met! And people, on both sides, are mostly trying to do the right thing, although more on my side of course!”
Duncan laughs that he has very good friends on the other side of poli-tics. “I just try to change their minds because they are misguided!”
But seriously, says Duncan, there are indeed “good people on the other side too, which is important because when you are in opposition you need to work with them to look after your con-stituents, and I have been lucky enough to be able to do that.”
His highlight, of course, is becom-ing minister after 23 years in politics, “to actually have your hands on the levers, have the responsibility and be able to try to do things”.
Duncan recalls waiting for a week at the farm after the election to hear which portfolio he would get, before finally giving up and deciding to drive back to Sydney with his wife.
Halfway there, they stopped at a service station, where one of the at-tendants “was giving me an earful about roads, and I said ‘I am not the roads minister,’” just as his wife handed him the mobile and said, “Barry is on the phone”.
Even though it was not the portfo-lio Duncan had been hoping for, he says
of course it took him just a “millisec-ond” to reply “yes”, and it turned out the one he was given was “even more exciting”.
For four years prior to the election, Duncan had been shadow minister for mining, energy and primary industries, so he is now glad to be able to imple-ment the policies he devised during that time in opposition.
He says both he and Gladys Bere-jiklian “accept that the most important link in ports is the freight link. The key is getting the infrastructure chain to work. That is what I am concentrating on.”
One of his career highlights harks back to his first three years in politics, when he was on the new “Social Issues Committee”, tasked with preparing a report on the possibility of adopted children and their biological parents ac-cessing information about each other.
“For the first time it provided an opportunity where, if everyone was willing, adopted children could access information on who their parents were, and vice versa, parents could find out what happened to their children. It was interesting watching — as we were going through it, we knew it would work because you could see that there was respect, and that you weren’t going
to impinge on someone else’s privacy. It was just outstanding. If I didn’t do anything else in parliament, it was this that stands out,” says Duncan.
Low points? “Way too long in opposition!” he
laughs.When not in parliament, Duncan
enjoys reading and going to concerts. He and his wife Kate are subscribers to the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra. “My wife tells me it’s good for me!”
But Duncan’s greatest passion is car racing. “I am a car racing tragic. I love it, absolutely love it.”
From time to time he took his two children, now adults, to watch the car races at Bathurst, but his wife doesn’t share that passion. She does, however, enjoy rugby, and they are both mem-bers of the Waratahs.
“We have been supporters since day one of the new franchise, although sometimes in the last couple of years you have to wonder why!” he chuckles.
Kate and he now have five grand-children. “It is just fabulous, and they are all granddaughters!” Needless to say, looking after their grandchildren is another favourite activity outside work.
As such, they spend about two-thirds of their time in their inner city Redfern terrace, which they have owned for a long time.
“Redfern has changed in character since we have been there, but it is still a friendly community, and interestingly, I could never have imagined that there would be a friendly community, like a country community, in the inner city,” he says.
Likewise, Duncan says he would never have imagined, growing up, that he would become a state minister one day.
“Sitting on a tractor would have been more likely. I had always wanted to be a farmer, and looked forward to it. It was way beyond my wildest dreams to be as lucky as I have been — I could never have imagined it.”
“I am a car racing tragic.
I love it, absolutely
love it.”
26 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Grant Gilfillan
Leading the charge for change
“But then I realised I had a yearning to make a difference. I have since realised that it is a characteristic in me – I am always looking for what more I can do to make a difference.”
27Grant Gilfillan – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
Grant GilfillanCEO
Sydney Ports Corporation
By Nicole Gooch
#07
It’s a cloudless winter’s day in Sydney, and Grant Gilfillan, 60, is relaxed and happily chatting in his Sydney Ports Corporation office, perched up high in the
Rocks, just a stone’s throw from the harbour. But it is a world away from South Australia’s Jamestown — a town settled by his ancestors and where he grew up, and a long way too from the Hunter Valley coal mines, where his working life started.
Grant laments, quietly, that he was a “slow starter for the first ten years or so” of his career. He is referring to the time when he worked as a mining engineer, firstly with Rio Tinto on the Paraburdoo mine, then with Coal & Allied as the senior mining engineer and project manager for its new coal mine, the Hunter Valley No 2 Mine project, from 1982 to 1988, and finally, as production manager and manager of mining, for Rio Tinto again, at the Hunter Valley No1 Coal Mine in Sin-gleton, from 1988 to 1997.
It may be a slow start compared to what he has achieved over the past ten years, but Grant progressed from labouring to driving haul trucks and then to working as a supervisor over a two-year period on a graduate mining engineer development programme. He then spent two years as a grade controller and drill and blast engineer, before being promoted during his fifth year to the position of senior mining engineer.
“I felt quite comfortable just being a technical person. I enjoyed getting my hands dirty and I enjoyed being around the people who get into those sorts of industries. They are genuine people,” says Grant.
“But then I realised I had a yearn-ing to make a difference. I have since realised that it is a characteristic in me — I am always looking for what more I can do to make a difference.”
It was, however, a gradual
realisation. Grant had been increas-ingly conscious of a sense of boredom that was slowly but surely permeat-ing into most of what he was doing, and he had begun to wonder what he should do about it.
Then life intervened, in the form of a 16-week strike at the No 2 Hunter Valley coal mine in 1997, and it was the catalyst for change for Grant.
Although “overwhelmingly sad and stressful”, the industrial dispute galva-nised Grant’s energy and enthusiasm, as he says he could see “how things could be done so much better”, and that led him to realise that change was a “big motivation” for him.
Picket lines were tense, but management got through and Grant
says seven workers left the union and agreed to train management on how to operate the machinery, so the mine could keep on producing.
“That was a huge change for the mining industry. Normally, the workforce is divided between ‘us’ and ‘them’. We didn’t have a problem with the union per se, but we wanted the workers to have a sense of responsibil-ity towards the company as well,” says Grant.
“It didn’t break the union; that wasn’t the point of it. The purpose was to break down the barriers.”
By the end of his career with Rio Tinto, Grant had developed a passion for inspiring people and bringing about positive change by, among other
Grant Gilfillan, his wife, Rosy and their daughter, Emily.
Grant Gilfillan.
“The people element is at the basis of it
all, and it is always enjoyable to be able
to talk. It brings you back to earth and
reminds you of why you are in this job.”
28 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Grant Gilfillan
things, recognising as an effective leader that “people are motivated by their feelings, not their heads”.
“My background being mining and the waterfront, both were riddled with lots of industrial action issues where we had almost insurmountable problems in trying to make the busi-ness productive and profitable. But I found that on some of those journeys, the people I was working with were really galvanised and came together to overcome obstacles they never thought they could overcome,” says Grant. “Those people thrived on it and that gave me a great boost of energy.”
After the coal mine strike ended, Grant decided it was time to take a “brave step” into a different industry. P&O Ports happened to be looking for its next general manager at the Port Botany Container Terminal. Having forged himself a reputation as capable
of dealing with “resistance to change and a hostile industrial environment”, Grant successfully applied for the role.
It was the beginning of his new career in the waterfront. He then went on to become managing director of CSX World Terminals LLC, in Ad-elaide and Charlotte, followed by P&O Ports general manager of landside logistics for Australia and New Zea-land, then its director of operations, as well as spending a couple of years in management positions for DP World in Romania and Dubai, before finally
settling into his current position in 2008.
“I have changed jobs seven times in the past 12 years, but I have enjoyed each of those changes and never regretted any of those decisions,” says Grant.
He concedes, however, “it is fulfill-ing to be part of change, but it isn’t easy. But then again, things in life that are the most rewarding are generally the things that are the most difficult.”
Sydney Ports Corporation comes with its own set of extra challenges
Grant Gilfillan and the management team in Romania.
Newcastle Stevedores Unit 14, 56 Industrial Drive, Mayfield NSW 2304 l PO Box 525, Mayfield NSW 2304Telephone: +61 2 4014 7100 l Fax: +61 2 4968 8711 l Mobile: 0412 680 001 l Email: [email protected]
Illawarra Stevedores North Wing Building Christy Drive, Port Kembla NSW 2505 l PO Box 88, Port Kembla NSW 2505Telephone: +61 2 4276 4950 l Fax: +61 2 4276 4770 l Mobile: 0438 069 725 l Email: [email protected]
29Grant Gilfillan – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
too, says Grant, as it is not just about people; it is also about government, politics, stakeholders and weather. “But that makes it all the more interesting.”
Whenever he has time, Grant heads to the Ports’ operations centres, or onto a tug, to talk to people. “The people element is at the basis of it all, and it is always enjoyable to be able to talk. It brings you back to earth and re-minds you of why you are in this job.”
Grant says he would have achieved none of this had it not been for his family’s constant support.
“My family provided the emotional stability and security that is needed to get through such roles,” he says, laughing as he recalls that if anyone dares to praise him within earshot of his wife, Rosemary, she will be quick to highlight that “that’s because he has a really supportive wife”. Grant says, “I can’t disagree with her.”
Rosemary, aside from playing a “big role” in bringing up their three children, also ran a ballet school in the Hunter Valley when they lived there.
Their youngest daughter, Emily, is now studying an Honour’s degree at university. Her career as a ballet danc-er with Chicago Ballet was cut short by injury, while his second child, Kate, is a Digital Strategic Integration Man-ager for Sport at Foxtel, and their son Michael is a Clinical Nurse Specialist at Concord hospital. Grant beams with pride when talking about them.
“I am under no illusion that their talent comes from anywhere else but Rosemary. We engineers are just basic critters!”
Grant’s son started off as an engi-neer, but Grant is glad that, in the end, Michael followed “his heart, not his head”. And Grant says he has immense admiration for people in the health care and services industry, “who give a lot more than they get back”.
Grant and his wife also love to travel, for work or holidays. They have just returned from a week in Jerusalem for a conference, which Grant says was an incredible experience, and every year they travel to Fiji, “just to relax and swim and snorkel”.
Back in Sydney, Grant swims up to two kilometres every day at home, even throughout winter.
“I am keeping my LNG suppliers in business! But, seriously, aside from keeping my energy levels up, it’s like therapy. It clears my head out after a day at work. It is like a software/psy-chological reset.”
He is also an avid fan of photog-raphy and enjoys “playing around” with digital video editing. “It is a great distraction because it is something completely different, which puts me in an artistic space.”
If he is not indoors making movies or listening to music with a glass of wine, Grant can be spotted out on his boat most weekends, fishing on the Hawkesbury River — his favourite form of escape. Not that he really
needs to escape. He is utterly passion-ate about his work.
“If I ever have a message for peo-ple,” says Grant, “it is to be prepared to be bold and experiment with your life, try different things. If that is not what you want to do, if your motivation is to keep your world under control and predictable, than that’s fine, enjoy doing that, but if you are a person who does yearn for change, then make it happen. Don’t sit on your arse and wait until it comes to you, get on with it and do it yourself. Sometimes it might even mean changing jobs, or industry, taking risks.”
Grant says that making that first move from the coal industry into the shipping industry was the start of an “acceleration of experiences” in his life, culminating with the past four years at Sydney Ports Corporation, which he says have been “unbelievable”.
“I just hope many other people can go through the same sort of journeys I have been through and get the same sort of rewards and sense of satisfac-tion out of it.”
“If you are a person who
does yearn for change,
then make it happen.”
Grant Gilfillan in Dubai with fellow directors from Africa.
Grant Gilfillan in Djibouti.
30 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Fady Hayek
Family and hard work
“The only way you can succeed is if you and your team unite as a happy and strong family unit. You can’t just do it by yourself, it needs a team effort.”
31Fady Hayek – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
Fady HayekGeneral Manager
China Shipping Australia
#08
“With a name like Fady Hayek, you are going to get some interesting
stories!” laughs the general manager of China Shipping Australia.
Indeed! Fady was born in Baghdad in 1964, to a wealthy Roman Catholic family. The youngest of five children, Fady was only six when his father, aged 59, was ready to begin a comfortable retirement, after making his fortune from a life’s hard work.
“But my father had a problem. It was 1970 and he could foresee that the country was going to endure a lot more civil unrest and war down the track; and there he was, with a wife, a 16-year-old son, little six-year-old Fady and three daughters in between.”
So, instead of retiring, Mr Hayek senior decided to escape Iraq with his family. They could not tell anyone that they were leaving and had to get fake identity cards. All their savings and the luxuries of servants and drivers were left behind.
“We escaped in the darkness, in the early hours of the morning,” recalls Fady. “We made our journey and landed in Sydney with basically nothing. My father had $1000 to his name and he was the only one of us who could speak any English. The six of us depended on him and at the age of 59, he had to start all over again.”
The experience of having to start again from scratch, with nobody to rely on but each other, had a deep effect on Fady. “That’s where I got my family values from and everything I do in life is based on family, including setting up China Shipping Australia. The only way you can succeed is if you and your team unite as a happy and strong family unit. You can’t just do it by yourself, it needs a team effort” he says.
His brother and sisters went to school but also worked, as “everyone
chipped in to help the family survive. Working in factories was a big shock, especially for my Mum, who had to work for the first time in her life, but it was all about survival,” says Fady.
His brother, who only spoke a few words of English when he arrived in Australia, started school in Sydney in Year 10 and went on to university. “But of course, the youngest one in the family was the one expected to have the best English and therefore the best education,” says Fady. “I was expected to show my relatives in Iraq that Australia
had given us all these opportunities and we were able to be just like them — doctors and lawyers.”
Fady had already realised that, indeed, “everything was possible in Australia”, and the young teenager was keen to give everything a go, including camping, boxing, bike riding and other sports.
“But that was also why I wasn’t just going to sit indoors and study!” he laughs. “I took advantage of life and lived it to the fullest, and at the age of 16, I wanted to leave school. I didn’t
Fady Hayek on a recent family holiday to Europe.
Fady Hayek.Photography by
Nicole Gooch.
“We made our journey and landed in
Sydney with basically nothing. My father
had $1000 to his name and he was the only
one of us who could speak any English.”
By Nicole Gooch
32 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Fady Hayek
want to go to university. I wanted to work, earn an income and, having heard my Dad’s stories so many times, I wanted to return what Dad had given us, and get out there to work and help the family immediately,” he says. “Plus, I didn’t like school.”
Fady’s father was approaching his mid 70s when the young boy saw an ad in the paper “for a mail boy with opportunity to progress” with Patrick Agencies.
“So I went to the interview and got the job, but then I had the hurdle of explaining to my parents that I was go-ing to be a mail boy,” chuckles Fady. He did manage to convince them, however, and in 1980 Fady started with Patricks, the same year the company began its cadetship programme.
“It was perfect. There was this little Fady Hayek ready to start. I said, ‘bring it on’! My theory in life is ‘everything is possible, just work damned hard and never give up’, as they say Rome wasn’t built in a day, but I’ll give it a go anyway.
“I had to get ahead, because I couldn’t let my family down now that I wasn’t going to study and achieve suc-cess through higher education.”
After three months Fady was moved to finance, then freight, opera-tions and marketing . He says he had the opportunity to see what every department in the shipping industry had to offer. His manager then asked him where he would most like to work, and at that time Fady “loved ship opera-tions”, so that’s where it all really began.
“I had kept up my Arabic, which helped too as at the time Patricks looked after the Egyptian vessels loading wheat. I continued working in Sydney and then in Newcastle and Port Kembla. I was fortunate to have worked every type of vessel.”
Fady says his favourite ships were those that fed him well. By then, how-ever, Fady was 24 and wanting to learn more about what other ports in Aus-tralia were doing. In 1988 he applied for the position of national operations manager at McArthur Shipping, which he occupied for six years, before taking on the responsibility of setting up its Sydney liner branch and managing that for the next five years.
“In ship agency you need good communication skills, knowledge, honesty and common sense. I took great delight that that was what I was all about,” says Fady. “I never said no to any task and the opportunities just kept coming.”
In 1999, while working for McAr-thur’s, Fady’s managers asked him if he’d be interested in setting up, from scratch, China Shipping Australia.
“This reminded me of when we first arrived in Australia, and I had also learnt that Chinese and Middle-Eastern lifestyles are quite similar, so I was very keen,” he says.
“Setting up the agency — China Shipping’s first agency outside Asia — was a wonderful and very exciting time. We had to set up the Sydney headquar-ters as well as branches in Melbourne and Brisbane, and find all the staff. A month later, our first vessel arrived.”
Fady says, “This is why I believe everything is possible with the right family team. And here we are, over 13 years later, and we are so proud of what China Shipping has achieved to date,
in Australia as well as globally. We are even more excited about our future plans and growth.”
In 1989 Fady married his wife Jannine, whose father is Lebanese and mother is from an Australian country town. They now have two boys — An-drew, who is 19, and Daniel, 16.
“They are following their dreams and desires. Andrew wants to be a film maker and writer, so he is studying at the International Film School Sydney, and Daniel is working hard in Year 12,” says Fady.
Jannine is a qualified Orthoptist (eye therapist) and part-time writer. “She writes poetry, speeches and per-forming arts scripts,” explains a proud Fady.
He adds that his father was very happy when Fady and Jannine bought
“In ship agency you need good
communication skills, knowledge, honesty
and common sense. I took great delight that
that was what I was all about.”
Fady Hayek – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 33
their first home. “That was extremely important to him; he knew he could relax then!” says Fady.
Fady also enjoys travelling, his sports, and the family’s companions — two labradoodles named Hamish and Shandy. Every morning he rises at 5am to take the dogs for an hour-long run.
“My sons always ask me, ‘Who are you running from? Why don’t you just sleep in?’ But it makes the dogs happy and keeps me fit and that’s when I start thinking and planning the day ahead of me,” says Fady.
Upon reflection, Fady says it is a “shock to the system” when he thinks about his relatives left behind in Iraq, and realises how “fortunate” he was.
“I just thank my parents for that opportunity, and I try to provide so that my family members can also be suc-cessful,” he says.
“I am very sad about what is hap-pening in the Middle East now and in every country that is involved in war and civil unrest. It makes me realise how fortunate I am to be part of a won-derful Chinese network and to be based in Australia, the lucky country.”
