An Engineer’s Story - Sylvia McNeall

Name: An Engineer’s Story - Sylvia McNeall
Start: 2026-03-28T18:30:00+11:00
End: 2026-03-28T18:30:00+11:00
Location: Upstairs at Gleebooks

About

6pm for 6:30pm Saturday 28 March

An Engineer’s Story is one of adventure and achievement. It is the story of Malcolm McNeall, a policeman’s son, who became an engineer, a businessman, a grazier, an occasional pianist, and a philanthropist who valued integrity above all.

Driven to seek experiences that would broaden his horizons, after completing his engineering degree at the Department of Railways NSW in 1953, Malcolm worked in Malaya, Canada, and the United States, then returned to Australia to start his family.

Malcolm attributed his success to appointing ‘the right staff’ and to inspiring and training his recruits to become expert engineers and businesspeople. Sylvia McNeall’s book tells of her husband's life as a successful owner of several businesses and three significant rural New South Wales properties. But also his good fortune to have a large, close-knit family, including a son, also an engineer who took on many business responsibilities, and a daughter who loved living on and operating the rural properties.

After writing her life story of resettlement from her native Estonia to Australia, Sylvia McNeall embarked on An Engineer’s Story, a biography of her husband. She is a mother of three sons, the grandmother of six granddaughters, and the step-grandmother of three grandchildren of her second husband, Malcolm McNeall. Together with her husband’s two children, they are a close family unit.

A graphic artist by training, Sylvia gained a Diploma in Illustration in the 1950s at the National Art School, and in the 1990s, completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Sydney and a Master of Arts at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW. She spent some years as the Assistant Director of the New England Regional Art Museum.

Slyvia McNeall will also be joined by Malcolm’s children, Sara and Richard McNeall.