Walking alongside it is one of Simon Chamberlain’s team, a surveyor and a machine control operator, checking every metre as it goes down, making sure the thickness is right, the height is right, the tolerances are met.
Most people will never know they were there. They will just drive on the road.
Simon Chamberlain, General Manager of Aptella’s Infrastructure and Paving Services division, has spent his career in moments like that one. He started as a surveyor, learning the job from the ground up, and worked his way up to run the operation that is now one of the most experienced specialist paving services teams in the country. He is not someone who talks abstractly about infrastructure. For him, roads have always been personal.
There are people in this industry, he says, who have spent their entire working lives building better roads for this country. His team includes some of them.
“We have experts that have been in the industry for 20 years. Their whole lives they have worked in roads, bringing good roads to this country.” Simon Chamberlain, General Manager, Infrastructure & Paving Services
That depth of experience is what sits behind every project the team takes on. And across Queensland over the past two decades, they have taken on most of them.
“Basically all the major projects in Queensland, we have had somebody involved in the last 20 years” says Chamberlain.
Aptella is best known as a national supplier of positioning and automation technology. The Infrastructure and Paving Services division is something different. This team does not just sell equipment, they show up.
On a major highway project, that means surveyors and PaveSmart machine control operators embedded directly with the paving crew, shift after shift, ensuring every layer of asphalt goes down to the right thickness, width, and height. It means Quality Assurance reports produced at the end of every shift, documenting that the work meets specification. It means pre construction ride quality testing to establish a baseline, and post-construction testing to prove the result. For airport projects, where the tolerances are even tighter and a runway line marking must land within five millimetres of where it is meant to be, it means bringing a level of precision that leaves nothing to chance.
The work spans the full life of a project, from the first survey grid to the final conformance report. Clients like Downer, Boral, and Fulton Hogan keep coming back not because Aptella is the biggest name in the room, but because the work is done properly.
What Chamberlain talks about most when you ask him about his team is not the technology. It is the people, and what happens when experienced people are encouraged to actually talk to each other.
“You create that little nugget of brilliance when you have all of those people talking to each other. You do not get that in bigger companies because they are more siloed. But because we touch the whole process, we can link all of those things together” he says.
The team includes engineers, surveyors, machine control operators, and CAD specialists. Many have worked their way up from site to office, which means there is no translation problem between what is happening on the ground and what is being planned in the office. Chamberlain sees that as one of the team’s most underrated strengths.
“We can explain things at the ground level and at the engineering level and bridge the gap. That is where a lot of other people struggle” reflects Chamberlain.
Being part of Aptella gives the team a reach that a standalone specialist firm simply could not have. Offices in every Australian state. The ability to mobilise crews quickly. Access to a deep network of technology expertise, which means that when a project needs a particular piece of equipment, the team can assess what will actually work on site rather than defaulting to whatever is being pushed commercially.
But Chamberlain is clear that size has not changed the way the team operates.
“In essence, we are still a small business operating in a big business, which I believe gives our clients the best of everything.”
It is a positioning that is hard to replicate. Large contractors have scale but not specialisation. Boutique operators have focus but not reach. Chamberlain believes his team occupies a genuinely unique space.
“There is not actually another company that has the same thing as we do” he muses.
The team is Queensland based but expanding fast. New South Wales is an active focus, with NATA accreditation already in place for ride quality testing. Western Australia is next, where road construction specifications are similar and the market for specialist paving services is growing.
With major infrastructure investment underway across the country and the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games bringing a wave of new project activity to the region, the team is well placed for what comes next.
But for Chamberlain, the motivation has never really been about growth. It is the same thing it has always been. Do the work well. Make the roads better. Know that it matters.
“Roads are more than a means of transport,” he says. “If we do our job well, they keep families together.”
Every road you drive on was built by someone. The best ones were built by people who cared. For Chamberlain, that’s what he says his team can truly deliver.Â
