Gerry Noonan

GERRY NOONAN was born in 1950 and grew up in Georgetown in the mid North of South Australia, the son of a wheat and wool farmer. The farm was not large enough to support three sons so Gerry found work driving tractors and farm trucks and working in shearing sheds. In 1968 MacMahon Construction came to a neighbouring town, to build a railway formation from Gladstone to Jamestown. He started with MacMahons as a labourer and driving a CAT D4 towing a roller. He was soon operating a scraper, along with some grader and dozer work.

After twelve months in Gladstone Gerry was moved to Alice Springs, NT, to work on road construction, and then to Tennant Creek. During the next five years he became a leading hand and an earthworks foreman on the section of the south road reconstruction south of Alice Springs. This continued for some years as the new road headed south to the SA/NT border. The company grew rapidly acquiring heavy plant for the many contracts it won nationally. Gerry moved into the transport side of the business, attracted by his love of trucks. With his large earthmoving equipment background the role suited him very well and he found himself travelling between the depots in Perth, Adelaide, Alice Springs and Brisbane.

Gerry spent the best part of thirty years with MacMahons, moving plant and equipment to large infrastructure projects nationwide. When MacMahons made the decision to move the business in another direction Gerry chose to stay with transport, and found himself in Adelaide for the next ten years, working for James Contract Supplies doing heavy haulage towing platform trailers, low loaders, cranes and heavy equipment nation wide. He played a major role transporting heavy and over-dimension components to Olympic Dam for the Olympic Dam Expansion Project (OEP) in the 1990s. The next eight years saw Gerry working with Edgars Transport in Adelaide doing road train and tipper work. Health problems forced him to slow down; he is retired and living in Adelaide with his wife Annie.

Gerry is a member of the Old South Road Dirt Runners Club; a community of truckies who travelled what is now the Stuart Highway before it was sealed. Every trip was an adventure, you shared the road with people who became lifelong friends and you always gave a mate a hand. Gerry is well known in the bush for his 'make it happen' attitude.