Our final guest on "The Good Drop with Hawkes & AD" for 2022 is Joseph (or Joe) Tam.  Joe is currently the Principal Supply Engineer for Seqwater where he leads the development of supply options and securing land to increase water supply certainty for South East Queensland. He also conducts high-level strategic planning for a possible augmentation.

Joe’s has had an interesting career that has spanned over 40 years, where half of his time has been on engineering works and half on people engineering. His experience covers a broader spectrum – that is civil, structural, water and control systems from planning, design, construction, O&M, incident management, disaster recovery and asset management and optimisation.

He is a real champion of promoting Engineering and has given so much back to the industry via his tremendous volunteer work for Engineers Australia. This commitment to the cause has resulted in Joe being recently appointed as Queensland President, Engineers Australia. Congratulations on the new role Joe !!!

It was great to talk with Joe about his amazing career journey and to discuss his new role with Engineers Australia, we hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Hawkes & AD

In this episode, we sat down with Civil Engineer, Master of Wine (MW), and grandfather - Andrew Corrigan MW.

Andrew has had an incredible engineering career, but in a way, it has been somewhat overshadowed by his incredible work in the wine industry, in particular his qualification as a Master of Wine.  It is important to acknowledge that MW is a rare qualification - there are currently 416 Masters of Wine world wide and Australia has only 24. Andrew is also the manager and part owner of Hidden Creek Winery in the Granite Belt region which is about 200km outside of Brisbane. He is also the President of the Queensland Wine Industry Association. Andrew is also a wine consultant, educator, writer, and judges in Australian and international wine shows. He has also published a book “Table Talk” in 2012 on the social aspects of wine.

As mentioned above, it’s not all just about wine with Andrew. One which is not often discussed and we thoroughly enjoyed learning about.  And that is his engineering career which we were so excited to shine some light on.  Andrew is an accomplished Civil Engineer. Andrew graduated from Sydney University in 1977 and has experience in civil engineering, structural engineering and commercial building construction in both design and construction management. He has also worked in construction both throughout Australia and internationally. He is now currently a Director of Gould Development Solutions Pty Ltd based in Brisbane and a part time sessional Tribunal Member of the Qld Civil and Administrative Tribunal (QCAT).

We know this episode is a long one, but when you stop and think about it, we are really interviewing a coin with two incredible sides.

We thoroughly enjoyed this interview, and we hope you get a buzz out of it too !!

Hawkes & AD

In this episode, Hawkes and AD sit down for a conversation with Luisa Maria Panuccio who is a qualified Civil and Architectural Engineer who graduated from the University of Adelaide.  Luisa is now currently working in Melbourne as a Senior Project Manager with Arup.  Luisa has an Italian background, and like most Italians, she is passionate. In particular, passionate about promoting STEM (which stands for Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) - and this is was a key theme that we talked to her about.

Luisa’s career to date has been so interesting. She has been an Ambassador for Engineers Australia, Engineers Without Borders Australia, Google, Children’s University Australia and the University of Adelaide. Not to mention Luisa also entered Miss Universe Australia as a way of promoting to fellow engineers that you can be and do anything you want, and not be stereotyped.

Despite still being in early in her career Lu has already achieved many awards -  just a few to touch on:

We hope you enjoy the interview.

Hawkes & AD

In this episode Hawkes & AD reflected on their first ten podcast episodes. After setting a goal when we commenced to complete 6 podcasts before the end of the year (2022), we have exceeded this, notching up the first 10 episodes several months ahead. 

We both wanted to reflect back on the first ten episodes and consider our learnings, what some of the great takeaways were for each of us in speaking to our esteemed guests. Both of us have come across some real pearls of wisdom through these conversations, which we both feel have impacted our lives (personal and professional) and how we look at things now. 

We've reflected on what some of these key takeways were for each of our guests. If you're new to the podcast, it might be a good summary of some of the key points we took from the conversations with our respective guests (and our own introductory episodes). 

Hope you enjoy... 

Hawkes & AD

Our interview guest for Episode 10 is a little different than our previous guests (as he is not an engineer nor is he involved in the water industry), but he is someone who really packs a punch and is incredibly motivating - that person is Noel Peters. Noel is 61yrs of age, lives in Hobart, is a bricklayer by day, and 6th Dan Karate instructor and Kyoshi (or Professor) by night.  For over 40 years, Noel has trained in Goju-Ryu (one of the four traditional styles of Karate), and he is now Tasmania’s karate master.

AD met Noel on a plane trip to Melbourne a few years ago, and was so impacted by Noel, that he couldn’t wait to reconnect with him and learn more about Noel’s life, especially in relation to his ongoing commitment to Kaizen (Japanese for “continual improvement”).

In this episode, Noel talks to us about his early years and upbringing in Hobart, and his karate journey.   He also shares valuable insights (and inspirational messages) on how we all can find self improvement and find our way in life.  We also talk about one of Noel’s special achievements where he converted an old Hobart church to a Dojo (a place to study 'The Way').

