Sheer Bastardry. Memoir of an Australian Engineer (en Inglés) - Warren Thomas Brown

Warren Thomas Brown left school at fourteen, cut fence posts west of Cunnamulla, and taught himself engineering from correspondence courses and sheer bloody-mindedness. By his mid-twenties he had built roads and bridges across outback Queensland, earned his place in the Institution of Engineers Australia, and taken on projects that men with twice his credentials would not touch.

In this candid, often wryly humorous memoir, Brown traces a life spent at the sharp end of Australian construction: the dust and machinery of Mount Isa, the day-labour gangs of Thiess Brothers, the high-stakes contract battles of Six Mile Creek and Eungella Dam, and the institutional corruption that nearly destroyed him. Along the way, he crosses paths with larrikin truckies, vindictive bureaucrats, a French chef with a drinking problem, and the enigmatic Les Thiess, whose method for cutting staff involved a blue pencil and every second name on the list.

From rural poverty to major dam construction, through bankruptcy and back to a successful consulting practice, Sheer Bastardry is the story of a self-made engineer who refused to be broken by the system. It is also a vivid, firsthand record of a vanishing era in Australian infrastructure, told in a voice that is unmistakably direct, distinctly Australian, and utterly unpretentious.

This Second Edition, published by Amazon Global Publishings, incorporates new material including Warren’s childhood friendship with an Aboriginal boy at Tin Can Bay who went on to build a fleet of trawlers in the Arafura Sea, a reflective return to Eungella Dam with his grandchildren decades after construction, and a full-colour photo section drawn from Warren’s personal archive.