M A R I T I M E E N G I N E E R S
P T Y L T D
w w w . m a r i t i m e - e n g i n e e r s . c o m . a u
Ship Surveyors & Consulting Marine EngineersPO Box 610, Fremantle WA 6959
Tel: (08) 9335 3250 | Fax: (08) 9335 3249 Email: [email protected]
34 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Elle Hilton
Elle HiltonGeneral Manager
Toll Marine Logistics
Elle Hilton.
Elle Hilton.By Nicole Gooch
Elle Hilton’s office, as general manager for Toll Marine Lo-gistics, is in Darwin, but she is a Queenslander at heart, and Townsville and Mount
Isa are both still very much home for her.
Elle’s parents worked in mining at Mount Isa before moving to Townsville, where she was born and grew up.
“I have done a lot of moving around, but north Queensland is still a very special part of the world for me,” says Elle.
“I look back and always smile about my childhood. My father worked at the port in Townsville for some time, and he used to take my sisters and me there to watch the ships come in. It led to a thirst for knowledge on what was on board those ships and for their destina-tion, a curiosity that hasn’t waivered.”
Elle says she feels fortunate to have grown up in a place with such a “can do” approach to life.
“It has nothing to do with whether you are male or female, it is about being honest, having a good character, being able to communicate, have a laugh and
get on with the job.”Elle’s family didn’t live on easy
street, and she says that taught her some valuable lessons that helped to shape her.
As someone who doesn’t like to conform and who tries to look at things from a different perspective, Elle struggled at school and couldn’t wait to finish and find her way in the world.
Which she did. At 19, she moved to Darwin to “see what it was about”. She got a job with Coca Cola, where she learnt the marketing techniques that would later stand her in good stead. She
also put herself through night school, studying accountancy, “just to under-stand business better”.
Elle had been doing this for a few years quite happily when, one day while enjoying the horse races at the Darwin Cup, she met a fellow who happened to run a shipping company.
“He asked me to do some work for him, to help him out, and I did that, and the rest is history really,” she smiles.
Elle eventually went on to work for Patrick Defence Logistics as port services coordinator. The position was based in Brisbane, but Elle spent most of her time in Singapore, Japan and Korea.
“It really was a great experience,” says a passionate Elle. “I was lucky to work with a great team of experienced people who weren’t just managers, but were actually teachers, and I was like a sponge, soaking up as much as I could. And now, I try and do that with others too.”
Elle then worked another stint in the same position in Darwin, before returning to Brisbane. She moved to Townsville in 2005 as Townsville man-ager for Patrick Logistics.
“Until then I had been involved in shipping and ports, but this was the land side of logistics — trucking and rail — so again, it was another big learning curve that helped to shape a broad understanding of all things T&L.
“The industry of transport logistics
is fantastic because it is generally an
area where people can do well,
as long as they are motivated
self-starters, work hard and can find
solutions for clients. That’s what
our business is all about.”
35Elle Hilton – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
#09From the shores of Darwin to the battlefields of Virginia
“It has nothing to do with whether you are male or female, it is about being honest, having a good character, being able
to communicate, have a laugh and get on with the job.”
It was also an enjoyable time. I don’t think they were actually expecting a woman,” she says, “but I look back on the period and the team we built very fondly.”
Elle says it may be because she is younger, but being a woman in the shipping industry has “never been a big deal”.
“In the past, sure, there was a ‘boys’ club’, and I was not party to that, obvi-ously, but I have never needed to be either,” she says.
“The industry of transport logistics is fantastic because it is generally an area where people can do well, no mat-ter what their gender or background, as
long as they are motivated self-starters, work hard and can find solutions for clients. That’s what our business is all about.”
In 2007, Elle was appointed general manager of business development for the Port of Townsville, one of only a few places in Australia where multiple dry and liquid bulk commodities are handled in the one, relatively small port. She thrived on such stimulation.
Then in 2009 she accepted an of-fer to work with one of her previous customers, the phosphate miner Legend International Holdings.
Based in Paradise Creek, 100 kilometres north of Mount Isa, Elle was
responsible for designing a supply chain from there to the Port of Paradeep, on the north-east coast of India. It was a difficult and challenging role, which took a year, and again the role helped to form a view from a customer perspec-tive when dealing with major lines and providers.
“It was not straightforward at all. Every time you thought you were going down the right path, there was a road block, so it could be frustrating as well,” says Elle.
But she is the first to admit to enjoying a challenge. “It’s a pleasure working in the logistics industry,” says Elle, “and I have aspirations for
36 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Elle Hilton
“It will take all of our combined knowledge, experience and expertise
to get shipping back to where it belongs in the Australian market.”
the business being more customer focused, delivering value through highly motivated people who continue to improve their knowledge and skills.” And now, after working on Toll’s LNG project construction support activi-ties in Gladstone for 18 months, Elle is back in Darwin, and she says she feels she has come full circle.
It is a role she is very excited about, and it is also an all-consuming job which leaves little time for hobbies or relaxation, especially since any free time she has at the moment is spent in Brisbane, with her family.
“I get a lot of pleasure out of work — literally, it floats my boat — but there is no comparison really to having children, and watching them grow,” says Elle, the proud mum of 17-year-old daughter Morgan.
“She is doing so well, and is looking forward to the prospect of university.”
Elle is usually in Brisbane for about one week in four, and the rest of the month she is likely to be in Darwin or travelling, so she considers herself lucky to have “an amazing support base” in her family.
“To me, the highlight is that my husband and daughter actually want
me to be the best I can be, and give me the freedom to do that,” she says.
While nobody suggests that being away from home is easy, Elle says it is still “doable”, and the key is having a positive outlook and keeping commitments.
“If you’re not reliable and trust-worthy, then it is going to be a pretty negative experience. And I find taking presents home is very helpful as well!”
Elle adds that she is “very happily married, and has learned a lot from husband and state operations manager for QUBE Logistics, Craig. His focus is road and rail, and mine is shipping and ports, so we have some lively dinner table debates over modal choice.”
Elle is a self-confessed American Civil War buff. A veteran of five trips to battlefields in the USA, she is planning another one with her family at the end of this year, to Virginia.
“When I left school I realised that I didn’t know enough about Australian history, and particularly recent Austral-ian history. So I read quite a lot about the Vietnam War, which led to reading about other wars, which eventually led to the American Civil War, and that interest has never changed,” says Elle.
“I find the strategies employed tremendously interesting, and it is a
very moving war because it was not two countries fighting each other, but it was state against state; it’s fascinat-ing to read about. So to then be able to stand in the place where it occurred is indescribable.”
Elle’s interest in history also rever-berates in her outlook on the shipping industry.
“The really exciting thing about being in this industry is looking at what’s happened in the past, and see-ing that the values and reasons for shipping’s existence are still valid, and they still work, particularly with the changes that are occurring in Aus-tralia’s economy right now. With such a squeeze on infrastructure invest-ment, there is a genuine opportunity to take advantage of the big, blue free highway out there and to reinvigorate the impressive and productive coastal services of the past. ”
Elle says she wants to inspire what is an “almost underground movement in coastal shipping” to be more open and vocal about itself, and to come together to work towards its shared goals. “It will take all of our combined knowledge, experience and expertise to get shipping back to where it be-longs in the Australian market.”
#10
As managing director of Qube, the Australian logistics and infrastruc-ture company, Maurice James generally spends
three days in Sydney and two days in Melbourne each week. It’s a commute Maurice happily subscribes to, as his family still live in Melbourne and he himself is Melbourne “born and bred”. He is proud of that fact, although it does come with its downside — he is still waiting for that elusive AFL pre-miership given his team Melbourne last won a grand final in 1964…
Maurice had a typical working class upbringing in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs. His father was initially
a toolmaker, who went on to build a successful small business importing digital display machine tools when Australia converted from imperial to metric measurement systems.
It was a childhood made up of kick-ing the football with the neighbouring kids in the street until it was time to come in for dinner, and riding his bike to and from school. There was no such thing as a chauffeuring Mum in those days. That was lucky for his parents, given Maurice is a self-confessed “sports fanatic”, and while at school he thrived on playing Australian Rules football, cricket and basketball.
Basketball was quite an unu-sual sport of choice in those days, but
Maurice explains that it was the result of having an American teacher at Oakleigh Technical School, who started a small club.
Maurice eventually played a season with the school club, before being approached by the Melbourne Tigers’ junior coach when he was 15. The eager schoolboy eventually played for five years with the Melbourne Tigers at jun-ior level, finishing in the under 20s.
But Maurice’s father had always been adamant that his three sons would get a university education, and that was drummed into them from an early age. Having been influenced by a friend of
Maurice JamesManaging Director
Qube Logistics Holdings
Hooked on the shipping industry
“Like many people in the
port/shipping industry,
once you get into it, it
gets into your blood and
you enjoy it too much!”
37Maurice James – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
By Nicole Gooch
his father’s, who was a civil engineer, Maurice decided in primary school that he would become an engineer or a builder.
So his secondary school training was at Oakleigh Tech, which then led to civil engineering at Caulfield Insti-tute, now Monash University.
Maurice graduated in 1978, but they were difficult times then and he was lucky to be accepted for one of the two civil engineering positions, which happened to be in the Port of Mel-bourne Corporation, known then as Melbourne Harbour Trust.
“I thought I would just get a couple of years’ experience there and then move on, but, like many people in the port/shipping industry, once you get into it, it gets into your blood and you enjoy it too much!”
The first couple of years working in the design area turned out to be a great experience for Maurice, as being with the Port of Melbourne exposed him to the challenges of working in both com-mercial and private contexts. He was then offered a position as an engineer in construction management at the Port’s East Swanston Dock No 4.
A couple of years later he moved into project management, then into planning.
“It was really good grounding, and one day, one of the senior engineers sat me down and asked me, ‘Do you want to be an engineer for the rest of your life, or do you want to do something else?’”
It was a defining moment for Maurice, prompting his enrolment in a part time Master of Business Admin-istration (MBA) at Monash University, which he finished in 1990.
It was perfect timing, as at that stage Victoria’s state government was moving down the path of creating the Docklands Area in Melbourne and privatising the East Swanston Dock.
Strang Patrick Stevedores won the bid for the container terminal, and shortly after, its managing director, Chris Corrigan, merged three different stevedores into what became Patrick Corporation. And just 18 months later Maurice, by then manager of commercial operations at the Port of Melbourne, received a phone call from Corrigan, whom he had only met twice during the tender process, and an offer to join Patrick Corporation as its Victorian state manager.
That was 1994, and the start of a whole new career adventure for Maurice.
In 1996, Patrick was restructured into just two divisions, container termi-nals and general stevedoring. Maurice was appointed national head of the container terminals division, and led the redevelopment of Port Botany, and ultimately the automation of Brisbane.
Maurice stayed with Patrick for 12 years, until its acquisition in 2006 by Toll Holdings. His last position at Patrick was that of executive director of ports, which included responsibility for Patrick’s container terminal and port logistics businesses. For the last three years at Patrick he joined Chris Corrigan as the two executives on the board of Patrick.
Despite these achievements, Mau-rice says he is fairly relaxed — he has never set out to reach any particular goal in his career. Rather, his philoso-phy is that, if you work hard, opportu-nities will present themselves.
“There is no point in career plan-ning too much, because things always change outside of our control, and opportunities sometimes also come out of left field,” he says, referring to that phone call from Corrigan.
Of course, Corrigan is now chair-man of Qube Logistics, which Maurice
helped set up in 2007, after DP World took over and acquired the assets of P&O Trans Australia and P&O Auto and General Stevedoring.
For Maurice, it was again about creating more opportunities, and he says he has enjoyed it very much, espe-cially since, in the months leading up to the birth of Qube Logistics, Maurice worked as a consultant and non-exec-utive director, and he says he is glad to be back into full-time employment and part of a team again.
“My wife claims that I have never woken up and said, ‘I don’t want to go to work’,” laughs Maurice, “and it is true.”
“You have to make your own life, and that means that if you are not happy, then you move on. But the port/shipping/logistics has me hooked.”
It hasn’t always been smooth sail-ing, however. The so-called “waterfront dispute” of 1998 is a prime example of that. But Maurice, despite having been right in the middle of it, says he is fortunate to have a personality that allows him “to go home and switch off”. That’s not to say that it was not a stress-ful period, and Maurice chuckles at the fact that his wife tells him, even now, that he is still thinking of work when he is at home.
But with the constant stream of chaos provided by four children and
25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Maurice James38
Caption xxxxxxx
caption
39Maurice James – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
weekends full of the kids’ sports coach-ing, boating and more, there was no time to dwell on it too much.
Looking back on the 1998 Mel-bourne dispute, Maurice says, “In the end, it is really pleasing that, not long after the dispute, employees told me they had gained a lot of job satisfaction since the reforms, and that things have never been better on the waterfront. For me, as a manager, to have employees come up to me and tell me that they are happier now is one of the very positive outcomes of that difficult time.”
Father to three boys and one girl, with just a six-year gap between the eldest and youngest, Maurice and his wife were certainly kept busy on the home front too. And it is not quite over yet. His youngest two, aged 21 and 19, still live at home. Maurice credits his
wife for the “wonderful” upbringing of his children.
They all have a great relationship together, and although he would have liked to play more golf, it is in the end “a selfish sport, and takes up a lot of time, so weekends for me were really about forgetting about work and spend-ing time with my wife and kids”.
Evenings during the week were also spent ferrying children around from one sporting or music activity to another (mostly done by his wife as Maurice was often late home from work), and all of his children played basketball, in particular his eldest son, who like his father played for five years at Melbourne Tigers juniors. Maurice coached all the boys’ sports teams, and still watches his sons play Australian Rules on Saturday afternoons.
He and his wife also love to travel. They took four months off together to explore Asia and Europe before the children were born, and continued to travel as a family later. Between leaving Patrick Corporation and beginning work with Qube, the whole family went on another four-week trip to Europe.
“We have encouraged the children to see the world. There is a lot out there to do and see,” says Maurice, who also undertook the Australian ritual of backpacking while at university.
And although none of his children is an engineer, their father conceals his slight disappointment with a brave and supportive “I don’t blame them for that, as they had to find their own way in life”.
“But they are all Melbourne AFL supporters, so I had an influence there!” he adds with a laugh.
“You have to make your own life, and that means that if you are
not happy, then you move on. But the port/shipping/logistics
has me hooked.”
40
25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Graham Lightfoot OA
A dedicated life
“Graham was sent to New Orleans for three months with the job of buying 12 pusher tugs and four oil barges and get them down to the upper reaches of the Amazon.”
41Graham Lightfoot OA – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
#11
Graham Lightfoot OARetired as Managing Director
Blue Star Shipping Line
Graham Lightfoot began his journey in the ship-ping industry licking stamps.
“I was the real office boy — the lad who licks the stamps and goes out and gets the lunch orders and does all the trooping,” he laughs.
It was 1950. Graham was not yet 17, having joined shipping agent Gibbs Bright & Co in Adelaide straight from school. After six months of licking stamps, he was called into the manag-er’s office and told there was an opening for him in the insurance division.
“I remember thinking, ‘Probably what you are going to say next might define your life,’ and I said, ‘No, I don’t want a career in insurance, I want a career in shipping’.”
Graham didn’t know he was going to say that until he’d said it. The man-ager was “horrified”, and told him there was no vacancy in the shipping division so he would have to continue licking stamps for at least another 12 months, if not longer. Graham replied, “So be it.”
“Back I went to licking stamps, but eventually, after a full 12 months, I got my break into the shipping department, and it did become my career.”
Graham says he had looked around the office, and thought “those fellows in the shipping department have a pretty interesting life”.
“I had noticed them rushing down to the port, visiting ships, and captains would come up to the office and it all seemed rather more exciting than insurance or wine and spirits.”
That was the start of a 46-year ship-ping career for Graham, culminating in September 2012 with an Order of Australia award.
“At the end of those 46 years I certainly didn’t regret the decision I took at the tender age of 16 and a half,”
says Graham, who retired as managing director of Blue Star Line in 1996.
Graham says he could “never have foreseen” how his career would play out. “I always just kept my eye on the chair ahead of me, focused on one step above.”
And he thrived on the excitement of the industry. “It is 365 days a year. It never ceases and is full of variety. You never learn it all. You can’t go to school and learn shipping. And it doesn’t stop on Christmas day or on your wedding anniversary.”
Graham’s first “big step up” was a transfer to Perth in 1958, although he is again filled with dread as he recalls the day his manager informed him of the move.
“I had just married Shirley, we had a small child and the foundations of our house were still wet, and that was the day I had to go home and announce we had been transferred to Perth,” he says. “That is not a conversation I look back on with a lot of joy!”
But the family stayed in Perth for 12 years. The highlight of that time for Graham was the arrival of the first container ship in Encounter Bay in 1969, after a two-year build up in preparations.
“We knew that day the whole world had changed. Every single aspect of the business had changed, and we knew it had changed forever,” he recalls.
Not long after, Graham, Shirley and their, by now, three sons moved to Syd-ney, where Graham had been promoted as NSW State Manager for ACTA. But a couple of years later, Vestey offered Graham the position of assistant
manager for Blue Star Line in Australia, the plan being to take over as general manager in two years’ time.
Graham had always aspired to run his own show, and here was a chance that in two years he could be “running a shipping company on my own in Aus-tralia. It was too great a chance to miss”.
But first came a test, which turned out to be another highlight of his ca-reer. Graham was sent to New Orleans for three months with the job of buying 12 pusher tugs and four oil barges and getting them down to the upper reaches of the Amazon.
“But, of course, it is one thing to buy 12 tugs, and another to put them on ocean going barges, and tow them down a river,” laughs Graham, who ended up spending six months away from home.
“It was a big six months of my life, but my wife was very supportive and it was an interesting start to my career with Blue Start Lines.”
