Have you ever wondered what MacGyver would be like if he was born in Australia? If you are unfamiliar with the antique reference, let me fill you in. Back in the awesome ‘80s there was a TV show about a secret agent that could basically solve all the world’s problems with a Swiss Army knife, a stick of gum and some corny catchphrases.
They rebooted it in the 2010s, but I’m talking old school original Richard Dean Anderson MacGyver. Those who know, know. He was a guy that just seemed to find a way to take control and handle any situation. He could put his mind to a problem, a challenge or even a new skill and just work away until he’d mastered the aforementioned situation.
Yes, the show also contained cheesy bad guys and 1980s state-of-the-art terrible special effects explosions, but my focus is on the character development of the lead protagonist, not the leather jackets and cliché villains. I’m referencing MacGyver’s ability to master his surroundings and succeed. Those attributes are what this preamble is all about.
The reason for the preamble and ‘80s nostalgia is because recently, while driving through the Keperra area of Brisbane, I found my attention accosted by an imposing, square edged Champion bonnet, sitting steadfast and staunchly on the front of a Mack Super-Liner. The Super-Liner in question, branded with an anniversary livery, turned out to be a surprise gift for a man whom I would come to learn epitomises many of MacGyver’s best attributes.
For more than 40 years now, Gavin Turner has taken every opportunity, every conundrum, every situation, good and bad and has mastered it. Now, with his sons in tow, the industrial machine fitter-welder who began his business part time while working as a maintenance fitter at an air-conditioning factory has celebrated 40 years of operations with this impeccable Mack Super-Liner.
As seems standard with transport stories, sitting down to learn the ins and outs of a truck that has caught my eye often leads to an amazing origin story. The Gavin Turner and Boulder Wall Construction story follows that trend. It began back in 1984 when Gavin wandered home after a hard day fixing breakdowns at the air-conditioning factory to inform his lovingly tolerant wife Fiona that he was going to buy a Bobcat and move some dirt around.
“I remember coming home one day and just saying to Fiona I think I’m going to buy a Bobcat,” Gavin laughs.
“I hadn’t driven one before. So, when I bought it, I went over to my cousin’s place who had some acreage and learned how to operate it. I kept working and would do odd jobs on the weekend. I would pick the jobs that weren’t technical while I was learning, like moving dirt into a chook shed, or knock the fill over. I got the hang of it pretty quick.”
Gavin hadn’t grown up surrounded by earthmoving influences, but he grew up with a fascination of the industry.
“I’ve always loved everything earthmoving,” he exclaims with passion.
“When I was a kid, everyone else was getting Matchbox sports cars, but I was buying toy dump trucks and dozers.”
It was that enthusiasm that gave Gavin the drive to purchase that original Bobcat. For those wondering, it was an old petrol 632 with a 1300 Cortina motor in it. Not exactly state of the art, even back then, but it did the job.
Almost hand in hand with an earthmoving addiction was a growing truck obsession forming. The two genres are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they are almost codependent. There’s no better example of this than the fact that with the purchase of Gavin’s first Bobcat also came the purchase of his first truck.
“The first truck I bought was a second hand J3 petrol Bedford, I bought it to move the Bobcat around,” Gavin says.
“I had to make ramps up to get the Bobcat into it, and I’d flit off to jobs throughout the weekend.”
It wasn’t BWC back in those days – that name didn’t originate until a bit later. In fact, Gavin was Turnico Bobcat Hire for quite a while. That changed to Brisbane Earthmoving Pty Ltd once he’d gotten more gear under his belt. Odd jobs changed to specialised jobs and pretty soon specialised jobs with a finesse for forming rock walls, leading to the creation of the name Boulder Wall Constructions.
Among the gear acquisitions, Gavin’s truck resume was getting quite creative as well. As mentioned, it began with the J3 and then its successor, a T4100 Mazda. Both early acquisitions for BWC were in Gavin’s ‘learning the ropes’ phase. By the time he had progressed from site clean-up jobs to more specialised work, which involved carting rock to job sites himself, he had a D-series Ford and a CAT powered Louisville. Gavin even ran at one stage, I kid you not, a Fuso with a 671 in it. His truck affection knew no limits as he was building the business. Instead, it was driven by his MacGyver-ness.
