Australian Dictionary of Biography

GJ Dusseldorp, c.1968

Courtesy of Lendlease Corporation. Reproduced with permission of The Licensor through PLSclear.

Gerardus Jozef (Dick) Dusseldorp (1918–2000), property developer and entrepreneur, was born on 2 December 1918 at Utrecht, the Netherlands, second of seven children of Carolus Theodorus Johannes Dusseldorp, international wheat merchant, and his second wife Martina Emerentiana, née Kuijten. Dik (his Dutch name as a child) was raised with eleven siblings, including several from his father’s first marriage. The collapse of commodity prices in 1929 forced the family to move from a wealthy neighbourhood to Utrecht’s ‘boondocks’ (Dusseldorp 1999). He got into fights and was expelled from his Jesuit school, but private tutoring from a sympathetic priest enabled him to attain his Intermediate certificate (1935), then study civil engineering at the Middelbaar Technische School, Haarlem.

On 14 August 1940 Dusseldorp married Johanna Cornelia (Anne) van der Kroon, at Utrecht. With the Netherlands under Nazi occupation, he was forced to work as a labourer in Germany and Poland. After the Allies liberated the Netherlands in May 1945, and with housing in short supply following wartime destruction and disruption, he joined one of the country’s biggest residential construction companies, Bredero’s Bouwbedrijf, where he was soon promoted to oversee the firm’s nationwide cottage building program.

In October 1950 Bredero’s, in league with the Royal Dutch Harbour Works Company, a civil engineering concern, sent Dusseldorp to Australia for three months to assess opportunities in a country that was intent on postwar reconstruction, but constrained by shortages of plant, materials, and skilled labour. He met the commissioner of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Authority, (Sir) William Hudson, and secured a contract to supply and erect prefabricated houses at Cooma, New South Wales. Back home, he convinced his employers that the Snowy Mountains project could offer a protracted stream of work; they set up Civil and Civic Contractors Pty Ltd, and appointed him construction manager. He returned to Australia in March 1951 with Anne, their five children, thirty-five Dutch tradesmen, and a brief to deliver the Cooma job and expand the business. Other residential and civil works contracts followed in the Snowy Mountains and nearby Canberra. With the firm also securing work in Sydney, by 1953 he had been promoted to managing director. For the next thirty years he built a career on overcoming the challenges of a construction industry riddled with inefficient practices that made time and cost overruns inevitable. Along the way he shook ‘the shibboleths of mid-20^th century Australian business’ (Harley 2003, 54).

One of Dusseldorp’s earliest innovations was to introduce a design and construct methodology to reduce the demarcation between the functions of architects and contractors. Civil and Civic brought design and construction specialists together with clients to manage projects collaboratively from the start, reducing costs and communication breakdowns on-site, and creating a smoother path for new design features and construction technologies. This approach was applied to one of Sydney’s first skyscrapers, the twenty-one storey Caltex House, which was completed in 1957, on budget and three months ahead of schedule.

In 1958 Dusseldorp confronted another problem: the company’s difficulties raising finance. Problems financing the Caltex House project convinced him that the organisation needed a more scalable solution. With Australia’s capital markets relatively undeveloped, the only way to raise sufficient funds was through a public float. Although most financial institutions were deeply sceptical—the float would be labelled ‘one of the greatest enigmas of the Australian stock markets’ (AFR 1964, 8)—he found underwriters. By May 1958 the share issue for a new finance and investment company, Lend Lease Corporation Ltd, was oversubscribed. He was appointed managing director, and in 1961 Civil and Civic became Lend Lease’s construction division, after Lend Lease acquired it from the Dutch parent company.

While Dusseldorp’s collaborative approach annoyed the architectural profession’s old guard, a young Harry Seidler was so impressed by the ‘simply unbelievable’ (Seidler 2000, 51) speed at which Caltex House was going up that he asked Dusseldorp to collaborate on an Elizabeth Bay apartment block, Ithaca Gardens (1960). It began a partnership spanning three decades and over a dozen projects, including Blues Point Tower (1962) and the MLC Centre (1977), and the Riverside Centre in Brisbane (1986). Their best-known collaboration, Australia Square (1967), was completed within budget and on time, in no small measure due to another of Dusseldorp’s innovations—his approach to industrial relations. He had an ‘almost mystical rapport’ (Bradley 1961, 10) with his on-site workforce. On the Caltex House site, he had met with workers and unions to hear first-hand their complaints about working conditions. Those discussions led to an agreement recognising both the company’s and the workforce’s interests and obligations, and sharing productivity gains between both parties. In the following decades he extended other benefits to his blue-collar workers: superannuation in the 1960s; profit-sharing through employee share ownership in the 1970s; and measures to support skills development for younger employees in the 1980s and beyond. Jack Mundey, then secretary of the New South Wales Builders’ Labourers’ Federation, remembered: ‘He gave us continuity of work, and he shared the increased productivity gains … It was a unique culture of dignity and respect’ (Horin 2002, 2).