But it his role as President of the Australian Chamber of Shipping, from 1982 to 1986, which proved to be one of Graham’s major highlights. He says he enjoyed the exposure it gave him to the “machinations” of Canberra and to international relations.
“I have always been fascinated by politics and I follow it fairly closely,” says Graham, who was also one of the “founding fathers” of the Australia Arab Chamber of Commerce and Industry (AACI) in 1975, and its national presi-dent from 1987 to 1990. As such, he led a trade mission to the Middle East and was the business leader for a joint ministerial meeting in Saudi Arabia.
“I was in Kuwait when Saddam invaded
at midnight on the 2nd of August 1990.”
By Nicole Gooch
Graham Lightfoot OA.
42 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Graham Lightfoot OA
“I have been involved with the Australia Arab Chamber from day one. I am still its patron, and have been delighted to see how it has developed over the years.”
Graham, however, ended up a hostage in Kuwait in 1990 while on a business trip there.
“I was in Kuwait when Saddam invaded at midnight on the 2nd of August 1990, and of course his invasion led to the long walk to the wrong end of the rope. But that’s when his long walk started — the night he pressed the but-ton at midnight, and I was asleep in my hotel in Kuwait.
“I heard the sounds of invasion by about six in the morning, and the three-and-a-half months that followed were pretty tough for me, but think how tough it would have been for my family back home.”
Graham was in hiding in a villa with another two foreigners when he became very ill with an ear infection. “I had to come out of hiding and took my life in my hands to get to Baghdad, and spent the last six weeks there, some of which was spent in hospital, where they looked after me very well,” he says. Over the years since then he has lost most of his hearing in one ear as a result of that illness.
Graham says he coped with the ordeal thanks to his Christian faith.
“I came though it fairly confident from day one that I would come out of it,” he says. “But there is no question about it — it is the biggest experience of my life, and probably its low point.”
He and Shirley have now been mar-ried 56 years. They were engaged on Graham’s 21st birthday, after meeting during a holiday on Kangaroo Island.
“She came in by boat, I by air. I, being an adventurous lad, thought I’d better go down and have a look at this boat coming in. As the ship docked, I saw this very attractive girl in an outstanding red and white polka dot skirt, and there we go!” says Graham, his voice still resonating with pleasure at the memory of that day.
“I made it my business to meet up with her during the course of our time on Kangaroo Island, and as they say, the rest is history…”
Shirley was a hairdresser, but gave it up to be “a fantastic mother for the three boys, particularly when I was travelling so much. She certainly took a leading role on the home front,” he says.
But Shirley was diagnosed with acute rheumatoid arthritis aged just 33. “She is a very brave girl,” says Graham. “As she gets older it gets increasingly worse. She has had 11 operations, and last year she had two major heart attacks, and I have never heard her complain. I find that very inspiring.”
Despite his dedication to Shirley as her primary carer, Graham still finds the time to serve as chairman for the Sydney Bethel Union and as deputy chair of the Australian Mariners Welfare Society. He also helps run the annual Golf Charity day for his local Rotary Club.
“I am very proud to be involved with the Bethel Union and the Mariners Welfare Society, because they are doing
great work for the seafarers, who are the backbone of our business. They lead a hard and totally different life, and I am very happy to try and put something back into their welfare.”
Graham also has eight grandchil-dren, and plays bowls twice a week.
“You start out playing cricket, then you move to a bit of tennis, then tennis gets a bit much, then you take on golf, and now golf has got a bit much, and so I have taken on bowls,” he quips.
Shirley is currently in respite care, and Graham is saddened as she is miss-ing out on the beauty of the azaleas in bloom in their north Sydney garden. But out comes the iPad, and Graham can look forward to showing his photos to Shirley on his next visit.
“I am very proud to be involved with the
Bethel Union and the Mariners Welfare
Society, because they are doing great
work for the seafarers, who are the
backbone of our business.”
Graham Lightfoot and his wife Shirley.
44 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Julie Magnone
Thriving on challenges
“It’s been a huge adventure. I never thought, 15 years ago when I started at Skelton, that I would one day be CEO of a multinational company.”
45Julie Magnone – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
Julie MagnoneChief Executive Officer
Skelton Sherborne
#12
It was Christmas 1990, in hot and humid Brisbane, and Julie Mag-none had just finished her Year 12 exams. While her friends fooled around at the beach or the pool,
Julie was working as a “checkout chick” at Woolworths.
It wasn’t enough money for her though. Julie planned to start a nursing degree the following year, and wanted before then to make more money and have “some fun”.
“When I was at school, I was inter-ested in doing nursing. I have no idea why, because I really can’t stand the sight of blood now — actually it makes me a bit queasy — but that’s what I planned on doing and I was waiting for the results to get into uni after final school exams,” says Julie.
“So I went to the job office, and they had cards up on the wall, typed up at the time, with the different jobs that were available, and there was an advertised job that said ‘runner’ for a freight forwarder.”
Julie says she had another couple of cards with her, but was intrigued by that one as she just couldn’t understand what it was. She asked the lady at the counter, who promptly disappeared into another office, only to return a few moments later and announce, “I’ve got you an interview at 8:30 tomorrow morning”.
“No, no, no,” Julie protested. “I just want to know what it is.” But Julie now laughs as she recalls the clerk’s answer. “Well, you will find out when you get to the interview then, won’t you?”
“So I went to the interview at freight forwarder, Powerhouse Interna-tional,” says Julie, “and by the time I had driven from the company’s office back to my house after the interview, they had already been trying to ring me at home to tell me I had the job.”
Unknown to Julie at the time, it was to be the start of her love story with the
shipping and logistics industry, that has grown in intensity ever since.
“I fell into shipping that day, and have never looked back,” she says.
But while it was a stroke of luck and curiosity that steered Julie down the shipping industry path, it was nothing but determination, hard work and pas-sion that took her from being the “new kid on the block” as runner to the chief executive officer of Skelton Sherborne.
“I love a challenge. And what I love most about freight forwarding is that no shipment is ever the same. I am looking out the window at a back-hoe loader, or an excavator; some of them are exactly the same, but there is always something different about each shipment,” says Julie, who, despite now being CEO, still enjoys nothing more than to “roll up her sleeves” and figure out how to undertake some of the most challenging cargo projects.
“Challenges are what get me out of bed. It’s a new day, with new opportuni-ties — there are opportunities every-where you look, and that’s what makes me want to get up and come to work.”
Over the past 22 years, Julie has experienced all areas of freight for-warding. She has worked for Skelton Sherborne for 15 years, making her way up through various roles as general manager of Skelton Tomkinson, then acquisitions manager and chief operat-ing officer.
She has also been responsible for opening offices in Perth, Melbourne and Houston, as well as representative offices in Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur, and for the acquisition and integration of various transport operators around
Australia and the freight forwarding business of Sherborne ACA.
“It’s been a huge adventure,” says Julie. “I never thought, 15 years ago when I started at Skelton, that I would one day be CEO of a multinational company.”
Julie believes it is wonderful that “the industry can take you there and the opportunities are there for people,” but laments that so few people outside the industry know anything about it.
And she is still often the only woman in the room at heavy machin-ery functions, but she says “nothing has ever held me back, and certainly not being female”.
“When I first started in heavy machinery shipping, there were three girls and two guys in the office — the two guys were the managers and we girls did most of the operational work,” laughs Julie.
“The machinery guys wouldn’t talk to me in the beginning, and one guy even said, within earshot of me, ‘What would a sheila know about shipping and machines?’.” But, Julie says, “That only made me more determined. I was going to do this and I was going to do it well.”
She says she has never experienced the glass-ceiling phenomenon talked about at Skelton. “Everyone is treated the same.”
Rather, Julie thrives on learning and the thrill of the new. Reflect-ing on that first summer after school had ended, Julie says she liked the freedom of driving around delivering the documents in the days when there wasn’t electronic lodgement of custom documentation.
Julie Magnone.
“There was an advertised job that said
‘runner’ for a freight forwarder”
By Nicole Gooch
46 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Julie Magnone
“I would just be going back and forth every day between the airport and the city, delivering cargo, talking to lots of people all day, behind the counters at the shipping lines and customs, and I just really enjoyed the industry. There was something about it that I found quite exciting.”
After about six months in the job, and having by then deferred nursing, Julie returned at the end of a long day of running to be offered a position in the company’s operations section, after the previous operations person suddenly left.
“I thought I would see how I went and have some fun, so I took this job in operations, but I had to teach myself because it was a small office and the people there really didn’t know what this girl used to do.”
Julie says she came in early the next morning, sat down with one of the op-erations files and started reading it, and “pretty much taught myself her system”.
By the time Julie left, she was opera-tions manager and in need of something new. She took three months off to travel around Europe independently, and was glad she had focused on her career earlier so as not to have to join a Kontiki tour.
“I got off the beaten track, which is what I like to do, and took time to sit back and soak up the culture, people watch, and just enjoy the country.”
When she returned to Brisbane, Julie started a new job with another company, now called Mainfreight, and finally went back to uni, but this time to study management and marketing.
For nothing is ever boring in Julie’s life. “I was a little busy! I had no life — full-time work, full-time renovation of a little worker’s cottage, and part-time study.”
Julie left that position a couple of years later, frustrated by the slow pace of bureaucracy inherent in large companies.
Fast-forward 15 years, and Julie is still “running hard”, flying between her offices, cities and airports, but enjoying every minute of it.
In 2004 she flew to Houston to set up a new Skelton Sherborne office there in three days — Julie had to be home on the Saturday for a uni exam. Jetlagged, she failed the exam, the only one she has ever failed, but resat it later successfully.
“Things like that I find very excit-ing, it’s a bit of a challenge,” she says.
During her downtime, Julie says she does a “lot of nothing. I used to have hobbies, but now they are on my list of things to do for next year.”
These include picking up Spanish again, which she used to speak fluently.
“My downtime is spending time with my friends and family. I really value that time with them. They keep me sane and grounded,” says Julie. “I have a little niece and nephew with whom I spend a lot of time babysit-ting, and they are just happy to hang — they never want anything from you.
“At work it’s question after ques-tion and everyone wants a piece of your time, but when I am with them, all they want is for me to watch them doing something silly. And laughing or playing.”
Julie says she still has a lot of friends with whom she went to school who are nurses, but she doesn’t think she could do that job now.
“Looking at what they do and what I do now, it seems I fell into it and I was meant to. I believe that everything happens for a reason, and I was meant to pick up that little card and ask a question at the job office.”
“I love a challenge.
And what I love most
about freight forwarding
is that no shipment is
ever the same.”
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#13
At an age when most would be content to enjoy a well deserved retirement, at 75 Ross McAlpine is still deeply
involved in the maritime industry, work-ing from home for MSCA as its industry affairs consultant.
He regularly travels to Canberra from Sydney to take part in policy and legislation negotiations, and represents MSCA at Shipping Australia Limited (SAL) meetings. And he thoroughly enjoys it.
For Ross has worked hard all his life. His great grandfather, a fruit merchant, was the first owner of a store in Sydney’s Queen Victoria Building, and his father was a linotype operator at The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), and wanted his only child to follow in his footsteps.
So when Ross left Sydney Boys’ High School in 1952, he started at the SMH as a copy boy in the editorial department, “without even having a holiday first!”.
“The thing I remember most about my time in that job was the Queen’s first visit to Sydney. I had the job of following
Ross McAlpineIndustry Affairs Consultant
Mediterranean Shipping Company Australia (MSCA)
A lifetime’s worth of stories
47Ross McAlpine – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
By Nicole Gooch
“His great
grandfather, a fruit
merchant, was
the first owner of a
store in Sydney’s
Queen Victoria
Building, and
his father was a
linotype operator
at The Sydney
Morning Herald
(SMH).”
the journalists who were covering the visit and getting their copy back to the office. I forget how many times during her time in Sydney I saw Her Majesty,” recalls Ross with a big smile.
But when it was time to take on an apprenticeship there were no positions available in the composing room so Ross was placed in photo engraving, which he soon found he hated with a passion. He was busy complaining bitterly about it one night at dinner in front of his girlfriend’s father, when the latter, who worked for Macdon-ald Hamilton & Co, then P&O group agents, suggested Ross apply for a job with the firm.
Ross says he returned home that night to a “great argument” with his fa-ther and not long after, he resigned from the SMH and started in the overseas outward freight department as a junior clerk for MacDonald Hamilton & Co.
That was in 1954, and lots of fun, says Ross.
“One of my daily after-lunch jobs was to pick up from a certain well known hotel the day’s wool book-ing slips and take them back to the office for processing and thence to the Clearing House. I got to run around everywhere and learnt all the ins and outs and paraphernalia of the industry.”
In 1955 Ross was transferred to the publicity department, which in those days combined advertising, PR and printing. One of his roles was to run the press launch, which met every inbound P&O passenger ship just inside Sydney heads. He did this until 1960, when MH merged with Orient
Line, and advertising and PR became separate departments. Ross went into advertising.
In 1964, Ross spent a few months in the property department help-ing with the move into the new P&O building in Hunter Street. He was then appointed to the administration department looking after the managing agency for the Eastern and Australian Steam Ship Co (E&A), which operated five cargo ships in the trade between Australia and Japan, as well as the Phil-ippines, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Whilst in the department, he worked on the introduction of the pas-senger/cargo ship Aramac into the trade.
“She replaced one of the older cargo ships and carried 350 passengers. This marked the return of E&A to the passenger trade after an absence caused by the loss of the entire fleet during the Second World War,” says Ross.
“I also looked after the replace-ment of another two cargo ships by two newer and bigger vessels, and became involved with the freight conference covering the trade. It was in this department that I became closely involved in ship management issues such as scheduling, crew and marine insurance matters.”
When containerisation came to Australia E&A joined with another three companies in the formation of the Australia Japan Container Line (AJCL), and Overseas Containers Australia Pty Ltd (OCAL) was appointed commercial agents. Ross transferred to this company in 1969 and became heavily involved with the freight conference.
In 1971 the chairman of AJCL became chairman of the freight con-ference, and Ross was asked to take up a position with that organisation. He joined the Australia Northbound Shipping Conference (ANSCON) as assistant secretary, with particular re-sponsibility for the Japan/Korea trade. He subsequently became manager, responsible for arranging north-bound freight rate negotiations. Ross was with ANSCON for 19 years and travelled to Japan and Korea for rate negotiations and principals meetings, as well as making regular interstate visits.
Ross was approached in late 1989 to join MSC and establish a pas-senger division to run the Australian operation of the vessel Achille Lauro. “I started with MSCA in January 1990, and immediately travelled to Fremantle to join the ship for passage back to Syd-ney and then a Pacific Islands cruise,” says Ross, his head still full of happy memories and anecdotes of those days. “I had some wonderful times, and worked with wonderful people.”
In 1992 Achille Lauro was with-drawn from Australia and Ross was appointed corporate services manager for MSCA.
“This position covered a variety of functions that I had carried out in ear-lier days, such as advertising, PR and printing, but also representation at meetings of the Australian Chamber of Shipping (subsequently absorbed within Shipping Australian Ltd), legal matters, cargo claims and for a time the carriage of passengers on the
25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Ross McAlpine48
Caption xxxxxxx
“Ross overheard
Margaret saying
that she was going
to London on the
P&O Himalaya, and
just that mention of
P&O was enough
to sow the seeds of
interest in Ross.”Ross McAlpine and his wife, Margaret.
49Ross McAlpine – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
container ships. I was also entrusted with the management of the company car fleet.”
Ross retired in 2006. “It’s been a long, interesting and challenging career,” he points out.
There were so many highlights he hates to pinpoint any in particular, but Ross does recount with particular amusement how he had once been asked to stand in for his manager at a South Africa-Australia trade meeting. He ar-rived at the venue not knowing anyone else, and dutifully dropped his business card in the ballot box as required, only to win the prize — two business class return airfares to South Africa!
Ross still remembers that night well, returning home and announcing to his wife Margaret that they were off to Af-rica. “And it was a great trip!” he laughs.
He has also been “fortunate enough whilst at MSCA to make several trips to the Pacific Islands, including the New Caledonian island of Lifou, and took a group away for a Mediterranean cruise on one of the MSC passenger ships”.
But even for Ross, who loves read-ing and history, and is passionate about the Mediterranean, there is a tipping
point, as he discovered, at which one Roman ruin just starts to look no dif-ferent from the previous one.
Ross also remembers with fond-ness his time spent at sea, training in a CMF unit. He reached the rank of Sergeant, and laughs at the recollection of some of the misfires that occurred during exercises in Jervis Bay, south of Sydney. “Thankfully there were never any injuries, except perhaps for a few dignities!”
But a more serious highlight was his work involving negotiations between the Department of Transport and the Attorney General’s Depart-ment concerning the Hamburg versus Hague-Visby rules.
And of course, Ross’s great love is his family. He and his wife Margaret were married in 1959, after they met at a youth fellowship event. Ross overheard Margaret saying that she was going to London on the P&O Himalaya, and just that mention of P&O was enough to sow the seeds of interest in Ross.
“Eventually we got married, and went on a cruise to New Zealand on one of the P&O ships. As an employee I had a special rate — it cost me £24
sterling for a first class cruise to New Zealand in 1959!” he exclaims.
Ross and Margaret, who worked with the AMP Society, had two children.
“Our daughter, Jeannette, believe it or not, started life working in PR, but then she left to go to university and graduated with honours in science. I am very proud of her,” says Ross.
“Our son, Ian, is very much the opposite sort of personality. He did an apprenticeship in sheet metal work, and even contributed to the Federa-tion memorial sculpture in Centennial Park. Then he ran his own business for a while in swimming pools and is now employed as senior technician with a commercial swimming pools busi-ness. They have contracts for all the big swimming pools around the city, and in Port Stephens.”
Margaret and Ross are also dot-ing grandparents to Iain’s 15-year-old daughter. In his spare time Ross still very much enjoys reading about history, and particularly about places he has visited.
During his travels he spent time in Beirut and Syria, and says, “It makes me very sad now to read about what is happening there”.
