How Two Greek Brothers From Kalymnos Built a $50m Darwin Construction Empire

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When Mihail “Mick” Halkitis arrived in Australia from the Greek island of Kalymnos in the 1950s, Darwin was a small, remote northern city and the life he would eventually build there was difficult to imagine.

He and his brother Theo began taking construction contracts in 1960 with little more than a compressor and a jackhammer. More than six decades later, the business they founded has grown into HB Group, one of the Northern Territory’s significant privately owned construction and materials companies.

A profile by journalist Damon Kitney published in The Australian this week put the scale of that transformation into perspective. HB now employs more than 140 people and has annual turnover of about $50 million, with interests spanning concrete, quarrying, construction materials, transport and property. Mick’s sons, John and Nick Halkitis, now run the business.

But the Halkitis story belongs to a much larger chapter of Greek-Australian history.

Both Mick and Theo were born on Kalymnos, the Dodecanese island whose economy and identity were shaped for generations by sponge diving. Theo arrived in Australia first, among Kalymnians drawn to northern Australia in the 1950s during attempts to employ their Mediterranean diving expertise in the pearl-shell industry. Mick followed later and initially took whatever work he could find, including labouring at an isolated cattle station in the Northern Territory.

The experiment with Kalymnian divers was short-lived, but the migration it helped begin was not. ABC News reported earlier this year that about a dozen Kalymnian men were initially brought to Darwin and Broome in the 1950s to collect pearl shell. The conditions were very different from those of the Aegean and the venture faltered, but migrants found work on land and more families followed. Darwin would eventually become home to what the ABC describes as the largest Kalymnian expatriate community in the world.

For the Halkitis brothers, opportunity was found in construction.

HB began with civil works, taking on earthworks, drainage, kerbing, bridges and other infrastructure across the Northern Territory and the Kimberley. Over time, the family expanded into the materials needed to supply its own projects. HB Concrete entered the market in 1992, while the group acquired its quarry operation the following year. Today its concrete plants operate at Winnellie and Yarrawonga, while its quarry on the Arnhem Highway supplies aggregate and other construction materials across the region.

The company’s history also runs through one of the defining events in modern Darwin.

Cyclone Tracy struck on Christmas Eve 1974, destroying about 70 per cent of Darwin’s buildings and 80 per cent of its homes. Only around six per cent of houses remained habitable. The Darwin Reconstruction Commission was established in February 1975 and oversaw the rebuilding or repair of more than 2,500 homes over the following three years.

HB was among the local contractors involved in the city that emerged in the decades after the cyclone. The business went on to undertake works associated with Darwin’s expanding northern suburbs and spent years on highway construction through Kakadu National Park. Its current operations supply projects ranging from hospitals and commercial developments to roads and Defence-related construction.

For Nick Halkitis, who joined the family company in 1986 at 25, the business was something he entered from the bottom rather than inherited from behind a desk. He began assisting a surveyor, moved on to driving a water truck and was running jobs within several years. His older brother John had joined in 1978.

Nick belonged to a generation able to move more easily between the world of their migrant parents and the institutions of the country in which they had grown up. English gave him a fluency with government and business his father had needed to acquire gradually. His Greek was different. He did not attend Greek school and learnt the language at home, leaving him, as he told The Australian, comfortable with the vocabulary of family and everyday life but less so with the language of politics, science or mathematics.

Mick, meanwhile, never entirely loosened his connection with Kalymnos.

Later in life he bought and restored a row of shops on the island. After his death in 2019, the properties passed to John and Nick, who continued restoring them. Their commercial value appears almost beside the point. They remain a physical link to the place their father left before building most of his life on the other side of the world.

Mick’s standing extended beyond the family company. He served as president of the Kalymnian Brotherhood in Darwin from 1980 to 1988 and in 2018 received the Medal of the Order of Australia for service to the building and construction industry and to the community.

He had also planned carefully for what would happen to the family business after him. Years before his death, he began transferring property to his children and established a succession structure that allowed HB to continue without disruption.

Now John and Nick face the same question from the other side.

All three of Nick’s children, Michael, Anthony and Georgia, work in the business, while one of John’s five children currently works alongside him. The family is already discussing how the next transfer of ownership might work.

There is another inheritance Nick is thinking about too.

Two years ago, he travelled to Kalymnos with his wife Helen and their children. For a third generation raised in Australia, the island could easily have become little more than a name in the family history. He wanted them to see the place themselves.

“If you don’t take them there, if you don’t show them, it’s very easy for that connection to disappear,” he told The Australian.

For a family whose Australian story began with two brothers from Kalymnos, that connection now stretches across three generations, thousands of kilometres and much of the physical development of modern Darwin.

Read also Theo Hatzistergos and the Uneasy Legacy of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’

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