Hardcastle & Richards

Both Roy Hardcastle (who obtained his BCE at the University of Melbourne in 1948) and Harold Richards were major contributors to the Melbourne School of Engineering, University of Melbourne for over 50 years as educators and donors as visiting alumni and in the case of Richards, Associate Professor. Their involvement began in 1962 when Richards recalled: ‘Professor Francis at the University invited us in 1962 to participate in his students’ final year projects...I think this was an industry first.’

The company was taken over by Dames & Moore in 1995 at a time it had grown to about 130 staff under Managing Director Russell Smith. At this time it had offices in Melbourne, Perth, Sydney, and Broken Hill, Australia, as well as operations in Jakarta, Indonesia and had net revenues of A$8.6 million. The firm was involved in '...multidisciplinary engineering and project management services for the mining, infrastructure and industrial markets plus offshore structural and process engineering for the oil and gas sector', However, the company had ceased by 2006 when it was last listed at 616 St Kilda Road, Melbourne. However, the Broken Hill division was taken over by the US URS Corporation and continues to operate serving the mining industry.