McCosker Contracting Pty Ltd is a privately-owned Gladstone civil construction company offering a diverse range of services to the mining, construction and industrial sectors. With 25 years of experience in civil construction, material processing infrastructures and quarry operations, we have built on our strengths to become a very successful Australian owned company in civil construction works, poly welding services and residue tailing management including mud farming, dam lifts and maintenance operations on residue disposal areas. Farming started with the idea in 2004, where McCosker designed, built and operate our amphibious machines known as “Scrollers, servicing residue tailing facilities throughout Australia. Since then McCosker have built and operated seven machines across different tailing facilities, with our current operations located at QAL, and Rio Tinto’s Yarwun and Gove sites. We started with a Piston Bully snow plough concept that we were trialling as a replacement to a dozer, and we started pulling it apart to commence the building of the Scrollers.

We then engineered the base first principles from scratch, with our own designers and a lot of research and development.

The intent, which are not too far away from, is to have them totally autonomous and remote controlled.

The first of the amphibious, buoyant 15-tonne machines were chain driven, but all succeeding models have been propelled using McCosker’s custom, locally derived, hydraulic system. The concept came from a discussion with a client when we were repairing tailings dams and doing dam wall lifts to extend dam wall capacity, and wanted to give faming a go of the tailings. We weren’t actively looking for tailings faming, but we had to address it if we wanted to do the bulk earthworks and other jobs McCosker were performing at this time.

We spoke to suppliers who had history in tailings operations, and they weren’t doing exactly what we wanted, and didn’t have the same vision as us. So we thought we would invest in developing this concept.

The McCosker Technology and what we are doing is unique and it is new. Our machines are totally amphibious, they can float and go anywhere on tailings dams.

Theoretically you cannot bog them, which means you can go to places you could not when conventional machines. The machines technically squeeze the water out of the mud and compacts it at the same time, so the water comes out of the tailings and then it is compacted with other earthmoving plant.

By squeezing and compacting the tailings you increase the capacity and the life longevity of the dam, which is far more economically viable and longer lasting for the client.

Since concept and design of the first Scroller, McCosker have been doing a lot of research and development and improving each machine.

We have built them as the demand came, and the productivity gains of our Scrollers, compared to what some of the others have had in the past have been a significant increase.

They are up to three times faster and more productive than our competitors.