Walter Abraham

Walter Victor "Wally" Abraham, BArch, DipTCP, ARAIA, FAPI (1923 – 20 August 2006) was an Australian architect and town planner, noted for designing the layout of the campus of Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, as well as overseeing the first 20 years of its development.

Early life Walter Abraham was born in Kobe, Japan, and was descended from a prosperous Jewish family of merchants based in London, United Kingdom. His paternal grandfather travelled from England to Japan in 1868, where he established an import-export business in Kobe and eventually settled permanently, marrying a Japanese woman. Walter's father was born in Japan, but was educated at Dulwich College in London and, on his return to Japan to join the family business in Kobe, married a German woman from Hamburg.

Abraham initially followed in his father's footsteps, completing part of his education at Dulwich College. Mindful of the perils of being foreigners from an enemy state during wartime, in 1941 his parents moved from Japan to Australia and he completed his secondary education at Sydney Boys' High School.

Career World War II and early career After leaving school, Abraham joined the Royal Australian Air Force and was seconded to a small intelligence unit which became known as AIRIND, composed of five Australians who could both speak and write Japanese. Their duties involved collecting and examining engines and parts from crashed Japanese aircraft, in order to deduce when and where they had been made. In the latter part of the war, the intelligence produced by AIRIND guided long-range bombing raids to attack factories involved in military production and thus hamper the Japanese war effort. In mid-1944 the unit was transferred to the control of the Pentagon, and was absorbed into the US war effort.

As part of his preliminary work in 1964, Abraham conducted a comprehensive photographic survey of the proposed campus site, which at that time was farmland. He wrote how he found

In October 1964 it was decided that the university would open for teaching in early 1967, and would have a growth target of 1,000 new students each year for the following decade. The new Macquarie University Council decided that the planning of the campus would be conducted internally, rather than by consultants, and as such, an architect-planner's office was established. He was appointed Architect Planner to the university in April 1965 For a 40th anniversary article in Macquarie University's alumni magazine, Sirius, Abraham wrote For its first 19 years, an in-house Architect-Planner’s Office conceived and coordinated Macquarie’s site development. Despite challenging deadlines, our superb site and a supportive Vice-Chancellor’s Office and Council ensured the establishment of an open-ended foundation for growth and change. No university could have been endowed with a more favourable beginning. (his wife Felicity Prudence Abraham had predeceased him in 1994).

In early 2006 it was announced that the main west-east pedestrian spine of the Macquarie University campus, formerly known as University Walk, and which had been undergoing extensive renovation and repaving would be renamed "Wally's Walk" in recognition of Dr Abraham, when it re-opened in April 2006.