Roberts was born in the Adelaide suburb of Evandale,[1][2] into a family that lived in the country township of Dublin, South Australia.

[7] After beginning his working life as a junior porter in a South Australian Railways carriage shed, Roberts progressed to performing the exacting tasks of a train controller.

[8]: 262  In the latter capacity, he oversaw the restructure and dieselisation of the 58-kilometre (36-mile) railway operated by the company between Broken Hill and Burns, New South Wales, and in the 1960s the creation of four subsidiaries.

[6] In 1972, in the wake of the closure of the tramway and its replacement by a government-operated standard gauge line two years earlier, Roberts became corporate managing director of the renamed Silverton Limited and its subsidiaries.

Under his leadership the company, still headquartered in Melbourne, continued mine shunting in Broken Hill and began working on property development and rail construction projects around Australia.