Lindsay Black

 
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2020 Update

After school and a civil engineering degree, for my first job, I spent three years working for the NSW Government, building roads around the Snowy Mountains. I have just read a history of the Snowy Mountains Scheme, and I was surprised to find that I had known many of the characters in the book and had been there for a few of the historical events. It made me realise that at 76, we are all becoming history and it is a good time to record our collective part in it.

From the Snowy Mountains, in 1969 my wife Cecily and I moved to Canada. We lived in Victoria BC and I worked for a few years designing water supply and sewerage systems. Then In 1972, we took a year off and drove a van around North America, Britain and Europe before returning to Australia.

In Sydney, I joined a small consulting engineering practice that had big ideas, Sinclair Knight and Partners, and I worked with the group for the next 37 years until I retired in 2009. By then those ideas had more than materialised and the company was one of the largest consulting engineering groups in Australia.

I spent the rest of the 70s planning and designing water and sewerage systems for regional towns in NSW, then moved to Newcastle in 1980 and opened an office to provide engineering services to the mining industry in the Hunter Valley. It was boom time for the coal industry and there was plenty of work, both on mine sites and for the growing local communities.

About 5 years later an opportunity came up to work in Indonesia, planning a city-wide water supply project in South Sumatra and funded by AusAID. I had often thought about working in a developing country and so I took up the role. At the time, population pressure in Indonesia’s cities was outstripping the government’s ability to provide services and a lot of international aid was going into urban services (roads, drainage, water and sanitation). The Sumatra project led to other opportunities and over about the next 20 years I spent many months working with AusAID, the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank and the UN in the region on projects in cities like Jakarta, Medan and Bandung in Indonesia and in Kerala state in India.

Political crisis is another cause of infrastructure failure in developing countries, as funds dry up or get diverted elsewhere. After a few years water supply and sewerage become unsafe, more kids get sick and die and then the aid agencies get involved. So I also spent time in Vientiane, still recovering 15 years after the Viet/Lao war (ADB), in Fiji after the second Rabuka coup (UNCHS), in Ulan Bator after the collapse of the USSR (World Bank), and in Colombo during the civil war and in Galle after the 2004 tsunami (AusAID).

By 2005, the Australian resources boom had created a huge demand for engineers and I enjoyed working on some Australian projects in the years before I retired. There was lots of opposition to the last project I worked on, the Sydney Desalination Plant, but Sydney people were happy that it was there when it was finally switched on during the drought in 2019. it was also good to hear that it was meeting its longer term performance goals and environmental requirements.

My wife and I have lived in Newcastle for the last 40 years and enjoy the local culture and the ease of getting around. We have three children and seven grandchildren who add a lot of joy to our lives. After I retired, we built some storage sheds and started a small self storage business. That, combined with family, grandchildren, hobbies, travel, house maintenance, a local sustainable neighbourhood group and exercise (bike, kayak, swim, walk) takes up just about all my time. For a retirement project, I purchased a partly dismantled, rusty classic American car with a V8 engine and I have been making slow progress getting it back on the road. If you ever consider owning an old car, I suggest saving money and time by buying one that is already in good condition.

A friend and I got into kayaking about 8 years ago and every year since then, we have taken our “boats” on an adventure down one of our rivers. We enjoy the prolific birdlife/wildlife and you can spend days without seeing another soul. Australia must be one of only a few countries in the world where you can spend weeks paddling down a river and camping on the bank and not be concerned about security. For Cecily and me, “retirement” continues to be a very enjoyable period of our lives and I hope it lasts for many more years.