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Concept
Dick Dusseldorp
Summary
Gerardus Jozef Dusseldorp (2 December 1918 22 April 2000) was a Dutch water engineer and the founder of Civil & Civic, the financing arm of which later emerged as Lendlease, one of Australia's largest companies.
Born in Utrecht in the Netherlands in December 1918, Gerardus Dusseldorp was known as Dik as a child, the anglicised version of which stuck with him for the rest of his life. At the age of 15, he enrolled as a marine cadet, with the aim of becoming a captain in the merchant marine. He was found to be color blind when he sought entry into officer training and withdrew from the service. During World War II, as a Dutchman of working age, he was deported to Berlin, to work as forced labor. Returning to the Netherlands, he secured work with a Danish firm building a railway from Copenhagen to Hamburg. In late 1943 he was transported to Kraków, again as forced labor but this time for the Siemens Organisation. In Summer 1944 he escaped with his wife and four-year-old daughter, and returned again to the Netherlands.
In 1945 he and his younger brother Hank secured jobs at Bredero's Bouwbedrijf, a Dutch housebuilder established in the 1870s. By 1947 he had been promoted to Construction Manager. In March 1951 Bredero's sent him to Australia to seek out business opportunities. He identified a project to build workers' housing in the Snowy Mountains Scheme, the largest infrastructure project to have been attempted in Australia. He established Civil & Civic, as a subsidiary of Bredero's. The success of which was based on the principle that the designer should be employed by the contractor rather than the other way round.
During the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s he undertook residential housing developments such as Harbour Heights Estate and was a competitor of Leslie Joseph Hooker and Hooker’s housing developments. In 1957 he secured the contract to build the podium for the Sydney Opera House and, having established his reputation, built the business into an international concern. Civil and Civic built the first high rise office block (Caltex House) to be erected in Sydney.
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