50 Years Our Foundation: ABI Group Constructing Australia’s Future
Australian History Business Biography Corporate History Civil Engineering Construction Technology Architecture & Urban Planning Industrial Photography
50 Years Our Foundation: ABI Group – Constructing Australia’s Future is the only authorised chronicle of one of the nation’s most influential privately owned construction companies. Written by industry insider Neil Montagnana-Wallace, this 2011 hardback traces ABI Group from a small family firm in 1961 to a multibillion-dollar force that helped shape Australia’s skylines, highways and resource projects. The narrative is built from board minutes, site diaries and first-hand interviews, giving readers an engineer’s eye-view of landmark builds such as Sydney’s Governor Phillip Tower, Melbourne’s Collins Place and the iron-ore export juggernauts of the Pilbara.
What makes this oversized, slip-cased edition collectible is its combination of corporate biography and social history: each decade is paired with the economic and political forces that dictated design, labour and materials, showing how ABI’s innovations in pre-cast concrete and fast-track delivery methods became national standards. Over 400 photographs—many never archived elsewhere—document everything from 1970s tower cranes perched above Circular Quay to the remote outback camps that housed thousands of fly-in workers, making the book a visual time-capsule for urban planners, civil engineers and anyone fascinated by Australia’s post-war transformation.
For students, professionals or alumni of the built environment, this is a reference that still circulates in university engineering courses yet is almost impossible to find in retail. This clean, tightly-bound copy is ready for immediate gifting or library display and represents a rare chance to own the comprehensive, officially sanctioned history of the company that quite literally poured the foundations of modern Australia.
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