Dusseldorp’s common interest philosophy—‘an entrepreneurial version of Dutch social democracy’ (Harley 2000, 5)—informed another of his innovations, the principle of developer contributions to infrastructure. In 1956 he had negotiated to pay for and lay the sewer pipes for a residential estate on Sugarloaf Peninsula, Middle Cove, overcoming a thirty-year backlog in the Metropolitan Water, Sewerage and Drainage Board’s sewerage redevelopment program. With the same aptitude for collaboration, he brought legislators, financiers, and lawyers together to create strata title for multi-unit developments in New South Wales in 1961, sparking a boom in apartment construction, and inspiring similar reforms overseas.

In time Dusseldorp caught the attention of the press. A cover story in the Bulletin in January 1961 noted that behind the public image of the ‘powerful and steel-reinforced tycoon’ (Bradley 1961, 10), the private man remained an enigma. Over the years some would describe his manner as stern, dour, and reserved; others found him ‘unemotional, coolly objective, even arrogant’ (Cleveson 1960, 55), but he was also described as charismatic, flamboyant, and ‘an advertising image-maker’s dream’ (Penberthy 1982, 9).

Not everything Dusseldorp tried was successful. Winning the tender to build the base of the Sydney Opera House in 1959 had given Civil and Civic (which at that time provided Lend Lease’s construction operations under contract) an international profile, but uncosted difficulties with that project came close to sinking the firm in the early 1960s. Lend Lease’s ill-fated investment in a Bass Strait oil permit through a separately floated company in the 1980s was a gamble that, he admitted to shareholders, ‘we lost’ (Clark 2002, 123).

Notwithstanding such occasional lapses, by the time Dusseldorp retired as Lend Lease chairman in 1988, the company had become a property and financial services giant operating across Australia, the Asia-Pacific region, the United States of America, and Europe, boasting an almost uninterrupted record of annual profit growth. The company’s market capitalisation stood at $1.4 billion, it employed six thousand people, and enjoyed a reputation as one of the best-managed, prudentially geared, socially responsible, and innovatively financed companies in the country. It had also acquired and transformed one of Australia’s largest life insurers, MLC Ltd, in ‘the most successful takeover of the [1980s]’ (Gottliebsen 1990, 37). Meanwhile, Lend Lease’s seventeen-year-old sister company, the General Property Trust—Australia’s first listed property trust and another Dusseldorp initiative—boasted a similar market capitalisation, and an annual run of profit growth that had never faltered.

On his retirement, Dusseldorp’s respect for shareholders was returned in kind when they and Lend Lease employees combined to give their chairman 1 per cent of the company’s share capital to establish the Dusseldorp Skills Forum, a foundation to develop the work and life capabilities of young people. He chaired the forum for many years before handing over to his eldest son, Tjerk, with a granddaughter, Teya, subsequently its executive director. Between the forum and his own group of property management and investment companies in the United States and Britain, he remained active throughout his retirement years while indulging his lifelong love of sailing. To the end a Dutch citizen, he was awarded an honorary AO in 1988. He was an inaugural inductee into the Property Council of Australia’s Hall of Fame in 2012.

Dusseldorp was remembered as a visionary: ‘a born navigator’ (Dusseldorp 2000) who was able to see opportunities and ‘[spot] danger before his competitors’ (Sykes 2004, 12). As a communicator, he was a powerful orator, ‘forthright and honest’ (Dusseldorp 2000), able to inspire, persuade, or assuage a crowd, and ‘[give] people a sense of what might be possible’ (Rumsey 2000). He was the ‘toughest man in business’ (Clark 2000, 33); ‘exciting, demanding, sometimes threatening’ (Harley 2000, 5) to work for, according to Lend Lease chairman Stuart Hornery, and ruthless in dealing with what he saw as foolishness, stupidity, or waste. But most distinctively, Dusseldorp was a shrewd entrepreneur who sought to extract profit at every turn, while seeking to ‘leave [behind] something of genuine value to society’ (Seidler 2000, 51). His legacy through Lend Lease extended beyond building a strong company, to what he saw as the essence of sound corporate governance: ‘the improvement of the human condition, not just that of any specific group, be it shareholders, workers, management, or others’ (Times 2000, 25). For him, a company’s environmental and social impact was as important as its economic contribution. The culture he established at Lend Lease was once described as combining the ‘performance and entrepreneurial orientation of the US … with the social values of Europe’ (Goodwin 2000). The Lend Lease executive David Thorne described him as a ‘great capitalist when making the profits, and a great socialist when distributing them’ (Thorne 2000). He died of a stroke at Papeari, Tahiti, French Polynesia, his home since the 1970s, on 22 April 2000. For several decades he and Anne had lived apart. She survived him, as did his companion Atea, and his and Anne’s children Lenneke, Tjerk, Karin, Kristine, and Wouter. The National Portrait Gallery holds images of him by Joe Greenberg, and Gary Ede.