Milestone birthday for Woodside legend Charles Allen

^{Cover image: Signing reams of documents is a small part of the CEO's job but one that can be time-consuming. Charles estimated he signed his name more than 500 times during one marathon signing session in the 1980s.}

As Woodside CEO and Managing Director between 1982 and 1996, Charles led the development of the vast hydrocarbon resources of Western Australia’s North West Shelf.

Under his leadership, the North West Shelf Joint Venture took one of Australia’s largest resources projects from vision to reality, setting the strong safety and values culture that persists to this day.

Charles's children Malcolm, Rosamund and James and his second wife Jocelyn, together with some former Woodside colleagues, were among those at the birthday bash at the family home in Melbourne.

James described the party as a low-key celebration where everybody chipped in with bringing or helping prepare food. Pomp and circumstance, he pointed out, were never part of his parents’ lives.

“Mum (Angela) and Dad were very down to earth and never cared who you were, it was about your values,” he remarked. “They never worried about status and didn’t like people who thought too much of themselves.”

He recalled one Christmas party where a Prime Minister sat next to Chris, the family’s cleaner.

“I remember my mum saying, ‘He’s my friend – why shouldn’t he be sitting next to the PM?’”

James said his father was proud to represent the thousands who had worked tirelessly to create something for Australia, and he was motivated by much more than making Woodside an energy giant.

It was always about the people,” James insisted. Front and centre was ensuring the safety of those people. “Safety was his big thing,” he said.

I remember him saying: ‘No employee should go to work and get hurt. Why should anyone die?’”

“He really enforced safety of the team, and it was never done for accolades.”

The other great driver was Charles’s desire to build an Australian company – one that created skilled jobs for Australians and a long-term revenue stream for the nation to build prosperity.

“He was very passionate about this,” James said.

Charles Allen was born in England on 3 April 1936. His father was a Melbournian, his mother an Englishwoman.

His father worked in Africa as a mining engineer while the Allen family lived in England. On leaving school, Charles completed two years’ National Service, before studying geology and geophysics at Cambridge University and Imperial College London.

He joined Shell International in the Netherlands in 1961 and worked in New Zealand, Turkey, Netherlands, Egypt, England and Nigeria.

After rising to senior levels at Shell, he arrived in Australia in 1979 on secondment from Shell to become the Executive Director of Woodside.

In those days, Woodside was in a joint venture with Shell and Burmah Oil and headquartered in Melbourne.

James remembers his father spent a great deal of time travelling each week to Perth and each fortnight to Europe to seek funding for the North West Shelf Venture – an ambitious and hugely promising undertaking that needed an estimated A$1.4 billion in funding.

^{Former CEO and MD Charles Allen, surrounded by family at his recent 90th birthday celebration in Melbourne.}

In 1982, Charles decided to leave Shell and take the position of Woodside CEO and MD.

“At that time, he was the most senior person ever to leave Shell,” James said. “And he joined a small company – I think there were only 13 employees at Woodside’s headquarters at that time, including the coffee lady!

“He switched to Woodside because he saw an opportunity make something amazing out of this as a public Australian company and not absorbed into a larger foreign-owned and operated multinational. He thought, ‘I can actually help build something and give something back to Australia’.

“To Dad, Woodside remained a big family, even as it became one of Australia’s great global companies.”