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50 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Ted Muttiah
From Sri Lanka’s rugby fields to Australia’s shipping world
“Management and leadership are fundamentally about how you get on with your fellow human beings, re-gardless of divergent perspectives.”
51Ted Muttiah – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
Ted MuttiahManaging Director
APL Australia
#14
Ted Muttiah.Photography by
Jim Wilson.
“The coach told us that we had to be
prepared to die.”
By Jim Wilson
He’s the first overseas born Australian to reach the position of managing director of APL Australia. But it’s not his first time
at the top. He has a long track record of achievement, including a spell as an in-ternational athlete. Ted Muttiah reveals all – including how he got the name Ted.
Playing rugby is a family and cultural tradition for Ted. Hailing originally from Sri Lanka, where rugby is seen as a “man’s game”, Ted followed in the footsteps of his uncle, who rep-resented Ceylon in the early 1960s.
Ted went one better than most sportsmen. He was selected to play for the national rugby team.
“Oh, absolutely, do I remember it! I was over the moon! It was a dream come true! I’d dreamt of it since the age of six or seven while playing in the back yard,” he exclaims.
Although national selection was a goal the young Ted had been work-ing hard to achieve for many years, he recalls that he was “quite calm” at the time it became a reality.
“I had been working so hard for so long and I had done everything that I possibly could. It was the next logical step.” And, he adds, “There was a lot of encouragement from the family.”
Describing himself as “not par-ticularly studious” and chuckling that rugby was a good “distraction from the books”, the young Ted worked hard to distinguish himself as a centre-three-quarter.
Early in 1984 he got his chance in a trial game before the selectors, and impressed them. That won him a place in an informal national side, the Presi-dent’s XV, which was pitted against visiting European teams.
“I didn’t shy away from tackling the big European players. The coach told us that we had to be ‘prepared to die’. Looking back now it seems so trivial to be told to be prepared to die
on a rugby field,” he laughs. But back then it was no laughing
matter, as there were tens of thousands of rugby mad followers in the country and the young Ted was equally mad for rugby.
But he nearly missed out on his chance. He’d suffered a twisted ankle, a broken eye socket and a serious hamstring injury, and was omitted from the national Sevens squad for the Hong Kong Sevens in 1984. Then the selection meeting was held.
“We were waiting. I had a degree of trepidation as the selectors came out of their meeting and began to read out names. I was quite calm about it…” Ted recalls.
And then they read out his name. “I’ll never forget the day they told me I’d made the squad!”
Ted went on to represent Sri Lanka at the Asia Rugby tournament
in Japan in 1984.“What a set of wonderful memo-
ries. It was a beautiful time. Just focused on sport — a very simple life! That was what was available to me, to be the best that I could be.”
“I don’t play now,” he says, but adds, “I still watch passionately!” Ted also describes himself as a “long-suffering” supporter of the Wallabies.
Sadly, this idyllic time was not to last. Sri Lanka began to experience civil
unrest, which later developed into an insurgency and then into a full-scale, 25-year long civil war, until 2009. He prefers not to dwell too much on those sad times. Instead, he recounts how those developments led him to Australia.
Ted’s father boldly decided in 1983 that it was time to move on. The op-tions were Australia, Canada and the UK; it was the land down under that was chosen.
Ted Muttiah and his family celebrating his MBA in 2001.
52 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Ted Muttiah
“I don’t know why. And, given our background, we never questioned the decisions of our elders,” Ted laughs. “Regardless, Australia is home now and continues to provide an enriching quality of life.”
Ted effectively fell into the ship-ping industry. Upon leaving school, a job was available as a management trainee at Mackinnon Mackenzie Ship-ping as agents for OCAL. It paid wages and the company was keen to have quality sportsmen among its number.
So the family left Sri Lanka in 1983 and Ted, playing his rugby, left a year later.
“It was sad, quite a difficult thing to do,” he says. “Most of my friends were in Sri Lanka. It took me a good 18 to 24 months to adjust.”
But assimilation was easier for Ted than most of his family, because of the sports and because of the shipping industry.
He effectively walked right into a job with P&O. “It was a bit of a god-send, really, as they hired me over the New Year break,” he says.
Apart from giving him a wage, keeping him busy and introducing him to the Aussie way of life, he made several lifelong friends then. Taking up competitive cricket further enhanced rapid integration in the new country. The job also gave him the name he is now commonly known by — Ted.
The interviewer was quite im-pressed with the young Ted but, back in the early 1980s Australia wasn’t quite so internationally savvy. The in-terviewer wanted to offer Ted the job, but there was a problem.
Ted’s first name is Hiran, but the interviewer thought that Hiran would prove confusing on the phone and difficult for the locals to spell, espe-cially as Ted’s accent was much more pronounced then than it is now.
“So,” Ted says, “the interviewer asked if I would be willing to go by my middle name, Edward, and of course I agreed. But then he said, ‘You can’t be Edward as we’ve already got an Edward!’ So he asked me if I would go by the name Ted (being short for Edward), and I said, ‘You can call me what you like, please just give me the job’, and that’s how I got my name,” he laughs.
And that provided a few days of comedy in his first job in Australia as, of course, he didn’t associate the name Ted with himself. “It took some getting used to,” he chuckles.
But today it’s a different story. “If anyone were to call me Hiran outside the family circle I probably wouldn’t recognise it immediately as my name,” he jokes.
Skipping forward several years, and after various frontline leadership posi-tions in customer service, operations and commercial with OCAL, P&O Containers, P&O Swires and P&O Blue Star, Ted took on the challenge of academia. He studied part-time for qualifications in commercial shipping, and in 2001, for a Master of Business Administration. He was presented with the Australian Institute of Manage-ment’s award for most outstanding student.
Between 1994 and 1995 he also took on a more challenging role in Sydney.
“I was totally out of my depth, well away from my comfort zone,” he chuckles, adding that he’d never been responsible for profit and loss to that point. And now he was working with senior people, planning and engaging in forward thinking.
“It really tested my resolve,” he says. It was tough as his wife, Sonalie,
had just given birth to their daughter, Anique, he was in Sydney and his fam-ily was in Melbourne. They eventually joined him in Sydney.
Ted was later retrenched, which gave him time to finish his MBA.
“It resonated with me. I enjoyed the strategic thinking, the contingency plans, and it was particularly satisfying after learning how much I really didn’t know about business,” he says.
And, from there, the combination of experience and academic qualifica-tions has led to a meteoric rise.
He joined APL in Victoria in 2001, later becoming a regional sales director in Indonesia in 2003.
“I went from one sailing a week to 15 sailings a week! There were seven times as many teu and many more customers!” he laughs.
It was decided by Sonalie and Ted that they would not disrupt their daughter’s education nor Sonalie’s
career in banking and management, which was going very well.
“So I moved on my own,” says Ted. After Indonesia, he worked as man-
aging director for APL in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, then in Egypt. He orches-trated the establishment of APL’s offices in Bahrain and Egypt, and also launched Egyptlinx, the first fixed day container rail shuttle from the port of Sokhna.
“It was a journey of discovery,” he says of his time abroad. As a mentor panel member of the Chartered Insti-tute of Logistics and Transport, he is now passionate about imparting the ac-cumulated experiences towards inspir-ing emerging leaders in the industry.
In 2011, as APL’s managing director, he came back to Australia to be with his family, especially as his daughter was studying for her VCE.
“APL has been a very supportive employer, recognising the challenges of satellite families many miles apart in incompatible time zones,” he reflects. “And of course, none of this would have been possible without the solid back-ing of my wife Sonalie and daughter Anique,” he says with gratitude.
Summing up his career to date, Ted muses on the nature of management.
“In life’s journey, you have to be resilient and flexible to adapt to what is around you. Management and leader-ship are fundamentally about how you get on with your fellow human beings, regardless of divergent perspectives.”
It was a beautiful time. Just focused on
sport — a very simple life.
Ted Muttiah as a young rugby player.
53Paul Nicholson – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
PaulNicholsonRetired as
NSW Sales Manager
Seaway Agencies
An adventurous Noddy policeman#15
Paul Nicholson, 69, started his working life at the age of 15 in London, when he left school and joined the British Post Office (GPO).
“In our family, it was a tradition to either join the post office or the police,” laughs Paul, who has lost nothing of his English accent. It was boring, he says, but at least he learnt to add up — every morning counter clerks had to practise their sums by randomly opening the phone book and adding the numbers.
Still, it was not long before Paul transferred to the Metropolitan Police. Nicko, as he is best known, was assigned to the Westminster Buckingham police, where he became one of the first to ride the famous “Noddy Bikes”.
It was a great learning experience, says Paul, and it was at that time too that he experienced his first encounter with a strange species — Australians. “We used to laugh at them as even in winter they would be walking around London in shorts!” recalls Paul.
But little did he know. He’d been in the police force for over two-and-a-half years when, on a miserable winter’s day, while risking his life directing traffic in the midst of a bitter snowfall, Paul de-cided it was time to move on to warmer shores. He could have transferred to Bermuda, Rhodesia or South Africa, but it so happens that by then Paul was dating a member of that weird and wonderful species — an Australian, and so he ended up in Geelong.
In the port city of Victoria, Paul was offered a job in the police force, but the general lack of respect for police there prompted him to move on quickly to a number of jobs, one of which included working as a “brake grinder” for Ford.
“I was the only English speak-ing person on the line — all the other workers were from Eastern European countries,” he quips.
After his relationship ended, Paul moved to Sydney, where he first worked
“The industry changes every day. There is never time to get bored, and it has huge scope.”
54 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Paul Nicholson
as a security officer for Securitor. But that involved too much night work, so he eventually got a job as a sales and inventory clerk with British Tube Mills/Metal Manufactures.
Paul’s list of ongoing adventures, undertaken in the space of about a year since arriving in Australia as a ten-pound tourist, is endless. Eventually, however, he flew to New Zealand for a friend’s wedding, and he liked the place so much he decided to stay.
Paul is not afraid of hard work, nor is he lacking in a sense of humour. In the Land of the Long White Cloud, he first worked as a fruit picker, then as a forklift driver at Watties, albeit “not a very good one”, so he was moved to the food pro-cessing line. Highlights of that time in-cluded being a “chute controller” on the peach line and a frozen pea smasher — a delicate task undertaken with the aid of a stainless steel hammer. Paul made it to the top of the food chain at Watties and was offered a “senior position on the spaghetti line”, but he decided it was time again “to move on”.
It was then that Paul started work in the freight industry. He became the siding manager for Caulfreights, and as such consolidated rail trucks from the North Island to the South Island.
“The position gave me a good in-sight into the transport industry, includ-ing all the rorts that went on, with lurks and dodgy perks, and how casual it was,” he says. For an ex-copper, that was a bit difficult to take at times, yet Paul says he enjoyed the atmosphere of the cargo transport world.
But after nine months, Paul returned to Australia. By then he had been away from the UK for just over two years.
“I thought I could join a shipping company to get a cheap ticket back home,” he laughs. And he did get a job as
a claims clerk with the Royal Intero-cean Lines, but he enjoyed it so much he never did return to London. It was the start of a long love affair with the maritime industry.
“As claims clerk I learnt a lot about the legal aspect of the maritime industry, and it was like an oyster opening, and literally stepping into another world.”
When Nedlloyd, Hapag, Mes-sageries Maritime and Lloyd Tristino merged into Seabridge, Paul moved to the new agency too. There he worked in all manner of positions, first as a wharf clerk, then inward freight manager, sales executive and finally, as national market-ing coordinator.
Paul still remembers the excitement caused by the arrival of the first Hapag Lloyd container ship in Sydney’s White Bay, of which he had the best view as wharf clerk. But he also remembers with great fondness the wonderful stories of “adventure, mystery and romance” that circulated among the “characters” on the wharf. Of ships coming in with crew held at gunpoint, or of a rum store owner in Circular Quay who’d upset a couple of his storemen so they loaded his Rolls Royce onto a cargo ship — the car toured the Pacific Islands while its frantic owner spent weeks looking for it in Sydney.
“Ships used to come in for a week, we would get to know the crew, the Mas-ter was king and it was a very different world to what it is now. Not necessarily a better world, but more of a fantasy, adventurous world,” says Paul.
Paul, married with two children
by now, was then offered a position in Germany to work with Hapag Lloyd as group leader in marketing for its Australia/New Zealand Department in Hamburg, then to the UK to establish a container depot on a greenfield site in Barking for the Hapag subsidiary, DCD.
After that, Paul was appointed sales executive, then NSW branch manager for Unimodal, and was again posted to the UK as general manager of Uniomodal UK, before returning to Australia as national Flexitank manager. When Flexitank was sold, he joined Herman Ludwig as export and project manager, followed by sales manager for Whilmesen, director for Seaport Ship-ping, and eventually NSW sales manager for Seaway Agencies, with whom he has been for the past ten years.
“It’s been wonderful and fulfilling,” says Paul. “The industry changes every day. There is never time to get bored, and it has huge scope.”
Paul says his highlights of the industry include the fact that “deals are still done over a handshake or a phone call”, and that “trust doesn’t get broken”. Likewise, he has made friends all over the world that he knows he will keep for life.
“I was eight before I saw the sea, and had I stayed in London, the only port I would have ever seen would have been Brighton,” reminisces Paul, whose sister still lives 15 miles away from his old home.
“Instead, I have enjoyed meeting and helping people from all parts of the world, and trying to understand the way
“I thought I could join a shipping company
to get a cheap ticket back home.”
Paul Nicholson as a proud Noddy.
55Paul Nicholson – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
different people live and work,” he says. “I think travel teaches you a lot
about tolerance and humanity. I hate to see anyone being put down, and I would never ask someone to do what I am not prepared to do myself.”
Paul’s only caution regarding the maritime industry is that it is “so easy to be sucked into it because it is such an interesting industry, and there are a lot of divorces as a result”.
As such, Paul says he tried as much as possible to be there for his family.
“Work has been my passion, my family has been my guilt. So instead of finding a hobby outside of work, I tried to put time back into my family.”
Paul promised his wife he’d retire by the time he reached 70, so this is his last year in the maritime industry. He and Sue were married in Sydney, having been engaged once previously in London
before Paul first came to Australia. They have a daughter and a son, and are now busy looking after their three grandchil-dren, who live with them.
Paul wears a large wedding ring with a buffalo engraved on it — not exactly the conventional ring one would expect. He agrees and laughs.
“My mother used to have a charm bracelet, with a licorne on it, and not long after my wedding ring was stolen, I was in the USA on holidays and I saw a buffalo in a wildlife park. It was mag-nificent, so I decided I would wear a ring with a buffalo.”
Paul looked everywhere for such a ring, until he asked a designer at Pad-dington Markets in Sydney to make one for him. He has worn it every day since.
And recently, his son gave him a $100 gift voucher for a tattoo for his birthday. “I had always wanted one as a
child,” he says, “but I had to promise my son that I wouldn’t tell his mother the tattoo was his gift!”
And so Paul the adventurer now happily sports a tattoo of a buffalo on his right shoulder too, just as he sets off, albeit a little begrudgingly, to enjoy his retirement.
“I have enjoyed meeting and helping
people from all parts of the world, and
trying to understand the way different
people live and work.”
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Paul Nicholson, his wife Sue and two of their grandchildren.
Local Experts in Global Shipping
• 15 offices across Australia & New Zealand • Logistics & Transport Management • Sea, Air, Road & Rail • Shipping Agency
Contact: Seaway (Shipping Agency & Logistics)Email: [email protected] Tel: +61 (0)3 9014 8100 Web: www.seaway.com.au
56 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Dr Terry O’Brien
“The DUKC system mathematically predicts the under-keel clearance (UKC) for large ships moving in and out of ports and through shallow waterways.”
The art of mixing the scholar and entrepreneur
57Dr Terry O’Brien – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
#16
Terry O’Brien.
Dr Terry O’Brien OAMFounder and Executive Director
OMC International
A phone call from the British Phosphate Commissioners was all it took. Next thing he knew, Terry O’Brien,
who’d grown up on his family farm in Victoria and gone on to become a successful young engineering scholar at Melbourne University, was flying to the isolated island of Nauru. It was 1965, at the height of the phosphate boom in Nauru and on Christmas Island, and the Commissioners needed help to design deep-sea moorings at these islands for large ships. Each mooring system comprised a number of interconnected cables, with offshore anchors located in water depths of up to 600 metres, which, at that time, were the deepest in the world.
Terry had just recently under-taken a PhD on cable structures for suspension bridges, which he com-pleted on a Reserve Bank scholarship at Imperial College in London. He had returned to a lecturing position at Melbourne University when he received that phone call.
He went on to pursue a 22-year career at the university, winning nu-merous awards and scholarships along the way for his academic achieve-ments, but his greatest achievement is the creation of software navigation technology DUKC, which stems from that initial trip to the phosphate rich islands of the Pacific.
For his experience on the rugged shores of Nauru spiked his curios-ity and, back in the learned halls of the civil engineering department at Melbourne University, Terry became increasingly intrigued by waves, cur-rents and the motions of ships. He eventually developed an innovative numerical Simulation Package for the Motion of Ships (SPMS) and, demon-
strating a rare entrepreneurial drive in the world of academia, Terry then left the university in 1987 to establish his own maritime engineering business, OMC International.
He had realised there was a niche market up for grabs, and set about developing a working system for commercial shipping based on his ship motion model. DUKC is the product of that research. Now installed in major Australian ports, in New Zealand and in Europe, the DUKC system mathematically predicts the under-keel clearance (UKC) for large ships moving in and out of ports and through shallow waterways. As such, it allows for safe passage for large vessels and, in most cases, for them to load more cargo and sail with wider tidal windows.
Terry says “developing the DUKC system and getting it into most of the largest Australian ports, and now Torres Strait and other international waters, is the highlight of my career”.
But that achievement also “comes with the great satisfaction of provid-ing work and mentorship for the young engineering graduates who work on DUKC”.
