Earlier this year on a cool May evening, long-time Master Builders member Reg Burubu gathered friends, family and colleagues at Eureka Tower for a celebratory look back at half a century in the concrete business. As champagne flutes touched, BRD Industries marked fifty years of continuous operation from their Brunswick headquarters, helping to create the foundations of a constellation of buildings that now surrounded them 89 stories below.

Reg had received a 20-year certificate from Master Builders earlier that week in recognition of his steady alliance with the organisation, and was visibly pleased—smiling for countless photographs with his guests, reading a few prepared words and sharing stories of how the business had evolved over the decades.

“I feel quite proud of the fact that I started BRD back on 1 June, 1965,” he said. “That certificate is on the wall in the front room of our office where people can see it when they walk in.”

BRD Industries has traded at 256-260 Victoria Street from its first day, in the centre of Brunswick, a neighbourhood Reg selected for its central location and long history as the hub of the Melbourne’s distinctly Italian concrete culture. Reg had his first exposure to the concrete business at 19, when he performed accounting for another concretor on nearby Breese Street.

After four years, Reg launched his own business with partners Dino Belia (an old family friend) and Ray Partenio (his uncle) with, he notes, “little more than  Toyota ute and a couple of concretors”. Ray left the partnership a year later and Reg and Dino went on to build the business with a substantial number of highly respected clients. BRD collaborated with prominent builders such as W.O. Longmuir and Sons, Van Driel Pty Ltd, W.C Burne and Civil and Civic (eventually Lend Lease) among many other construction luminaries.

“I was never a hands-on man,” Reg explains, recalling the days before pumps began to be used in the late 1960s. “Foundations were poured by tipping concrete out of a heavy wheelbarrow. The concrete went in, but then so did I. The other men had a good laugh, and I thought ‘Reg, stick to the paperwork’.”

Of all the projects that compose BRD’s impressive portfolio, perhaps the best known are City Square at Collins and Swanston Streets, and the National Tennis Centre at Rod Laver Arena—this one in particular a colossal achievement for an operation the size of BRD and a remarkable contribution to Melbourne’s international stature as a tennis capital. On his office wall, a framed newspaper clip commemorates the feat.

In 1997 Reg’s stepson, David, assumed the BRD helm. Having come from an accounting background himself, he was uniquely qualified to lead an operation that was built on both financial prudence and an appreciation of the hard physical trade of concrete work.

But old habits die hard. As director of BRD, Reg maintains a business role, though one slightly less active than in years prior. “The easy thing to say is that I’m not doing much,” he says casually, “but the truth is that I still like going to work, and I’m still involved in the estimating side of things.”