ABSTRACT
The Grollo Tower was the most adventurous and contentious of all Docklands proposals – a five-year saga with its roots in the migrant success story of the Grollo dynasty. Luigi Grollo, the family patriarch, migrated to Melbourne in 1928 where he built a family business from concreting gutters to become one of Australia's largest construction companies. In the early 1980s the Grollo company, by then in the control of sons Bruno and Rino Grollo, became the builder and part owner of the Rialto office tower, which remains Melbourne and Australia's tallest. The company was more than a family dynasty, however, including a large coterie of foremen and workers with enough loyalty to guarantee a performance that was rare in the industry – on time and on budget. This success was founded on Italian cultural and family bonds coupled with a masculine egalitarian ethos, mateship and hard work. These achievements and reputation were threatened in 1992–93 when a tax fraud investigation was launched and Bruno and Rino Grollo were charged with conspiracy to bribe a Federal Police officer. 1 The patriarch, Luigi Grollo, died in 1994 just before these charges came to court. Bruno Grollo's dream of building the world's tallest building first emerged around this time, partly as a monument to his father. Yet there was nothing sombre about Grollo's symbolic program: ‘It would be a golden building for a golden city for the golden times to come … it has to put the city on the world map’. 2