It has opened up opportunities in a new area which wouldn’t have been available before, and that is one of the greatest aspects of the whole expedi-
tion for me,” says Terry.OMC International began in Ter-
ry’s own family home and is still very much a family affair, with his son Peter at the helm as CEO, although it now has its headquarters in the Melbourne suburb of Abbotsford and employs more than 35 engineering graduates.
Terry doesn’t have as much of a “daily hands on” approach in the busi-ness any more, but says he is excited by the next challenges in the ongoing de-velopment of the system, and loves the way “the young researchers have taken it on and developed it to where it is”.
“It still has some distance to go yet in terms of its potential applications, but we hope we will achieve these over the next couple of years, and they will be the icing on the cake.”
In 2010, Terry was awarded an Order of Australia Medal (OAM) for his services to the maritime transport industry. Yet Terry grew up a world away from the maritime world.
“Some of my associates over the years have had fathers who were harbourmasters or ship captains. It’s been in their blood and their home en-vironment, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth in my case.”
Terry says he “just enjoys the challenge of the ocean — a lot of the work that we have done hadn’t been done before. The developments were
He had realised there was a niche
market up for grabs and set about
developing a working system for
commercial shipping based on his ship
motion model.
By Nicole Gooch
58 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Dr Terry O’Brien
“I am very appreciative of the support
I have had from the maritime industry
during the development of our
technology, and I am sure that award
wouldn’t have been possible without
that support.”
new, the opportunities that go with those developments were new, and the progress we have made, the acceptance of the work and its use — all of these contributed to my growing interest in the whole industry.”
As a young boy, Terry says he didn’t even know about engineering, and it is not until he went to boarding school in Ballarat as a teenager that he became aware of that possibility, and from then on was attracted to civil engineering.
“I had no association on the farm to shipping; it is something that evolved over time, it was an evolu-tion — opportunities open up and you go down those paths,” says Terry. “You don’t really foresee where you are going to finish. If you have the basic education to understand the opportu-nities, then you are in a good position to be able to follow whatever comes up in life.”
On a typical balmy evening in Darwin, Terry and his wife Pauline headed to the outdoor “deckchair cin-ema” whilst there on a recent business trip. The film they watched was The Boy Mir, about a poor boy’s progress towards manhood in Afghanistan.
Terry says the film suddenly “brought it all back” to him — a reminder of the importance of educa-tion to development and to providing children in poor environments or in the country with opportunities. He says growing up on the farm was a good experience, but he was lucky to be able to go to boarding school for his secondary education. “Without that education I could not have got into academia.”
It is also at Melbourne University that Terry met Pauline. Terry was a postgraduate student at the time, Paul-ine was studying for an Arts degree. Immediately following their marriage they left for Imperial College London on the P&O liner SS Canberra disem-barking at Naples to spend two weeks in Austria, learning to ski.
Soon enough their first child was born and when the sixth arrived, Terry says, “Pauline sacrificed her PhD on Multiple Birth Children and her own
career in Educational Psychology to provide the family nurturing role throughout the children’s developmen-tal years, and I got on with the career side of things. We pretty much worked as a team.”
Later, Pauline was also involved in setting up OMC International, putting to good use her psychology skills dur-ing negotiations and in marketing the business.
All the children have grown up to be successful in their own right. Three are physicians, one is a barrister, one an engineer and their only daughter, a neuropsychologist.
“They have all done us proud not only in their careers but in nurtur-ing their own families,” says Terry. “It is always a great thing for parents, as they get older, to be able to see the young ones take full advantage of the opportunities offered them. It is very satisfying.”
But while they have all outshone him on the ski fields, Terry’s com-petitive spirit has not let any of his children beat him in a golf round. And when it comes to bowling to his five sons they still cannot pick his “leggie” from his “googly”.
Asked if he has ever missed aca-demia, Terry admits to not thinking about it much. “It was part of my ear-lier life, I have fond memories of it, but the challenges that have come from private enterprise have probably been much greater, and they’ve absorbed all my attention so I haven’t looked backwards over the years.”
But now that he has a little more free time, Terry says he would like to rejuvenate those links with the uni-versity, “if anything because it creates career paths for more young engineers, which we will need”.
Terry laughs when he says the “maritime industry is certainly dif-ferent to academia”. Yet he says the “people involved in it are very down to earth, practical people and they are solving everyday problems that the general public are not aware of. And it is problem solving — that is what engineering is all about.
“So I guess our training in en-gineering is a good fit. Although we don’t spend months on board ships at sea, it is still good training to solve the practical problems associated with ports and harbours, as well as making maritime engineering more efficient and safe.”
Terry says the Order of Australia Medal was “obviously a great honour”.
“The work was satisfying in itself, without any honour, but the honour is obviously a great recognition and I am very appreciative of the support I have had from the maritime indus-try during the development of our technology, and I am sure that award wouldn’t have been possible without that support.”
Terry now works with PIANC, the World Association for Waterborne Transport Infrastructure, and IALA, the International Association of Ma-rine Aids to Navigation and Light-house Authorities, to help develop new industry guidelines and standards for ship navigation and channel design.
And, in 2009, completing the cir-cle, Terry returned to Christmas Island to monitor the laying of a new single-point mooring system he designed for cruise ships such as the Pacific Sun, which used the mooring for the first time in December that same year.
As he says, he is “never short of a challenge. There is always something new.”
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60 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Llew Russell
Bushwalking, gardening and Part X
“In September 1971 I took across the second reading speech for an amendment to Part Ten (Part X) of the Trade Practices Act to Doug Anthony, then the Minister for Trade and Industry.”
61Llew Russell – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
#17
Llew Russell and his wife Lorraine.
Llew Russell.
Llew RussellChief Executive Officer
Shipping Australia Limited
“It’s time.”
That’s the reason 65 year-old Llew Russell says he is retiring from his role as chief executive at Ship-
ping Australia in January 2013.Llew is sure he’ll remain involved
with Australia’s shipping industry in some shape or form in his retirement. But he’s looking forward to having more time to spend with his wife of 34 years, Lorraine, and with their four adult children, Nicole, Fiona, Bruce and Lucinda, as well as their seven grandchildren.
He says he’ll also be happy to have more time to enjoy doing the other things he loves, like fishing, reading, garden-ing and bushwalking. And, many would agree, Llew has earned his free time.
For years he has worked with an incredible number of advisory boards, committees and panels, all paramount to the success of Australia’s shipping and maritime industry. They include the advisory committee to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, the advisory board of the Australian Maritime Col-lege, and various consultative industry groups focused on security, biosecurity, border protection and logistics.
Most recently, he’s made his mark as CEO of Australian shipping’s peak representative body, Shipping Austral-ia Limited.
“I’ve been sitting behind that desk for 31 years,” he chuckles, gesturing to a heavy wooden office desk behind him in his Sussex Street office in Sydney.
The desk hasn’t been at Sussex Street for three decades, though. In fact the desk, and the bookshelves beside it, have followed Llew since he bought them to occupy his office at the Australia to Europe Shipping Confer-ence in 1981. Llew joined the Australia to Europe Shipping Conference as assistant director. He was 34, and it was his first leadership position.
Llew was born in 1946 and, after
growing up in Brisbane, he earned a Bachelor of Economics degree from the University of Queensland.
“It was the only university in the whole of the state,” Llew explains. “I was subsequently appointed to the public service, after I went for a couple of jobs.”
In 1969, Llew got a job at the Commonwealth Public Service in Canberra, and was appointed as an administration trainee.
“In my admin trainee year I remember reading in the newspaper about containerisation, and it fascinated
me then,” he says. “We used to give presentations to the group, and I gave a presentation on containerisation.”
Llew isn’t sure how that presenta-tion was received, but he thinks he “did alright”.
During his time as a trainee, Llew worked rotations in three depart-ments — Trade and Industry, Treasury, and Prime Minister and Cabinet. In 1970 he was assigned full-time to the livestock and animals section of the Treasury department.
“I never liked Treasury,” he says,
“In my admin trainee year I remember
reading in the newspaper about
containerisation, and it fascinated
me then,” he says. “We used to give
presentations to the group, and I gave a
presentation on containerisation.”
By Oliver Probert
62 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Llew Russell
however. “Very negative in their ap-proach. They’d always find a thousand reasons why something couldn’t be done, but I never found anyone in Treasury who could find me an answer for why something could be done.”
He was given a reprieve when, half-way through 1970, he was promoted to work in the Department of Trade and Industry, where at various times he took on policy and finance roles.
Llew speaks highly of a man he worked for then for six months, Sir John “Blackjack” McEwen.
“He was an amazing man,” Llew recalls. “He led the re-engagement with Japan after the war. Australia was the first country with a trade agreement with Japan, in 1957. He was a very powerful minister.”
After three years there Llew moved to the Department of Transport’s Liner Branch, and eventually became an act-ing assistant secretary.
While with the Department of Transport, Llew attended international meetings and led a number of Australi-an delegations to meetings dealing with regional shipping in the South Pacific, as well as meetings of the OECD Mari-time Transport Committee, and various United Nations committees.
After eight years with the Depart-ment of Transport, Llew moved to the Australia to Europe Shipping Confer-ence, where he bought the bookshelves and desk that still sit in his office today, 31 years later.
Since then, Llew has represented stakeholders in the Australian ship-ping industry as a key member of its peak representative bodies. Firstly, he was associate director of the Australia to Europe Shipping Conference for two years, then in 1983 he became the
Australian executive director.In December 1986 he became
general manager of Shipping Confer-ences Services. In 1994 Llew’s job title was changed to chief executive officer, and the company’s name was changed to Liner Shipping Services Ltd.
In 2001 Liner Shipping Services merged with the Australian Chamber of Shipping, and Llew became the CEO of the resulting representative body, Ship-ping Australia.
Today, Shipping Australia repre-sents members involved in the majority of Australia’s container, bulk, break bulk and car trades, as well as much of its cruising industry.
The last 41 years of Llew’s career have been dedicated to the successful continuation of the industry.
“In 1971 I was promoted to the exports transportation branch of the department,” he says. “I was starting to move up, and that’s when I first got involved with shipping.”
“Max Moore-Wilton, a Section Head at the time but later to become Head of the Prime Minister’s Depart-ment, was on the interviewing panel.”
“In September 1971 I took across the second reading speech for an amend-ment to Part Ten (Part X) of the Trade Practices Act to Doug Anthony, then the Minister for Trade and Industry.”
The amendment would create the Australian Shippers Council, which would negotiate with the shipping lines on all matters relating to international liner shipping.
“That’s when I first became ac-quainted with Part Ten (Part X), and I haven’t been able to get rid of it ever since!” Llew laughs.
He is, of course, being sarcastic. Since 1971, Llew has on many oc-
casions successfully defended that amendment, which makes ship owners and shipping lines exempt from several aspects of the Trade Practices Act, in the interests of efficiency, safety and market stability.
“Part X has never been favoured by the ACCC,” he explains, referring to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the body which ensures compliance with the Trade Practices Act.
“I’ve defended it so many times. I’ve been before senate committees, explaining why groups of ship owners should have special exemption from our competition policy,” he says.
Looking back, Llew sees the contin-ued preservation of Part X as the true highlight of his career.
“One of the biggest successes of a career like this is when you’ve argued a position on an issue, and something has changed as a result of your argument,” Llew reflects. Part X, he says, is a great example of that for him.
“That kind of exemption is very im-portant. I’ve been through five reviews, and we’ve still got it. Everyone thought it was going to go, and it’s still here, so that’s been a success.”
But regardless of that success, Llew says his family is the greatest part of his life.
“Family life is very important,” he says. “Having children and having grandchildren are two of the great delights in life.” Llew says he looks for-ward to enjoying his family much more often in his retirement.
But what of his old desk and book-shelf?
“They can stay here as a reminder!” he laughs. “Although someone might throw it all out!”
“That’s when I first
became acquainted
with Part Ten (Part
X), and I haven’t
been able to get rid
of it ever since!”
Llew Russell with Anthony Albanese MP at the Shipping Australia Parliamentary Lunch.
63Iain Sharples – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
Iain SharplesSenior Underwriter for Australasia
Thomas Miller
#18
Iain Sharples, 37, grew up not far from London, near the mouth of the river Thames and, like many people in the maritime industry, he just “fell into it”.
As senior underwriter for Thomas Miller, Iain is responsible for servic-ing brokers and members in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. He plans and oversees the underwrit-ing approach in the region, and travels regularly to most of the major cities throughout Australasia.
In 1995 he was halfway through a degree in environmental studies in Lon-don when he dropped out, as the course was more focused on agriculture than he had expected. He planned to resume his studies in another field the following year, and his father suggested that in the meantime he should get some experi-ence working in an office in the city.
Aged 19, Iain fronted up at a recruitment agency and the first job he applied for was to work with Thomas Miller, manager of the UK P&I Club and TT Club.
“All I did at first was the photocopy-ing and faxing, but I became interested in what was going on around me and, all of a sudden, I was in the thick of bills of lading and the Hague-Visby Rules,” he recalls.
Iain rapidly climbed the ranks to become the claims executive for mem-bers of the UK P&I Club in the Asia Pacific region in 1996.
Two years later, Iain extended a va-cation in Sydney and spent a week work-ing in the Thomas Miller office, at the end of which the office manager offered him a job. A year later the job became a reality so, then aged 23, he left London for Sydney on a two-year secondment.
“I am quite cautious. I guess that is where the insurance side of things comes in, and I used to be quite a
home-body growing up, so I don’t think any of my friends would have picked me as the most likely person among us to make such a move. In fact, even after I told them of my plans, I think some didn’t really believe me.”
“And now that I look back on it, that transfer was quite a big achieve-ment, but when you are 23 you don’t really think of those things, and you feel much older than you really are!”
Upon arriving in Sydney, Iain was involved in the TT Club, a provider of insurance for the international freight industry, handling claims on behalf of transport operators, port authorities and cargo handling facilities.
“The insurance industry has many ways to assist businesses mitigate the risks they encounter in the increasingly delicate global supply chain,” he com-ments, “and this time was a fascinating insight for me.”
The initial two years were extended to a third, during which Iain met his future Australian wife, Jenny. They now have two daughters, seven-year-old Fern and two-year-old Avery, and the family lives in Narrabeen on Sydney’s northern beaches.
Iain holds an Advanced Diploma in Insurance from the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII) in London, which he studied for via a correspond-ence course, and he is now planning to obtain a Fellowship.
A watershed moment in Iain’s career so far was the “sink or swim” two years he endured from 2005. Having just been transferred from claims to underwriting, his new manager left unexpectedly and Iain was asked to step in for him, “to give it a go and just see how it went”.
“It was extremely hard work and very stressful, but I am glad that I did it as it gave me a really good base and, looking back on that period now, I feel a great sense of achievement and of hav-ing proved something to myself,” he says.
Iain is now a director of Thomas Miller and a Senior Associate of the Australian and New Zealand Institute of Insurance and Finance (ANZIIF).
In his current role, Iain looks after 130 members and their brokers in Australasia, ranging from logistics companies, to Port Authorities and international cargo handling facilities.
His commitment to marine insur-ance has been seasoned over 17 years now. “I don’t think there are many classes in insurance that are nearly as exciting as marine,” he says. “It’s an area where one needs to be able to adapt and think outside the standard way of doing things, because it is an industry which changes a lot, especially on the logistics side, so you’ve got to be able to work with the brokers and their clients to find a way of insuring the new things they are doing.”
Iain Sharples. Photography by Nicole Gooch.
“I don’t think there are many classes in
insurance that are nearly as
exciting as marine.”
By Nicole Gooch
64 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Iain Sharples
Helping the wheels turn
“But insurance itself is about help-ing the wheels turn. Because at the end of the day, the world wouldn’t work without shipping, which I think a lot of people don’t realise, unless they are in shipping. I certainly didn’t. And without insurance, nobody will finance any-thing. It gives me a lot of satisfaction to think that, at the end of a particular deal, we were actually able to make a difference there.”
The environmental studies in which he was once enrolled are still on Iain’s mind. “From a personal point of view, I try to make sure I am not over-consuming, and I follow quite closely what is happening in Australia
Iain Sharples with his wife
Jenny and two daughters, Fern
and Avery.
“All I did at first was the photocopying and faxing, but I became interested in what was going on around me and, all of a sudden, I was in the thick of bills of lading and the Hague-Visby Rules.”
65Iain Sharples – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
in terms of wind and solar energy. It’s very interesting.”
Gardening is a childhood passion that persists, which Iain now shares with his daughters, as they attempt “more or less successfully” to grow a vegetable and herb garden on the veranda of their home.
Iain also grew up playing rugby from the age of seven, but he had to give it up recently.
“Shortly before coming to Australia, I dislocated my shoulder snowboarding and snapped the ligaments, but when I arrived in Sydney I thought joining a rugby club would be a great way to meet people.
“However, on the first trial match, I broke my wedding ring finger, just before getting married. My wife was not impressed – it was nearly impossible to find a wedding ring that would fit on my swollen finger!”
The second time Iain played in Australia he was tackled by a front row
forward and “smashed into the ground”. It was the beginning of summer and the ground was as hard as concrete. This time Iain dislocated both his shoulders.
“I haven’t played since then. I like golf and play a lot of it when I have time, and I play five-a-side football. It’s not quite the same because it hasn’t got that contact which rugby has, which used to get a lot of the frustration of the week out of the system.”
He has tried to become more involved in mountain bike riding, but at the moment his weekends are now largely devoted to his family. “I just tell myself that in 10 or 12 years’ time, both my daughters will probably be trying to get away from me, so I will have a bit of time on my hands then.”
And although Iain says that Aus-tralia is now home, he admits to “still not being able to fully support the Wal-labies yet”. “If they are playing England, I will still support England, whereas my daughters and wife are obviously strong
Wallabies supporters!”There is a quiet, contemplative na-
ture about Iain. It’s the part of him that enjoys gardening for its creativity and sense of achievement, and for allow-ing him and the girls to “just watch life happen”. It is also the part of him that says, looking back on his life, he has no regrets but can see “definite forks”.
