This was an interesting one.
I had pulled the pin from Barrick at Cowal due to my useless boss and the nepotistic yank GM with the small man syndrome - yes this guy had two-inch soles on his work boots to make him more than four feet tall. It didn't help - his crappy personality still shone right through.
Anyway, no doubt I have written all about this in a previous post, but perhaps not yet, this being one of the drags of writing my story in non-sequential order.
So I had left Cowal, had my two op's done, and was unemployed. I was still with the ex at that stage. It was time to look for another job. Interestingly, an old colleague from Cement Australia - John Reeve - contacted me out of the blue. I don't remember the exact details, but he was keen for me to have a look at a role developing the burgeoning mining department for a Queensland contractor called J.J. McDonald & Sons, or JMS Engineering. I didn't have a whole lot of options available at the time, so I flew to Brisbane to meet with him, and the boss of their mining group, who it turned out in due course, was a bit of a dud.
Still, the prospect of a move back to QLD, and the variety on offer in tendering and working various projects, was too good to ignore. Plus my in-box wasn't exactly over-flowing with offers at that point, so I accepted, and off we went. Initially, I was living in Townsville, which is where their head office was, although in time the corporate office moved to Brisbane. To begin with, it was a boring job. I started slowly building a database of operating costs, to enable more logical pricing of jobs as time went on. I helped a bit here and there in our operations - at Macarthur River (which is where JMS developed their taste to build a mining group) and Blackwater Coal, both huge operations that were new to me at the time.
It was when the Brisbane office began to pick up that my time at JMS got interesting. That also coincided with when my boss left the business. I have never been able to find a trace of him online since, so God only knows what happened to him. Not that it matters. JR put me in charge of our mining development efforts at that time. I had help too, JMS also employed a couple of my old colleagues from CA - Kevin Savoury and Bob Barnard. Both decent blokes, especially Bob, who became somewhat of a mentor of mine. Bob also became a director of JR's next enterprise, ASN Cement in Malaysia, which I eventually got involved with. That was both to my advantage and eventual detriment. But such is life, is it not? That's kind of how things tend to go with my life, I have found.
So I moved to a suburb called Hamilton, which was in the ritzy part of Brisbane. It was a super spot - I could walk to work when the weather was good. It was near the river, and not too far from the freeway, airport, and pretty much everything else. My cousin Phil was also in Brisbane, and I did enjoy catching up with him periodically. Check my post on him to see more.
We mucked around with a number of tenders, and started pushing more into WA. JMS had a Perth office already, but it was all civils, no mining then. A job came up for a trial leach pad construction at a start-up called Jump Up Dam. It was not all that far from Kalgoorlie, my old stomping ground, so it was a great opportunity to go visit some old haunts. We tendered the job, won it, and because they needed JMS to provide a QM, I ended up having to go run it. Our main PM Goose was the guy calling the shots on the ground, I was mainly there just for my ticket and to do the occasional arm wave. On one of my stints, I was able to take half a day and go exploring. I went past old Tarmoola, but couldn't get in the front gate. I was able to drive around the back at the foot of the waste dumps, but wasn't able to get to the pit, which was really what I wanted to see. On the way back I stopped at the old Kookynie pub, which is kind of in the middle of nowhere, and a nice historic spot to stop for a meal and a cold one or two. On another day I had call to go into Kal, mainly looking for gear to hire. So driving around one of the industrial estates, I spotted a machine that looked damn familiar - old EX3, the 100t digger we had at Tarmoola. It ended up being written off as Ab dropped it off a bench one day, and was damn lucky he didn't kill himself in the process. I don't think it ever worked again, and I was rapt to spot it in a yard in Kal. You can still vaguely see the Gwalia logo on the side of it.
So, the Peter Secker / Watpac era was the end for me at JMS. I didn't like him and he didn't like me. Yeah, the McDonald cowboy style didn't really work all that well for me either, but at least it allowed me freedom, and I did make them plenty of money. So, sitting in the office one Saturday, was when Dean rang me to interview me for Penjom. That was the end of this chapter, and the beginning of the next, hugely important one. Thanks JMS, I did enjoy the ride!
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