Both of us truly enjoyed our conversation with Noel, I am sure you all will too.

Natalie (Nat) Muir is Cardno (now Stantec)'s General Manager for Water & Environment. Hawkes & AD sat down with Nat to get her take on things that are important to us all, such as how to eke out a Work / Life balance (is it ever?) and how to handle Leadership. We discussed some of these important aspects with Nat, including her personal journey in Water, how she manages the everyday juggle, her successes and her challenges.

Hawkes & AD

Dr Tom Connor is a retired Structural Engineer, former Vice President of Technology in KBR's Infrastructure and Minerals Unit, Former National President of the Institution of Engineers Australia (now Engineers Australia), Recipient of Officer of the Order of Australia (AO), 1999 Queensland Engineer of the Year, Recipient of the Peter Nicol Russell Medal (EA's highest award for technical contributions to the engineering profession), former Chair Of the Queensland Sustainable Energy Advisory Council and former Chair of the Australian Building Energy Council, to name just a few of the things Dr Tom has been recognised for over the course of his illustrious career. 

AD was fortunate to have worked under Dr Tom during a time earlier on in his career at Kinhill (now KBR), and we were able to have a wide-ranging conversation with Dr Tom regarding his many professional undertakings, from his credentials and work overseas, contributing as Director to several appointments to ventures for International Aid addressing Disaster and Flood Recovery. He was responsible for the development of some of the earliest approaches to 2D flood modelling of river and floodplains in Australia, developing one of the first 2D flooding modelling softwares which was used as one of the only of its kind during the early advent of the field of computational finite element analysis for this modelling approach. 

Dr Tom was also at the forefront of some of the industry’s earliest approaches to advancing renewable energy, and energy and emission minimisation, and was responsible for development at the strategic level on climate change adaptation and sustainability when they were barely new buzzwords in the industry. Dr Tom was undertaking research and publishing papers as far back as 1988 urging sensible and reasoned considerations to an adaptive approach towards climate change so as to minimise the impact of climate change influences, and plan and design for implementation of projects to directly address this.

Dr Tom has also been involved in major initiatives for energy efficiencies and clean energy sources in Australia. He has been Chair of the Australian Building Energy Council which had its mission to reduce the energy requirements in Australian buildings. He was invited by the Queensland Government in 2000 to chair its Environmental Protection Agency’s Sustainable Energy Innovation Fund (QSEIF).

Dr Tom has achieved some unbelievable successes throughout his career which both Hawkes & AD felt extremely fortunate to be able to speak with him about and share with you. We hope you enjoy listening, Dr Tom is an inspirational yet extremely humble person, and one whose success is unparalleled. 

Sally Prosser is a Voice and Public Speaking Coach, a qualified speech and drama teacher, former TV news reporter, former media spokesperson and Host of 'That Voice' podcast (phew!). 

Hawkes & AD had a conversation with Sally about some of the ideas that have probably haunted us all at some point in time - the ability to communicate clearly and concisely. 

As engineers we've both experienced the pressure of speaking to crowds of different levels of technical proficiency, and the difficulties of being able to perform under the pressure of the spotlight and get the message across to our audience without things going completely pear shaped! (no expert claim here whatsoever!). 

Given Sally's background as Voice and Speaking coach, along with a dash of Water Industry experience as a former media spokesperson for Urban Utilities, we thought Sally would be a fantastic guest to give us some practical pointers and talk to us about some of the things that may plague us when it comes to communicating. We weren't wrong - Sally has a wealth of tips and interesting stories, it was fantastic to chat with her and get a crash course on improving some of our communication skills.

We were thrilled to have Sally as our 007 Undercover Agent, we really hope you enjoy this conversation.

This episode of The Good Drop is a conversation with Ian Cameron, a retired Civil Engineer with 34 years experience in the Water Industry. Hawkes & AD wanted to have this conversation with Ian largely because of the impact Ian has had on our individual water journeys, and to highlight Ian's amazing contribution back to the industry through his Mentoring and Volunteering work that he still continues today.

Ian has had a long involvement with Engineers Australia as a mentor through their formal mentoring program, as a Rotarian Ian has been involved with provision of essential water schemes in Papua New Guinea (and still is) and has also had involvement with the charity Bridges to Prosperity in providing critical access to remote communities. On top of this Ian is part of a weekly Bushcare group providing native species regeneration and is a keen apiarist (of native bees).

Todd Battley is AECOM's Chief Strategy Officer and former Chief Executive Officer of AECOM's Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) region. This was somewhat of a reunion for AD and Todd, having been classmates at James Cook University in Townsville, which they both attended for their University studies - 25 years ago! 

Hawkes & AD sat down for a conversation with Todd to learn a little bit more about himself and his career at one of the world's largest consultancy firms, and asked him about topics such as Leadership and his own personal experience, championing Equality and Diversity in the workplace and the challenges involved in bringing the world into the digital age (in the engineering context). 

We had a really great conversation with Todd, we hope you enjoy. 

Hawkes & AD