“I would be sad not to have expe-rienced the life I have lived so far, but I am also curious just to see where those other forks would have gone. For instance, had I not dropped out of university, or come to Sydney.”
“Part of me would like to just get my own farmland and be self-sufficient, but that might be best left as a retire-ment project. We will see.”
For the time being, Iain relishes his job of creating risk mitigation products and services that are so vital for insur-ance professionals, and tackling the far reaching consequences of disruption to the global supply chain.
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66
25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Kent Stewart
Working with your hands and mind
“Not a day goes by when there is not something new to pick up, to learn. There is new technology coming out from the industry all the time.”
67Kent Stewart – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
#19
Kent Stewart and his family on holidays in Canada.
Kent Stewart.
Kent StewartFounder and Executive Director
Maritime Engineers
Mathematics may tell us that Kent Stewart is 62 years old, but his sense of wonder-ment and fun could
easily lead us to believe otherwise. “If it ever starts getting dull I will
pull the pin, but there is no sign of that in the near future. It’s a lot of fun,” says Kent of his role as the successful execu-tive director and principal surveyor of Maritime Engineers, a company he cre-ated from scratch in 1994 in Fremantle with his wife, and which now employs over 30 staff.
Just 18 months ago, Kent sold the company to James Fisher and Sons, who kept him on with the mandate to grow the business further, find new markets and train new staff.
“It’s been very exciting,” says Kent. “I had built up the business to a stage where we couldn’t go any further with-out investing a lot more money into it, and the sale gave me the vehicle to do that.”
Kent admits it had been “a bit of an adventure to start Maritime Engi-neers on my own”, and he and his wife “toughed it out” for the first couple of years, but soon enough they were able to take on extra help, including Andrew Marsh, who is now general manager.
And a year to the day Kent sold Maritime Engineers he opened its new office in Singapore. “It has been a big thrill to see my company continue to grow, and be able to share those skills and experience with the next genera-tion,” says Kent.
“Knowing that Maritime Engineers as a company will go on long after I am gone, and it still remains faithful to the company that I started, is probably the biggest highlight of my career.”
Kent’s adventure actually started back in 1950, in Newcastle, where he was born. His father was an engineer for Australian National Line (ANL), and Kent grew up in a house on an
engineering works at Hexham. So, natu-rally, when the time came, Kent began work at the Dockyard, and studied mechanical engineering at Newcastle University, while also doing a trade in fitting and machining.
“You are a product of your environ-ment,” says Kent. “I just drifted into the maritime industry — it was what was around at the time.”
But he loved it, and Kent eventu-ally also joined ANL out at sea, on bulk carriers and container ships. “Fortu-nately, ANL used to have a lot of bombs that broke down so we used to spend
a lot of time in ports doing repairs,” he laughs. “I saw a little bit of the world. It was good.”
And although he says one could write a book of the stories out at sea, Kent fears most “couldn’t be repeated and are not publishable”. More seriously, “it was also a great learning experience as ANL had a big fleet with one of every kind”.
But after seven years with ANL, Kent joined Coal and Allied for two years, running up and down the east coast of Australia. “That was really interesting. We were trading up rivers,
“Knowing that Maritime Engineers as
a company will go on long after I am
gone, and it still remains faithful to the
company that I started, is probably the
biggest highlight of my career.”
By Nicole Gooch
68 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Kent Stewart
“I have been banging on about mentoring
and older hands passing on their knowledge,
because that’s what is missing in the industry.”
lugging sugar and coal out of river ports,” says Kent. “It was quite unique in the industry as we were on small ships, and we would just load off jetties on the beach or the headland — it was the type of thing that you didn’t really see anywhere else.”
Kent says he enjoyed “every bit of it”, but eventually he married and re-turned ashore to work as a surveyor for a small consulting company in Newcas-tle. Part of his work included building eight tugs for Howard Smith — the first of their kind in Australia.
“It was an exciting time as they were new designs, so we learnt a lot whilst working, but we also had great fun,” he says.
In 1984, Woodside offered Kent a position as engineer superintendent of its marine company in Western
Australia, where he built another two tugs for them. It was the early days of the industry, a great learning experi-ence, and again, Kent says he had fun all the way.
Meanwhile, soon after he and his wife Louise married, in 1981, Kent says they happily “started breeding”.
“We had three boys. We moved across the country for work quite a few times, and every time we moved to cross the country, Louise, got pregnant, so we stopped moving,” he jokes.
Indeed, Kent left Woodside to work for Adelaide Steamship Company, first in Queensland and then back in Western Australia. When Adelaide Steamship Company folded, he joined a consulting firm in Fremantle, before setting up Maritime Engineers.
“Not a day goes by when there is
not something new to pick up, to learn. There is new technology coming out from the industry all the time. It’s just amazing, and to see how the industry has changed in one’s own lifetime is astounding,” says Kent.
But his “pet project” since the early ’70s is ocean towage, on which he recently presented a paper at the Inter-national Tug and Salvage conference in Barcelona.
“I have quite an attachment for ocean towage, because it is not the type of thing that can be taught in class. It is derived from knowledge built on ex-perience. The people who are involved in it are good at it because they have spent a lot of time at it and passed it on to others.”
As such, ocean towage is a spe-cialised activity, and when Kent first
Kent Stewart during a water-ski slalom.
69Kent Stewart – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
presented a paper in Sydney at a confer-ence in the mid-1980s, he says he was “a bit of a voice in the wilderness”, so he is pleased to see that “we now have hundreds of tows going along the coast, and we have been involved in almost all of it, which is great”.
Kent’s only regret is “the general demise of the shipping industry over the years”.
“When I was at sea there were probably between 80 and 100 Austral-ian flagged ships. Now you can count them on one hand. And there were 14 major shipyards in Australia; now there are probably two.”
“It’s gone down hill, and it is sad-dening to see that, particularly in a nation surrounded by water, and with a population density based around the coast, but the reality is that we don’t re-ally have a shipping industry anymore.”
As such, says Kent, “my big push now, towards the back end of my career, is to see the knowledge of the older
guys passed onto to the younger guys so it is not lost.
“I have been banging on about mentoring and older hands passing on their knowledge, because that’s what is missing in the industry. We have closed down so many avenues, where on-the-job mentoring used to exist in shipyards. The young guys coming up haven’t got that knowledge to help them do alright.”
Kent says he is keen for young people to find an attraction in entering the industry, instead of “going off to become a celebrity chef”.
And when Kent is not working, he can usually be found down at the West-ern Australian Water Ski Park, south of Fremantle, training as a tournament skier. Four years ago, Kent won the Australian Slalom title.
“I have skied all my life and always enjoyed competing,” he says. “I used to play a lot of rugby until I was 50, then it started to get a bit harder to front up
every Saturday as I was getting older, so I had to give it away. But skiing is some-thing you can do all your life, if you stay fit.” He also does pilates to keep supple.
Kent’s three sons ski too, as does his wife, although she is more a “social skier” as she is currently busy finish-ing her PhD on the health outcomes of women who have had IVF treatment.
Louise also works part-time in the Department of Population Health at the University of Western Australia, and has had a number of papers published, one of which recently prompted Reu-ters and The Australian newspaper to publish news stories.
Kent says he is very proud of her. “Louise is smart, a lot smarter than me!” he laughs.
When asked if he would have done anything differently in his life, he says,“Absolutely not. Working with your hands and mind at the same time — you couldn’t really ask for much more than that.”
70
25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Kevin Sumption
Bringing life to our maritime stories
“In redeveloping the museum, I hope it will become a place where Australia’s maritime stories are brought to life in new and dynamic ways.”
Photograph supplied by the Australian National
Maritime Museum.
71Kevin Sumption – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
Kevin SumptionDirector
Australian National Maritime Museum
#20
Kevin Sumption grew up in a Royal Air Force family, in places as wonderful and disparate as Cyprus, the Netherlands, Wales and
South Africa. This explains not only his passion for the Boston Red Socks and the Chicago White Socks — some of the postings were to American bases — but also his love of museums and history.
“I had a very rich upbringing being exposed to a lot of cultures and archae-ology, in particular Mediterranean, and I think as a young person it had a very deep effect on me. It then seemed a nat-ural thing for me to become involved in museums and art galleries.”
Kevin was appointed director of the Australian National Maritime Museum early in 2012, after working in London for three-and-a-half years as director of Exhibitions & Programmes at the National Maritime Museum and at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, where he was responsible for the rede-velopment of the museum’s learning facilities and digital outreach services prior to the Olympic Games.
However, he and his family have been living in and out of Australia for the past 20 years. Kevin was assistant curator of immigration at the National Maritime Museum galleries in 1992, and was later associate director of Syd-ney’s Powerhouse Museum from 2001 to 2008. He is now excited to be back in Sydney at a time of much anticipated change for the maritime museum.
Armed with a new strategic plan, Kevin says the museum is set to undergo major “rejuvenation and redevelopment” over the next five years, coinciding with changes to its sur-rounding precinct of Darling Harbour and Barangaroo.
“It is a perfect opportunity for the museum to consider how it is going to engage with its new surroundings, which brings with it a lot of chal-lenges but also a lot of really exciting
opportunities,” he says. “I am very much of the philosophical view that history and museums are not places where you just look to the past, but where you also look to the future through the lenses of the past.
“So many people have lived, grown and died on our oceans, and continue to do so. But the maritime world has changed over the last 30 years, and with that change I think the public’s perception of the maritime industry and its importance, particularly here in Australia, has possibly waned. My job, and the job of the museum, is to ensure that people can understand and ap-preciate the centrality that the maritime industry and maritime commerce still play in the wellbeing of the country.”
The relationship between maritime heritage, the maritime museum and the Australian population is a particularly strong and unique one, says Kevin, and in redeveloping the museum, he hopes it will become “a place where Australia’s maritime stories are brought to life in new and dynamic ways”.
Kevin is keen to give more promi-nence to stories of Australia’s mari-time heritage, while also being able to unearth new stories, such as the recent discoveries of wrecks on the Great Barrier Reef which point to trade out of Sydney with India during the early settlement period.
Kevin originally trained as a graphic designer but, “having then been a graphic designer, and not particularly
Kevin Sumption with his wife Anne Maree, daughter Alice and son Harry on the Isle of Skye about to look for Basking Sharks.
Kevin Sumption.Photography by Royal Museums Greenwich.
“History and museums are not places
where you just look to the past, but
where you also look to the future.”
By Nicole Gooch
72 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Kevin Sumption
a good one”, and still having a great passion for the history and theory of design, he returned to study at the Uni-versity of Middlesex in London, where he undertook a specialist degree in the History of Art, Design and Film.
During that time he met his future wife, Anne Maree Payne, who was working at the London School of Economics, and they decided it would be nice to make Australia their home. Kevin subsequently lectured extensively at the University of Technology, Syd-ney (UTS), in History of Design and Theory, with an emphasis on European design, which was at the time “a very new and emerging discipline”. His expertise is in 18th and 19th century design, particularly German Bauhaus design and the British Arts and Craft Movement and, more recently, in 20th century industrial design.
One might be forgiven for wonder-ing what, if any, is the link between the mostly anti-industrial philosophy of the Arts and Craft Movement and maritime shipping history, but Kevin says he is interested in a multitude of disciplines, and has an “appetite for change”, most likely inherited from a youth spent constantly moving schools and countries.
“I don’t like staying static for too long. I look for opportunities to move in different directions and do different things,” he points out.
In fact, most of his specialisation has been as a curator of information technology and as a director of knowl-edge and information management projects. As such, Kevin has a strong interest in the use of the internet in education outreach.
“That is one of the reasons why I have taken on this job, for while we have this beautiful site here in Dar-ling Harbour, we are a national if not international museum, so most of our visitors will never come to Darling Harbour. They will use the internet to see what we do. So we need to be very clever, far sighted, and be sure that the museum can communicate prop-erly with visitors across Australia, and across the world,” he says.
And unlike any other museum that he has worked for, the Australian Na-tional Maritime Museum has a floating fleet of 13 vessels, about which Kevin is delighted.
“We are able to share our heritage in a way that brings it to life and gives people a flavour of what life might have been like on board those vessels over 200 years ago.
“The replica of the Endeavour recently circumnavigated Australia dur-ing 14 months, visiting 17 ports — not all of them major ports, many of them quite small ports — and we were able to make contact and build relationships with port communities all around Aus-tralia. Maintaining those relationships will be part of what we use new digital technology for,” says Kevin.
The Endeavour also contributed this year to a project on Lord Howe Island — the observation of the Transit of Venus.
Which leads to another passion of Kevin’s — astronomy, or to be more precise, the science of astronomy. And through that passion, he has become involved in projects like “Citizens’ Sci-ence”, which are large online projects developed by museums and focused on sharing science, be it astronomy or graphic science, with as many people around the world as possible.
One project he is particularly excit-ed about is “oldweather.org”, an online game in which players log in as sailors on Royal Navy battleships of the First World War, and then transcribe online data from thousands of old logbooks, particularly meteorological data.
“The Royal Navy was very strict about taking weather measurements up to 12 times a day. That data is then passed back to the British Meteorologi-cal Office, and their scientists crunch it to create very accurate climate models for the oceans of the world between 1914 and 1918. These historical climate models are what they use to test as-sumptions about the weather today.
“So it is a lovely way to bring to-gether maritime history, science and the environment in one project, while also getting people to learn about ships and
what happens at sea,” he explains. But of course Kevin also appreci-
ates the non-digital world, and his family’s favourite holiday is camping in Australia’s red desert. Their preferred spot lies in the Sturt Stony Desert, in the north-east of South Australia.
“Having lived in quite arid environ-ments for most of my life, I have always had a passion for the outdoors, and in particular the desert country,” says Kevin.
His wife shares that same passion, and they are both keen for their two children, aged 11 and 9, “to get out into the desert, learn about it and admire the night skies”.
“The children have great fun. They build their bonfires and have a good time without television or computer games.”
But during the past three years in Europe, a long way from the desert, the family feasted on another type of beauty, with “memberships to all the major museums and galleries in London!” laughs Kevin. If not exploring the rest of Europe, every weekend was devoted to a museum or heritage house, and it was “great fun”.
His wife is now undertaking her PhD on the Stolen Generations, having worked in equity, diversity and human rights in both Australia and the UK. “It is quite a unique study from a human rights perspective,” says Kevin, full of admiration.
Meanwhile, Kevin steals bits of time here and there to follow UK football, especially Arsenal, and watches as much sport as he can, although “at the mo-ment there is not much time for that!”.
It is a funny life, Kevin says. As a young boy his most treasured ambition was to follow in his grandfather’s and father’s footsteps, and he was deter-mined to join the Royal Air Force, but failed the eyesight test for pilots.
So instead, says Kevin, “a passion I had as a young one, having spent a lot of time growing up in art galleries and museums, has been given a chance to flourish. One passion has been replaced by another — you never know where life takes you!”
“My job, and the job of the museum, is to ensure that
people can understand and appreciate the centrality
that the maritime industry and maritime commerce
still play in the wellbeing of the country.”
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75Jeremy Tadman – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
Jeremy TadmanOperations Director
Hapag-Lloyd Australia
A life of tales and adventure#21
Jeremy Tadman, 66, grew up in England’s rolling green hills, near the village of Colwall in Herefordshire, enjoying all the charms of farm life in such
splendid surroundings. His father was a tenant farmer with a passion for wildlife, so aside from hunting and fishing, Jer-emy also grew to love bird watching.
He and his two brothers knew ex-actly where all the bird nests were, what type of bird they belonged to, and how many eggs it would lay.
“We had a ball growing up on the farm — it was a lovely life,” he recalls.
But despite such fun, Jeremy was just seven years old when he declared “pompously” to his parents, that he would be “going to sea”.
And it wouldn’t be in the Royal Navy. That wouldn’t do for young Jeremy.
“I had already worked out that in the Royal Navy, you spend most of your time in brick battle ships, and very little time at sea. And I wanted to go to sea. So I dug my heels in, and told my parents I wanted to go into the merchant navy and see the world!”
And that’s how it all started. Jeremy’s inspiration didn’t, however,
come entirely out of nowhere. “Funny thing,” he quips. “My great
uncle was Captain Harry Pennell, who was the navigator on the Terra Nova during Robert Scott’s last expedition to the Antarctic. Scott was captain when aboard, but when he wasn’t aboard, Harry was. So Harry dropped off the exploration team in Antarctica, went back to New Zealand, and then returned to pick them up, but of course, they weren’t there.”
Jeremy’s third name is Pennell, and he says he was always “absolutely intrigued by this uncle”. Captain Pennell eventually lost his life in the First World War, but his story still lingers in the background of the Tadman household.
“So I dug my heels in, and told my parents I wanted to go into the merchant navy and see the world!”
By Nicole Gooch
Photo by Nicole Gooch
76 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Jeremy Tadman
“I went to sea, finally, and enjoyed it
right from the start.” Jeremy had also always been
fascinated by a print of a painting that hung in the bedroom he shared with his brother on the farm. It was the famous Boyhood of Raleigh, depict-ing “a little boy listening avidly to this hairy, old and salty seafarer sitting on a bollard”. Of course, the little boy was in fact a young Sir Walter Raleigh, the Elizabethan poet and explorer who was instrumental in the British colonisation of North America.
Jeremy applied in 1960, at the age of 13, for a P&O scholarship and un-dertook his four-year training with the Thames Nautical Training College on HMS Worcester.
He obtained his Master’s ticket in 1973, with time spent at sea on a range of vessels, with many bold adventures in the process.
“I went to sea, finally, and enjoyed it right from the start,” says Jeremy, before adding that he was “very fortunate” to go to sea in the mid-’60s, before containerisation, but by which time pay and conditions had improved.
His first voyage was on SS Bendigo, on a voyage to Australia, which he re-peated on a number of occasions. Rac-
onteur extraordinaire that he is, Jeremy tells how the four apprentices aboard the ship, including himself, would go to the Captain and ask for an advance, and on arrival in Melbourne, the cheapest second-hand auto port, buy a car.