“Back then it was all about the body rather than the truck,” he admits.
“It was what we could get to do the job without compromising that mattered.”
From that first petrol Bobcat and J3 Bedford, Gavin found himself and the company on a slow and steady expansion to the point that they currently have over 80 staff on board, not including subbies. As far as equipment goes, along with over 30 truck and dog combinations, there is every possible piece of earthmoving equipment the Tonka Toy dreamers could conceive, but in real life. Excavators ranging from 1.5t all the way to 90t. Dozers, loaders, graders, jaw crushers, reclaimers. Let’s not forget the dump trucks, water trucks and service trucks. I am unsure how big Gavin’s Matchbox earthmoving collection was, but his BWC collection has it all.
Back to my MacGyver comparisons again – the rise and success of BWC hasn’t been an accident, it also hasn’t been a directive. It has come about from Gavin’s natural response to opportunities, good and bad.
“Any opportunity that presented itself, we’ve always approached with the right mindset, do our due diligence and if I know we can deliver for our client, we will make it work,” Gavin says.
“It’s never been about the money for us. Doing the job and finding a way to complete it for our customers is the important part. Don’t get me wrong, you’ve got to take the odd stiff arm in a scrum sometimes, but I’ve never left a job unfinished.”
That gut level approach and moral belief has been the core of the company. It may seem a bit cheesy when a TV protagonist like MacGyver portrays it, but when it’s genuine like Gavin, you can see why he has the results. It’s also why, after 40 years, there is a packed table when Gavin has his 20-year employees’ lunches.
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“We’ve got over a dozen people at our 20-year lunch, we have people that have been here for more than 30 years,” Gavin says.
“We’ve always been respectful of our workers, it’s a two-way street. They dig deep for us, and we do the same for them. We believe that anyone that comes to us, when or if they leave, we want to see them in a better position than when they came here. We sure as hell wouldn’t be here without them.”
You’ll notice the regular jumping between singular and plural references from Gavin. That’s because BWC is a family company and, while Gavin started the old 632 Bobcat, he is now joined by his two sons Brad and Jeff. The two boys have both taken roundabout routes to end up beside their Dad, with Brad becoming a draughtsman and Jeff an urban planner. Once they opted to work in the family company, however, it wasn’t in suit and ties. Like their old man, the boys have gotten grease under their nails in nearly every aspect of the company.
“The boys never started in the office,” Gavin attests.
“They were changing tyres, driving trucks, changing kingpins, putting buckets on machines, all that sort of stuff. Doing services, oil changes, even detailing trucks.”
The advantage of this path means that whether the boys are consulting with clients or chewing the fat with the workers, they can understand and relate.
I mention the boys, Brad and Jeff, not just to show how the MacGyver attitude and work ethic has spilled down through the generations, but because it was the boys that came up with the concept of the truck that brought me here in the first place.
BWC’s 40th anniversary was back in July 2024. Gavin and Fiona, along with the BWC family, decided to celebrate with a big function. While Gavin was preoccupied with all the organisation, his two boys took it upon themselves to arrange a special gift for their Dad as well.
“The boys organised it all, I probably should have noticed it going on, but I didn’t. They’d been asking about the Champion bonnet as well, because I always like that, but I never caught on,” Gavin admits with a laugh.
While BWC has had its fair share of manufacturers within the fleet and still do, the Bulldog brand has always had a representation somewhere. It’s a brand Gavin has long admired and, in the earthmoving industry, he has had great reward from them.
“We’ve got Tridents and Super-Liners; I do love the Super-Liners. What is a labouring day for the Tridents is a stroll in the park for the Super-Liners. They are perfect for us, and the turning circle is exceptional,” he says.
