AT WORK WITH / OLIVIA BURKE OF BURKE URBAN
PLEASE TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF AND YOUR BACKGROUND…
That's a big question! I grew up in a family where my father, Kym Burke, owned a business in property development when I was very young, so I grew up being driven around in the back of a vehicle looking at properties and vacant allotments of land out in the country and around South Australia. I was exposed to this context of taking a broad-acre land site and imagining and envisaging it as a new community from a very young age.
I personally took on my own path for a really long time – I never wanted to be known as ‘Daddy’s little girl' so I travelled overseas and lived in the UK, Canada and Melbourne for quite some time doing my own thing learning particularly skills in marketing and selling.
When I came back to Australia in my mid-twenties I did acknowledge that there was a great opportunity for me to work in our family business, so I started working for Burke Urban in my mid-twenties but with no other than that subtle experience of being driven around and being exposed to development through family discussions. I had no training, I did my degree in Commerce with a major in marketing but I didn’t have any specific expertise in development.
On the first day, my father put two boxes on my desk – one with a whole lot of papers and files in it for a project that he wanted to do on the Yorke Peninsula in Port Vincent and another one for a development in the Barossa Valley, each of 100 allotments so I learnt the process on the job, by being thrown in the deep end. I was doing all elements of engineering and working on planning, project management, marketing and selling so I really had to take those projects from being