“It was always the first thing taken off the ship, and the last thing loaded back on, as the wharfies wanted to keep us, the apprentices, on their side,” laughs Jeremy, who, if he was off-duty, would then jump in the car and go for long drives wherever the ship stopped during its voyage of two-and-a-half months around the coast of Australia.
“We usually had a couple of days off at each port, and we drove for miles. We saw so much of Australia,” he recalls.
Having reached Queensland, the ship would turn around. “We would then sell the car in Fremantle, and we normally made a profit, which paid for petrol, so we had all this free motor-ing!” laughs Jeremy.
The young men had a “hotline to all the local hospitals”, he adds. “We would call, ask to speak to the Matron and say ‘look, the ship has docked alongside and we are having a party tonight; would the nurses come down?’”
He roars with laughter. “We won’t go too deeply into that one!”
Jeremy also went on what he called his “magical mystery tours”, especially when sailing in the Far East. “On my days off I would just hop on a train and go wherever fancy took me.”
That is how he fell in love with Japan, and its cherry blossoms. “It was just beautiful.” He pauses, philosophi-cally, and says, “It was a good life”.
But he had always promised himself that once he married he would give up going to sea, and after marrying his first wife in 1973, he joined the Townsend Cross Channel ferries. In 1974, they both moved to Australia as Pamela, an Australian, was homesick.
Jeremy Tadman and his children, Angus and Monica.
77Jeremy Tadman – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
Jeremy was expecting to start work as soon as he stepped ashore in Sydney, after previously arranging a job, but instead he arrived to find that job no longer available. So he drove a taxi for four weeks — “one of the arrogant taxi drivers who doesn’t know where A or B is” — before being offered work deliver-ing a ship from Norway to Australia.
“That is a story in itself!” laughs Jer-emy. “As my first and only ‘Command’ it was an eye-opener!”
The journey was only meant to last seven weeks but instead took nearly three months and was filled with “tri-als and tribulations”, including a fire on board, a fuel shortage, engine and electrical systems breakdowns, and the list goes on. But Jeremy did make it home in one piece, not least thanks to an operator at Perth Radio who rear-ranged his roster so his shifts coincided with the time Jeremy would radio-in as they approached land.
From 1974 to 1976, Jeremy was em-ployed by Australian Offshore Services as a mate on the supply and anchor handling boats in Bass Strait, the Great Australian Bight and the North West Shelf. Of course, there were more adventures to be had there, including a “hair-raising” helicopter ride in the middle of Cyclone Tracy, at the end of which even the pilot, a Vietnam veteran, kissed the ground.
Jeremy then worked for a couple of years as a marine surveyor, before
entering into a family partnership to build a motel in Young, in country New South Wales. There he worked as head waiter, room cleaner and breakfast chef. But in 1981 the couple divorced, and Jeremy, with just $200 to his name, returned to Sydney.
He took up a position with Burns Philp as general manager for the South West Pacific Container Line, and when it folded abruptly in 1984, he was of-fered a position in Papua New Guinea for six months with BP Agencies.
In 1985, Jeremy was appointed operations manager for Atlantraffic Express, before joining Hetherington Kingsbury as line, then operations, manager for Ocean Star Container Line. It then merged with Eagle as Container Shipping Australia, which later became CP Ships and eventually Hapag-Lloyd in 2006.
Jeremy is adamant he wouldn’t go back to sea “in a fit”, because it has changed too much. But he does miss seafaring and seamanship.
“You are at the mercy of the elements, and I miss having to assess risks and decide on the safest course of action. And the thing about marine operations is that it is either right or wrong — you can’t be half-way. Because if you are half-way, you might be float-ing, but the ship will most likely be upside down!”
Jeremy thrived on the drama, including a seven-hour effort to turn
a ship into the wind in the middle of a hurricane off Hong Kong. “It was abso-lutely mind boggling!”
Nevertheless, Jeremy loves his current job as he is still “driving a ship”, albeit from the operations desk. “I love the port operation side of things; I always get my finger in the pie there. And I love the challenges of ship stow-age too, just like I really enjoy Sudoku and puzzles. It is just a gigantic three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.”
In 1986 Jeremy married Jenni, with whom he now has two children — 23-year-old Angus, a physiothera-pist who recently graduated from the University of Sydney with first-class honours, and Monica, 19, who is studying public communications at the University of Technology, Sydney.
When the children were born, Jeremy and Jenni moved to the Blue Mountains. Jeremy threw himself into all the children’s sports activities, but nowadays, his main hobby is “golf, and more golf!”
Sydney’s Blue Mountains aren’t ex-actly near the sea, but Jeremy is happy there. In fact, he admits to not being able to swim very well, “as is typical of many seafarers”, and he recalls raving about the dangers of surf while on fam-ily camping trips. “As a result, I think I turned both my children off the sea!”
But thanks to the sea, Jeremy got to see and experience the world, and has never regretted it.
Jeremy Tadman in the UK.
“The thing about marine
operations is that it is either
right or wrong — you can’t
be half-way. Because if you
are half-way, you might be
floating, but the ship will
most likely be upside down!”
78 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Jack Tomes OA
A beautiful life
“Waking at 4am to milk cows and collecting firewood for sale in a billycart were just a couple of his chores, while also having to keep up with his schoolwork.”
79Jack Tomes OA – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
Jack Tomes OAMission to Seafarers Volunteer
#22
I meet Jack Tomes on a cold, wet day in Hobart. To be honest, I don’t know what to expect.
Who is the 91-year-old, who for more than 70 years has been
giving up his own time to help mari-ners visiting Tasmania?
Jack ushers me into his living room. Over cups of tea followed by home-made bread and soup, made from his home-grown vegetables, we talk about his life.
Of growing up by the sea at Georges Bay, St Helens, on the Tasma-nian east coast; of his time in the Navy during World War II; of his many experiences with Mission to Seamen (now Mission to Seafarers); what motivates him.
It is clear he has a heightened sense of responsibility for helping oth-ers — something that I believe relates to his childhood in rural Tasmania.
When Jack was less than three years old, his father died of pneumo-nia. While he was possibly too young to suffer grief, it meant he had to play a much bigger role at home. Waking at 4am to milk cows and collecting fire-wood for sale in a billycart were just a couple of his chores, while also having to keep up with his schoolwork.
St Helens is almost forgotten now, but in its day it was an important harbour town. From an early age, Jack remembers being enchanted with the steamers that stopped there on their voyages to and from Melbourne.
“It was my first acquaintance with ships. The main supplies arrived from Melbourne, and [the steamers] took back timber and tin which was mined in the local area,” he recalls.
In 1934, aged 14, Jack moved to Ho-bart to attend technical school, learning skills as a carpenter and joiner.
“It was during those two years [at technical school] that I became acquainted with the waterfront and ships, and I used to go down to the
wharf in our lunch hour and walk around the ships and go on board and collect postcards,” he says.
For a lad from rural Tasmania it was a window to the world.
“In those days the majority of the ships were steamers, and they were on the regular trade route between London and Australia.”
At age 16, when many people are partying and living a life of hedon-ism, he was approached to help more formally as a Mission to Seamen volunteer. It was the start of long and rewarding commitment, and one that continues to this day.
“I was involved with church activi-ties in New Town (a Hobart suburb) and there was a friend who asked me if I would like to do some voluntary help,” Jack recalls. “So he took me and introduced me to the superintendent to the Mission to Seamen, which it was called in those days.”
Like so many other young men, Jack joined the army (a Militia unit) when the dogs of war began to bark in the late 1930s, but was able to continue his Mission work.
In 1942 he transferred to the Navy when the Japanese began their attempt to conquer south-east Asia and the Pacific.
“Eventually, after two years (in the Militia), one of my mates wanted to join the Navy so I joined up and went on ac-
tive service in the Pacific in 1942,” he says.As a stoker on the heavy cruiser
HMAS Australia, he saw action in the Solomon Islands. While supporting a landing by allied troops, the ship came under attack by Japanese torpedo bombers but managed to escape without serious damage. Sister ship HMAS Canberra was not so lucky, taking several direct hits before being abandoned and then torpedoed by a US submarine.
“It was all right,” Jack says of his time on HMAS Australia. “They were British-built ships and designed for the Atlantic, not the tropics, so it used to get very hot.”
Later he was ordered to leave ship and deployed on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait. It was a lucky break, as HMAS Australia came under Kami-kaze attack during subsequent opera-tions in the Philippines, with the loss of 30 men, including the captain.
It’s testament to Jack’s character that, after the War, he would help so many Japanese sailors in his role with the Mission, work for which resumed after the war.
He has been an interested observer of the changes to shipping.
“There’ve been so many changes right through, I’ve been fortunate with that,” he says. “Not only the types of ships, but the types of cargo and
Jack Tomes OA.Photography by
David Sexton.
“You’ve still got the danger of hijacking
[piracy] on the high seas. That is one
big trauma that puts fear into seafarers;
not so much in Australia, but if they
are travelling in waters that
are subject to [piracy].”
By David Sexton
80 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Jack Tomes OA
the cargo handling and the change to containerisation, and then we lost our ro-ro ships in Hobart.”
There’ve also been crew changes with crew from different and interest-ing parts of the world. At first it was the Japanese. In more recent times, there have been Ukrainians, Filipinos and Koreans, to name a few.
“Our first instance of overseas telephone dialling, which became very prevalent … [was when] we had an influx of Japanese tuna vessels, which were using Hobart as a base port,” he says. “They were the first who actually needed overseas dialling … We had one office phone and the language [barrier] was difficult as there was very little English spoken.
“Telephone connections then were mostly manual and you had to actually talk to a telephone operator to get through. The operators were usually in Sydney, or even in Brisbane.”
Jack used his skills as a joiner/carpenter to build two new telephone boxes for the Mission.
In more recent times, he would go on board ships with a mobile phone for the crew to use.
“Of course, nowadays, the tel-ephone dialling has dropped consid-erably and most seafarers now have
laptop computers.“But the ship visiting went on and
that took up quite a lot of time in the work that I was doing.”
And part of the Mission to Seafarers role is also to provide entertainment.
“In the early days, we had a bad-minton court and we had dancing, and of course there was quite a lot of activity. We would organise dances and the like.”
Jack is aware of the dangers await-ing seafarers.
“You’ve still got the danger of hi-jacking [piracy] on the high seas. That is one big trauma that puts fear into seafarers; not so much in Australia, but if they are travelling in waters that are subject to [piracy],” he says.
Jack’s Christian faith has played a big role in his commitment to Mission. But it is a quiet, dignified faith; a faith based on good works and discipline rather than loudmouth evangelism.
“We have scriptures and Bibles and things which seafarers are welcome to take. They’re not asked to take them but they are there if they want them,” Jack explains.
Mission to Seafarers has been im-portant in many aspects of his life, but perhaps none more so than in 1954 when he met his future wife, Kath-
leen. Kathleen was also a volunteer, so naturally they hit it off. Children, grandchildren, and recently great-grandchildren, have followed.
After a wonderful life together, Kathleen passed away in February. He misses her deeply, but his spirit remains unbroken.
Honours have also come his way — most notably the Order of Australia in 2002, presented to him by the Gov-ernor of Tasmania.
“It was very rewarding,” Jack says, with trademark humility. “It was com-pletely unexpected, of course, but very rewarding. My family was there and they gave me a reception afterwards, which was great.”
He has no plans to end his involve-ment with Mission, although he has had to restrict his activities a little.
“I’ll be involved as long as I’m able to get there and do something useful,” he says. “I’m with the Mission as an ob-server now, but I certainly can’t do the things I did in earlier years. But apart from my mobility, I think I’m all right.”
It’s tempting when talking or writ-ing about the elderly to refer to think of them mostly in the past tense.
And yet with Jack, you wonder if there might not be a few more chap-ters to come.
It’s testament to
Jack’s character
that, after the
War, he would
help so many
Japanese sailors
in his role with
the Mission,
work for which
resumed after
the war.Jack Tomes OA - volunteer for Mission to
Seafarers (formerely Seamen). Photograph by David Sexton.
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82
25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Prof Martin Tsamenyi AM
Prof Martin Tsamenyi AMProfessor of Law and
Director of the Australian
National Centre for
Ocean Resources and
Security (ANCORS),
University of Wollongong
An internationally recognised ex-pert in the Law of the Sea, Martin Tsamenyi was one of five advisors hand-picked to help draft the UN Secretary General’s Oceans Com-
pact prior to Rio +20 in 2012. Yet Martin was already 16 when he first laid
eyes on the ocean. Until then, he had grown up happily in the middle of a rainforest, on a cocoa plantation in Ghana, 250 kilometres from the ocean.
“When I first saw the ocean, I thought I was in a dream. And I worried it would be boiling hot!” he laughs.
As a child, Martin walked five kilometres each way to school every day, and after school and on weekends he helped his father on the farm.
“We would pick the beans, dry them and then carry them in bags on our heads to the village to sell them,” he says. “So I grew up with the smell of cocoa beans, and every time I smell them again now, I get a shock as it brings back all of that childhood. That was the life I grew up with, and it has a lot of happy memories. You must never forget your past.”
Martin was the third of nine children in a close-knit family, who relied on each other on their isolated farm. “We went to the stream to fetch water, and we had no electricity, but I didn’t know any dif-ferently, and it was great. It was just the normal way of life there,” says Martin.
“Now I see people doing it for fun in Australia, like camping, and I think, ‘that was my life’. And that is the one reason why I don’t go camping — it
Shaping the oceans
“It was the time when the Law of the Sea negotiations were about to end, and everyone around the world was wondering how they were going to implement it.”
By Nicole Gooch
83Prof Martin Tsamenyi AM – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
#23
Martin Tsamenyi surrounded by his family on his birthday.
doesn’t feel special! It just doesn’t make sense to me,” he giggles.
None of Martin’s siblings stayed on the plantation. Their father had wanted them all to go to school and, as Martin says, “once you got a formal education, the expectation was that you would do something better than the farm”.
And indeed, Martin first completed a Bachelor of Law with Honours at the University of Ghana, but all he wanted to do was to be a diplomat, so he ap-plied for a scholarship at the Australian National University (ANU) in Can-berra. In March 1979, Martin was one of the first students in the new Master of International Law at ANU.
“Canberra at the time was very dif-ferent. There were only public servants, diplomats and students,” says Martin. “It was a much smaller community, and it gave me a unique opportunity to start living the dream I had of becom-ing a diplomat.”
But it was during that same period that negotiations on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea began, and two of Martin’s lecturers were part of the Australian delegation involved in them.
Upon their return from each round of discussions, Martin would listen avidly as the lecturers regaled their students with tales of the negotiations. Soon enough, he was hooked. The Law of the Sea Conven-tion provided Martin’s hungry mind with the perfect mixture of law and international relations.
And in 1981, between finishing his Master’s degree and beginning his PhD at ANU, Martin spent a year as a lecturer at the University of Papua New Guinea.
“It was the time when the Law of the Sea negotiations were about to end, and everyone around the world was wondering how they were going to implement it. Many Pacific Island countries were also becoming, or had just become, independent, and Australia had a responsibility to show leadership on this.”
It was a new process, and Martin found himself, as a young academic, in the middle of it all.
“Everybody was thinking through the issues, fumbling with them, mak-ing new rules, trying new things out as we went along. There were not a lot of people who knew much about it in those days, and it was extremely excit-ing to be part of it.”
For Martin, however, it was also about “being at the right place at the right time, with the right issues, and given my previous interest in diplo-macy, it all just came together”.
But he did have to undergo a swift transition “from the forest to the ocean”.
“I had been very comfortable in the rainforest. It was a place I knew well, where I could run around and climb trees. I knew all the wildlife, and felt quite protected there,” says Martin.
In the end, though, it was actually “an easy process”.
“The way I made myself comfort-able was to basically conceptualise the forest in terms of its canopy — the green, undulating top — and if you go underneath it to the forest, you see something different. With the ocean, it is exactly the same. This is the connection; it is the same part of
the planet, which just happens to be covered by water. That’s the way I ap-proach ocean issues.”
But there is one difference — the ocean is a lot more challenging to man-age, says Martin.
“If you are managing the forest, you can count the number of trees, measure their size and estimate their age. You can be quite precise. If you want to protect an area you can fence it. But you have very little control over the ocean. You can’t fence it!” he laughs.
“The more I understand the ocean, and its vulnerability, the more I get passionate about it. That’s what gets me out of bed every day — the realisa-tion that the majority of countries in the world have some ocean jurisdic-tion, but few have the understanding and resources to be able to deal with the policy making, management and enforcement required by the Law of the Sea Convention. In particular, the degree of cooperation needed among States is not quite yet appreciated
“While from an environmental perspective
shipping impacts on the ocean, it is an
impact that is manageable, with the right
frameworks and enforcement mechanisms.”Prof Martin Tsamenyi AM.
Photography by Nicole Gooch.
84 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Prof Martin Tsamenyi AM
enough,” says Martin.After completing his PhD, Martin
returned to teach in Papua New Guinea for three years, before being appointed at the University of Tasmania, which he left as Dean of Law at the end of 1992.
In the mid 1990s, Martin was instrumental in helping to set up Aus-tralia’s Oceans Policy, and that remains one of his most cherished experiences at a national level, along with being part of the steering committee for Australia’s South-east Marine Regional Plan and later the National Oceans Advisory Board.
Martin is also well known at a regional level, having been Fisheries Law Advisor for the Pacific Islands Fo-rum Fisheries Agency in the Solomon Islands for two years, while also helping to develop a regional legal framework for the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, for whom he is now involved as a legal advisor.
At a global level, Martin says his career highlight is being chairman of two expert and one technical consulta-tion for the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO).
“It doesn’t really get much better than that! But all these highlights are pretty sporadic,” says a modest Mar-tin, before acknowledging that they did “all come together when recog-nised by Australia with the Order of Australia”.
Awarded in 2012, Martin received the AM for service to maritime and fisheries law in the Asia-Pacific region, through the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security (AN-CORS), and to legal education.