Hence when Brad and Jeff chose to award their Dad with an anniversary rig, the Mack Super-Liner with a 13 coat candy apple red paint job, a built tough Tony Champion bonnet and custom-made king bar was their go-to creation.
For the record though, the fairy tale 40th handover took a bit of a Shrek-esque fairy tale deviation before the party.
“We had planned to have a film crew and that at the event, we were going to roll it up outside and bring Dad out, get it all on video like candid camera,” Jeff Turner says.
“But it just didn’t align.”
As a parent, we’ve all had our kids front up at some stage saying, ‘oh we were going to do this for your birthday, but we ran out of time,’ and it would be fun to tar Brad and Jeff with that brush, which I am still inclined to do, mind you. Truth is, the boys had planned it out perfectly, but anyone who has been involved in a new truck build will know exactly how difficult it is to keep to a timeline. With so many contributors and so many delays possible, it is no surprise that when it came time for the anniversary party the boys had to opt for plan B.
The Monday after the 40th anniversary event, the boys wandered into Gavin’s office and presented him with the personalised plate ‘BWC40’. Gavin laughs as he recalls how blown away he was purely by the license plate.
“I actually got a bit emotional; it was really nice of them. Then they informed me that it should have had something hanging off it, which of course was the Super-Liner,” he remembers fondly.
What contributed to the delivery delay was the extent to which the boys went in preparing their Dad’s gift. Generally speaking, tip trucks get a pretty hard life – there’s very little glamour at the bottom of a muddy or dusty quarry and no red carpet on developing worksites. BWC has always ensured its trucks stand out on the highways as they represent the attitude and approach of the company as a whole. The trucks are never coated in chrome, but rely instead on colour and just a few shiny but sturdy additions. For the 40th Super-Liner, however, restraint was thrown out the window.
The Tony Champion custom bonnet was literally the biggest alteration to the truck. Gavin had commented to the boys after seeing versions of the squared up old school bonnet appearing around and they made sure that was the first option on the shopping list. Next up was colour. While BWC used to have the nickname of ‘The Jellybean Trucks’, there has always been a tendency to float back to the maroon/red hue. With that in mind, the boys settled on a gorgeous candy apple red colour. The truck was then sent off to Bel Air in Brisbane, where it received seven base coats, followed by six clear coats, resulting in a colour that wows you from every angle.
Fitting the bin and building the trailer was a task assigned to the team at Shephard Transport Equipment. Gavin and the BWC team have built a solid relationship with the STE boys over their years of operation.
“They have very similar core values and ethic to us,” he says, proudly confessing that since day dot, every new bin purchased by Boulder Wall Construction has the Shephard Transport Equipment branding.
The next difficulty is adding some custom work to a truck that will be bouncing around quarries and job sites for the next five plus years. For that, the boys sent it out to Ryan at BlingHQ.
“We took the truck to Ryan and gave him a little more rope than we normally do,” Gavin admits with a smile.
“But I knew with Ryan, he would make it look perfect. I didn’t want it to look like a circus truck, but I wanted him to make it special, and he did a great job.”
Getting the truck to be both practical and presentable isn’t easy with a tipper’s work environment, but BlingHQ added the right amount of add-ons so Gavin got his simple, minimalistic look while still cracking necks when it hit the road.
There are a long list of people that deserve recognition for this amazing anniversary ride, and a long list of people who deserve recognition for BWC’s arrival at the 40-year mark. I will most likely get requests by Gavin to rewrite a few aspects of this story as Gavin is an extremely humble man. But credit where credit is due – i’s not easy these days keeping your head above water, finding a way to confront conundrums, persevere through problems and navigate the nuances of a highly competitive industry, all while prioritising your workers and customers, making a buck and sticking to your own business and personal morals. Well again, that’s a MacGyver move. To do all that while keeping your trucking and earthmoving passion fuelled and, in this case, highly visible, it’s impressive. Therefore, Boulder Wall Constructions deserves an acknowledgement as big as the bonnet on its anniversary Bulldog.
Now let’s wait and see what the family comes up with for their 50th.
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