Each year, Clough celebrates the outstanding contributions of its long-serving team members, and this year we have several celebrating major milestones. Read their stories below.
 

CONGRATULATIONS TO GREG KEMBER ON 30 YEARS WITH CLOUGH!

“Where did it start? That’s the easy bit, when is it going to finish? That one’s a bit harder to answer, but let me have a go!

It starts when we turn the clock back to 1990 and I wanted some work experience for my last year of uni while living in Melbourne. It was the year interest rates in Australian peaked at 17.5%, imagine that.

So I put my CV out to a few places, one was called Clough Codelfa. They built Tunnels and that sounded interesting. So I went for the interview where they proceeded to tell me that the role as a graduate was in Indonesia, building a Jetty in Kalimantan, the island of Borneo. Nothing to do with tunnels at all, but it sounded good so I accepted the role and got on a plane to Indonesia.

That was it, middle of nowhere, no phones back then, only ham radio to call back to Australia via Darwin, never made a call home in 14 weeks because I could get my head around the world listening in on my conversation with mum and dad, sounded a bit weird then and still does now. It was great fun, new language, new place, building a 2 kilometre jetty with an Indonesian workforce on the East coast of Borneo. We worked 7 days a week, 12 hours a day and I stayed there solid for 14 weeks because I wanted lots of spending money for my last year of University.

Then I went back and finished the last year of Uni, that was a drag, already had the taste of work in a foreign place, travel, money, no boundaries whatsoever. Then uni was over, straight back to the Clough office, where to now? Back to Indonesia, go build a gas plant, yippee!

So I get on a plane and fly to Perth, go to the office and meet this guy, he was a bit grumpy, big beard, he ran the Engineering department. I think his name was Steve, he gave me a large bag of drawings, they weighed more than my own luggage. Apparently, they were the “Master Copy” of the drawings for the civil works of a gas plant that we had to build on an island called Pagerungan. I flew to Singapore and spent a day getting a visa, then to Jakarta, then flew to Surabaya in the Eastern end of Java.

Then I had to get to the island, wasn’t that a journey to remember, it was really early in the project and we had not organised proper boats for transporting people out there, we had to go on local wooden boats, 180 nautical miles, it took about 36 hours. It was OK though, I had the Clough survival pack. It consisted of 2 x pizzas, and 1 carton of beer, all of which had to be shared with the Indonesian skipper, oh and don’t forget the drawings, the bloody drawings!

So we get to the island and there is nothing there, just a small village, they have not seen expats before, and they do not have money, not even Indonesian Rupiah, they just trade fish for vegies that they grow on different islands. We lived in grass huts, slept on the floor, and ate chicken and rice for the first 2 months, the only luxury we had was bottled drinking water, other than that we lived just as the locals did.

Anyway, we put a fence up to halve the island and started digging and building, and digging, and digging. It was a corral island so every time we had to dig a hole it needed a rock-breaker, we built a little camp, and then a big camp, pipelines and water desalination plants, we built an office and a workshop, we dug a harbour for landing craft and barges, we built an airstrip, we build roads, and a causeway, we built a concrete batch plant, a sewerage plant. When we finished building all that, we built the gas plant, using those bloody drawings that we carried around in hard copy for two years.

So that’s how it started. Then it was off to build a gold mine in Central Kalimantan called Indo Muro Kencana where everything came by boat 500km up the Barito River in wooden boats or by barge if the river was in full flow. The river originates in Sarawak and is so long that water level could change by up to 9 meters overnight just from tropical rains 800km away. It was really thick jungle, our first crew of people to hit the ground was 20 “Chainsaw Operators” and we proceeded to chop down trees and clear the jungle away, we cut all the trees into planks to build our camp. The record rainfall in the first month we were there was 125mm in a 24hr period, really wet, really muddy.

After that it was a 50 kilometre gas pipeline in Central Pakistan, a place called Baluchistan, the pipeline went between Dera Murad Jamali and Dera Bugti which is a tribal region in the middle of the desert. There was nothing there, it was hot, really hot, like more than 50 degrees every day during summer. No boats there, no water, sand, sand, more sand, and in case you didn’t get it, hot!

I guess the main reason for “hanging around at Clough for 30 years”, is that we continue to get opportunities to build challenging new projects in exciting and different places. Some things about the way we work have changed a lot over the years, but the fundamentals haven’t, it is still about communication towards planning and coordination of resources to achieve a common goal. I guess the biggest change that has happened for all of us in the last 30 years is the way in which we can communicate via phones, and of course the use of computers.

Like many, I’m looking forward to coming out of covid and being able to travel again, get back to interesting places and people, hopefully even get back into Mongolia and finish the project we started there a few years ago.”
 

CONGRATULATIONS TO IAN ARMSTRONG ON 40 YEARS WITH CLOUGH!

“I was lucky enough to receive a Clough Scholarship in my final year of Civil Engineering at the University of Western Australia in 1980. At the time I was just pleased to get some money and the offer of employment which took the pressure off during final exams. I wasn’t to realise the remarkable journey this was starting me on (and which I’m still on 40 years later). I feel somewhat like the Stephen Bradbury of Clough (younger people should google him).

I never commenced with Clough assuming I would stay this long but, as with many things in life, it just sort of crept up on me! However, I have always found my work interesting and, whenever I felt like things were getting a little stale, I would be jetted off to some exotic place or given some fantastic job to do. I have always found the people I have worked with to be very supportive and professional.

I have been fortunate to see Clough grow from a small local construction company when the entire staff phone list could fit on an A4 sheet of paper to the successful, highly respected multi-national it is today employing thousands of people around the world. Throughout the years I have worked all around Australia and in exotic (and some not so exotic) locations overseas. I have worked with amazing people from both within Australia and, through our many joint ventures, from overseas.

One of my career highlights was when I was first sent away from Perth to work over East on the Port Botany LPG Tanks. I was told it would be a short term 6-month assignment and ended coming back 10 years later, married with 3 children!

I also enjoyed being Project (& Country) Manager in Vanuatu for a couple of years. I was the classic big fish in a little pond but it was a lot of fun.

In addition some of the larger projects in WA have also been highlights (Graham Farmer Freeway Tunnel, Roe Highway Stage 7, Kalgoorlie Reservoir Project, Woodman Point WWTP).

The most interesting change over the years has been the sheer scale of projects undertaken. When I started, anything over a million was ok, and over $20 million was massive. The Project Manager would need to multi-task and perform many roles (management, project controls, quality control, procurement and project engineering). Of course we never really knew if we made any money until about 6 months after the job was finished and the last bill had been paid.

The other change that has been interesting is the increasing use of joint ventures which I feel has been the making of Clough. The ability to tap into the experience and expertise of other large companies has been invaluable. I was lucky enough to spend several years working more or less full time with the BAM Clough Joint Venture and found the Dutch to be very friendly with a particularly wry sense of humour (as well as being very good at their job).

Clough has always treated me very well, and from talking to friends who have moved on, I know they are thought of very well in the profession and things aren’t always greener on the other side of the fence.”