“It felt pretty amazing. I couldn’t have asked for more.
“My father never quite understood what I did, or believed that is what I was doing! But my family have all been
very supportive and proud,” he says with a beaming smile.
These days Martin, who has been director of ANCORS since 1999, is also heavily involved in maritime security law, regulation of shipping and marine environmental law.
“Shipping has played, and will continue to play, a fundamental role in the global economy. And while from an environmental perspective shipping impacts on the ocean, it is an impact that is manageable, with the right frameworks and enforcement mecha-nisms,” he says.
Amongst other things, he is currently working on the interface between technology and policy in relation to maritime security, includ-ing a Vessel Tracking Initiative, and is researching the impact of the new security ID regulations, which were brought in after 9/11, and their impact on the seafarers’ wellbeing.
“Some days I wish there were double the number of hours in the day,” quips Martin.
And when he is not reading his students’ PhD drafts, Martin can often be found lecturing on the law of the sea to Caribbean or Pacific Island diplo-mats and fisheries officers. For he is passionate about capacity building, and hopes, he says with a twinkle in his eye, that one of those graduates will one day be president of their country.
Martin’s wife, Constance, is also from Ghana, and works as a nurse at Wollongong Hospital. They regularly go back to Ghana, where Martin volun-teers his time as special adviser, helping the government with its maritime policy and legislation.
But when in Australia, with one adult son and two daughters, Martin and his wife have their hands full on weekends with four grandchildren, much to their joy.
They are happy, says Martin, living at the foot of Mt Keira, in the Illawar-ra. They have the best of both words, thanks to “the Australian rainforest surrounding our house, and views of the ocean”.
“I grew up with the smell of cocoa beans, and every time I smell them again now, I get a shock as it brings back all of that childhood.”
“The more I understand the ocean,and its vulnerability, the more I
get passionate about it.”
Martin Tsamenyi and his wife Constance in Ghana.
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86 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Ernie van Buuren
Ernie van BuurenPartner and Head of
Transport and Shipping
Norton Rose Australia
A love of tankers, and the law
Ernie van Buuren, 51, served as a tanker officer at the height of the Iraq-Iran tanker war, and his ship carried a part cargo of Iraqi oil — cargo that was
contraband in the eyes of the Iranians. “Whoomph! The floodlights go on.
You’re blinded. An interrogator shouts over to you and asks you where you were loaded and where you are going. If they were suspicious they could attack and board you,” says Ernie.
“And they were looking for people like us,” he adds.
It was a desperate time in the Persian Gulf during the war, which ran from 1980 to 1988. Iraq began attacking Ira-nian shipping at the port of Kharg Island in 1984. The Iranians retaliated.
“I was young and I didn’t appreciate the risk,” Ernie says.
It was at Westernport, Victoria, where the seriousness of war began to dawn on Ernie. The shipping master handed over a copy of the war zone articles and gave him a choice: leave or sign up.
“If you sign up, you’re going,” Ernie recalls the shipping master as saying.
“It was two weeks of utter boredom across the Indian Ocean if we went from BP Kwinana refinery. Then we’d go in under darkness, total darkness, on a run through the traffic separation scheme through Hormuz. We always sailed at night — first into Dubai, then we hugged the southern coastline from port to port up to Mina Al Ahmadi, Kuwait. These are big ships running at 15+ knots. It’s black and it’s busy and there are lots of ships running in the dark. People cut in front of you. Why? I don’t know. Crazy. There’s lots of cross-ing traffic. So we’re glued to the radar. We’re weaving in and out of oil rigs. Ships like that take time to stop and we’re passing at close quarters. There are radar decoys everywhere to confuse missiles. At night we see the exchange of fire towards Kharg Island.
By Jim Wilson
Photography by Jim Wilson.
“Being a maritime lawyer is a privilege
as we get the best of both worlds –
interesting and often complex cases,
but also real life experiences.”
87
#23
Ernie van Buuren – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
#24
“Loading is very slow — one tank at a time with a very small bunker pipeline at the sea island terminal. It takes three or four days to load only one tank. We feel like sitting ducks. The Iranians are running out of money and their jets act as spotters. Then the helicopters come, a guy leans out and drops hand grenades on you. A ship leaving the Gulf behind us is fully loaded. It gets hit and catches fire. The crew has to abandon ship. I can hear the salvage tugs on the VHF pick-ing up survivors and looking for a place to land them ashore.
“Getting out, we are fully loaded and in deep draught, so we watch out for shoals. It’s just as chaotic coming out as going in but the ship is less responsive. We are coming out of the Strait of Hor-muz and an Iranian frigate comes in at high speed and then it U-turns…”
That’s when the interrogation began. Fortunately for Ernie the Captain
was able to convince the Iranians that the vessel wasn’t carrying Iraqi oil and so his crew and ship were not attacked. But, tragically, a great many crews lost their lives in that conflict.
Seawater runs in the veins of Ernie’s family. His father, John, was a marine engineer who migrated to Australia from the Netherlands in 1960. He was formerly a Royal Dutch naval subma-riner and was later a marine engineer with ANL, then chief engineer with Australian Dredging Company. Ernie was born not long after his father came to Australia.
As a young boy, he grew up around tugs at Bundaberg, and by the age of 14 or so he started doing ship-handling. The harbour master would take the young Ernie out when piloting the ships.
“I took any opportunity to get away from school and be at sea. I sailed as su-pernumerary on tug delivery voyages in and out of Bundaberg, up to Gladstone and down to Hervey Bay. I got three months’ sea time up on Howard Smith and BHP ships during my school holi-days, even before doing my cadetship,” Ernie chuckles.
So he did his cadetship and went to sea in 1979 with BHP Shipping. He served on bulkers, ro-ro and heavy lift ships. They were ships of the “Iron” fleet.
“I had a really good cadetship; it was very hands on and practical. I couldn’t wait to go to sea,” he recalls.
But for Ernie it wasn’t just the ship handling, although that was clearly a factor for him. It was also about the
camaraderie and the adventure of travel. “It was a great time to be at
sea. Once we spent six weeks in Auck-land, discharging steel from a heavy lift ship. That doesn’t happen now,” he says, adding, “I was very lucky to go overseas in the first year of my cadetship — to Japan and the Philippines.”
But even then, he knew that, al-though he loved going to sea, he didn’t want to do it for the rest of his life.
A relative, who later became a Su-preme Court judge in Fiji, was studying law at the time, after first qualifying as an engineer. An idea took hold in Ernie.
In 1982 Ernie talked to BHP about it, but the company wasn’t interested, so he instead joined CSR and the chemical tanker Silver Hawk.
“It was there that I developed my love for tankers. It was a great experi-ence,” he says. “You’ve got to be a bit crazy to like tankers. I think you either love them or hate them.”
Later, he joined ASP and began working on product parcel tankers and then crude oil tankers.
He finally enrolled in a law degree and first did two years’ full-time study of a four-year course in law, then went back to sea but also continued studying part-time.
“It was a good way of putting myself through university,” says Ernie, adding that he was effectively running two par-allel careers, studying law and seafaring. He eventually obtained an international Master’s Certificate and sailed as chief officer on tankers.
Ernie came ashore in 1990 and joined Powell Duffryn Terminals, a chemical storage company on Coode Island as the operations manager. He got the job because it was managing an “essentially shore-based tanker”.
Ernie recalls a huge explosion one day at a neighbouring terminal on Coode Island, followed by massive political fallout. “Although tragic, it was a great event for me,” he says. “Since then I’ve been involved in all kinds of crisis management!”
Ernie was finally awarded his law degree in 1992, at the age of 31, from the University of Technology of Queens-land and, in 1993, started with law firm Mallesons Stephen Jacques, where he did a lot of salvage work such as the ground-ing of the Iron Baron in Tasmania. And, in the case of the Martha 2, he got to arrest a vessel that he’d previously sailed upon.
In another first, he again got to sail on the Martha 2 whilst it was under arrest, but this time as a solicitor for the mortgagee, DNB. “Nothing had changed aboard the ship since I had previously sailed on it as a navigator, except for the crew of course!”
But by 1997 Ernie felt ready to take on a new legal challenge, and so he en-rolled in the Master’s degree in Admiralty law at Tulane University, New Orleans.
“It’s a great party city and being a student again was good!” he laughs.
Having completed his Master’s, he joined and later became a partner at Blake Dawson Waldron, now a part of Ashurst. He then joined Norton Rose Australia in February, 2011, as a partner and head of Shipping, and most recently as head of Transport.
“What I really enjoy is building teams and working with people. That, and of course, dealing with ships and international trade,” Ernie smiles. “Being a maritime lawyer is a privilege as we get the best of both worlds — interesting and often complex cases, but also real life experiences,” he says.
Recently he has acted for the owners and insurers of the Rena, which ran aground on Astrolabe Reef, in New Zealand.
“In casualty situations you are thrown into a crisis with totally new people, and somehow you have to make sense of it all and be the voice of reason.”
Ernie lives in Brisbane, but also spends much of his time in Sydney and elsewhere with his work. He is married to Kris, and has three sons — Nick, 17, Hugo, 13 and Anton, 11. His hobbies involve “mucking around in small boats” and reading — albeit technical books. He is, in fact, currently immersed in a book by Steve Redgrave on rowing.
And when he is not reading about rowing, Ernie is a keen supporter of Geelong’s AFL. After all, being born in Geelong, he explains, “Once a Geelong boy, always a Geelong boy”.
“You’ve got to be a bit crazy to like
tankers. I think you either love them or
hate them.”
full page ad
89Michael Vertigan – 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012
Dr Michael VertiganChairman
Australian Maritime College (AMC)
#25
Michael Vertigan’s pas-sion for education stems in part from the inspiration of his old headmaster at
Devonport High School.The Australian Maritime College
chairman, and adviser to govern-ments and leaders, recalled being “a fairly average student” at school before improving in leaps and bounds after hitting puberty.
“I started to enjoy school and do well and gradually developed an inter-est in education, but had some very good mentors,” Michael recalls. “My high school headmaster (Tim Jacobs) made it quite clear to me that going to university was the only thing that I should do.”
Mr Jacobs is described by Michael as “hard head, soft heart. If you translate that into education terms, Tim was a stern taskmaster but very committed to the welfare of students.”
Reading through Michael’s CV can leave you a little breathless. It all began
in the northern Tasmanian town of Devonport, a centre that was, and is, a crucial city for Tasmanian maritime trade. Michael clearly remembers the ro-ro vessels that used to come and go.
University studies, which he began in 1958, meant moving to Hobart, the distant southern capital of the Apple Isle.
“My first job (while at university) was as a clerk in the state treasury,” he recalls. “I worked full-time and did university part-time.
“Since my other passion in life is hockey, I really enjoyed the level of competition the many clubs offered. Having come from a town with four hockey teams, to come to a large, well organised competition with much higher quality was very enriching.”
Hockey has, incidentally, been an enduring passion.
“It was something I could play. I was never any good at football,” he says with a laugh. “But that’s unfair. The peers I had in hockey I could relate to really well, so I really enjoyed the team environment enormously and the
stick-ball coordination is something I enjoyed. But I enjoyed sport, because at other times I’ve played tennis and squash. To me, hockey was a really enriching part of my university life.”
His passion for hockey was such that he became an international referee, officiating at events including pre-Olympics, Pan-American Games and Commonwealth Games.
A particular highlight was the England versus The Netherlands match in 1975 and New Zealand versus India in Toronto in 1976.
He also coached Tasmanian senior and junior teams, and was coach of the Canadian “talented youth squad”.
North America features heavily in his story. After graduating from UTAS and starting a junior teaching and research role, also at UTAS, in 1966 he earned a Fulbright Award to go to North America, using it to go to the University of Berkeley in Califor-nia. There he completed a PhD in the study of business administration and economics.
Hockey, Berkeley and the AMC
“We went to campus for three months when there was barbed wire right around it and we had the National Guard guarding the campus.”
By David Sexton
Photography by David Sexton.
90 25 Faces of Australian Shipping 2012 – Michael Vertigan
He arrived in the mid-1960s, one of the most turbulent decades in North American history.
“It was an eye-opening experience because this was the period 1966 to 1969. A young conservative Tasmanian ... it was the years of the Vietnam War and Berkeley was the centre for student protests against the war and with respect to what was seen as restrictive policies in free speech and protests on campuses,” he recalls. “Plus, being in a city of that size was an eye-opening experience as well.
“Berkeley at that time had more Nobel Prize winners than any other university in the world, and was ranked by the Ford Foundation as the number one graduate school so it attracted students from all over the world, so that in itself was an extraor-dinary experience, both in the quality of academic staff and the quality and diversity of the students. It was one of life’s experiences that would be very difficult to replicate.”
He denies being radicalised.“I was in the business school and
we were the least radicalised of any part of the university I think,” he recalls with a laugh. “But on one occasion I was tear-gassed out of my offices — a helicopter flew over and popped tear gas on protesting students.
“We went to campus for three months when there was barbed wire right around it and we had the National Guard guarding the campus. From what, I’m not sure, but it was an ex-traordinary time.”
Aside from the social conflict, Mi-chael has good memories of California.
“It’s a very comfortable place for an Australian to be, but California has two parts to it. Northern California is rela-tively small ‘L’ liberal, whereas Southern California is much more conserva-tive,” he says. “You really noticed that through the sort of activities that were happening at Berkeley; they didn’t hap-pen at its sister campus at UCLA, which is Los Angeles.”
Then followed 12 years in Canada, where he taught at the University of Alberta.
“That was a fabulous opportunity, as the province of Alberta was a very afflu-ent province at that time, and was often called the Middle Eastern Kingdom of Canada,” he recalls. “It decided to estab-lish a contemporary school of business so it hired about 60 of us from primarily the top US universities to go there and basically start a new school of business.”
He had earlier married his wife Di in 1969 and their daughter Susie, now a Melbourne corporate lawyer, was born in Canada.
Returning to Australia, Michael joined Curtin University in Western Australia, becoming foundation head of graduate studies in business.
In the mid-1980s, he joined the Tas-manian public service as deputy head of Treasury, and 18 months later, in 1986, became secretary of Premier and Cabinet, and then secretary of Treasury and Finance in 1989.
In this time he worked with pre-miers Robin Gray and Michael Field.
“The big issues were economic de-velopment and getting agreement with regards to the forestry industry, and if you look at it, 25 years on nothing has changed,” he notes. “We also had to settle the issues around the World Her-itage area. Those issues emerged as a result of the Franklin and the Gordon-below-Franklin settlement.”
He recalls being involved in a tough restructuring of Tasmanian finances, with cuts to areas as important as health and education, and many redun-dancies.
“We had a situation where Tas-mania’s budget was seriously out of control,” he says. “We went through a very difficult period of fiscal consolida-tion to return the budget to a sustain-able position.”
In 1993 he joined the Victorian Government as secretary of Treasury and Finance for the newly elected pre-mier, Jeff Kennett.
“It was the same set of principles as in Tasmania,” he says. “We had an unsustainable budget position that had to be brought under control. The difference was Tasmania didn’t have as
strong an underlying base to work with as Victoria, so the impacts (in Tasma-nia) were greater and the capacity to recover wasn’t as great. Whereas in Vic-toria, once the adjustments were made, the state sort of rebounded relatively quickly.”
But Michael also has had setbacks, most notably the Tasmania Tomorrow Polytechnic scheme. This was aimed at combating the early exodus of young Tasmanians from the school system, a problem that in Tasmania is particu-larly high. Unfortunately the scheme at-tracted powerful opponents, including the Tasmanian Education Union. He quit the program in May 2010, citing continued political interference.
“Devastated,” is his answer when asked how he felt about the outcome of the program. “My involvement was with the Tasmanian Polytechnic, which I still believe was at the forefront of thinking with the delivery of skills develop-ment for younger people and this state (Tasmania) would have been a leader in doing that,” he says. “In my view, the lack of political will and the opposition of the Education Union just meant it could not progress.”
He says the program was to have gone beyond what was provided at the Technical and Further Education Col-leges (TAFEs).
“The TAFEs have done some good work but they don’t provide pastoral care, for example. They tend to be just related to a single skill area — this is generalising — as distinct from the individual to a broader extent such as enhancing literacy and numeracy skills as well as a particular vocational skill.”
But Michael takes a positive out-look in his role with the AMC and has a clear vision for its future.
“The first [goal] is to take a leadership role in marine and seafarer education and training in Australia through enhancing cooperation with other training providers, and through initiatives arising from the govern-ment’s maritime industry reforms,” he says. “The second leg is to increase our research activity and our R&D and consulting activities with industry.
“That’s where our focus is at the moment.”
“Berkeley at that time had more Nobel Prize
winners than any other university in the world.”
2013 features list
February 7 Port & Container Equip14 Crewing * Training 21 Tugs Towage & Salvage 28 Liner Trades to SE Asia
March7 Project Cargo14 Logistics & Supply Chain21 Victoria28 Resources & Commodities
April4 South Aus / Northern Territory11 LNG & Offshore18 WA25 Bulk Ports
May2 Pilotage9 PNG16 Regional Ports23 Green Shipping30 Tasmania
June6 Liner Trades to NE Asia 13 Ro Ro & Car Carriers20 Port Kembla / Sydney
& Newcastle27 Ship Agents
July4 Port Design Construction
& Dredging11 Coastal Shipping18 NZ25 Break Bulk
August1 Reefer Trades8 Maritime Law15 Queensland22 Containerisation29 Cruise Industry
September5 Liner Trades to Europe12 Dry Bulk Trades19 Freight Forwarders 26 Singapore
October3 Shipping &
the Environment10 Maritime Engineers17 Project Cargo
– Heavy Lift24 LNG & Offshore31 Maritime Services
November7 Liner Trades to PNG14 Training & Recruitment21 Port Kembla / Sydney
& Newcastle28 WA Port Development
December5 Pay Scale for Seafarers 12 Bunker / Tanker Trades19 Awards Issue26 Year in Review
for more information please contact Luke Smith on (02) 9080 4335 or email [email protected]
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