Australian Freelancing

My Proto Free Lancing journey

It all started way back in 1996… The Great Dividing Range Mining Company grew out of a childhood love of railways. My father was, and still is, in the mining industry and we ended up in Charters Towers (Queensland) in the early 90s. A small town roughly 130km from the coastal city of Townsville in North Queensland, Charters Towers at the time was a small yard and station stop for Queensland Railway's (QR) ‘Inlander’ passenger train and near constant parade of mineral freights from Mt Isa to an export port.

My parents were friends of the owners of the pub beside the station and I spent many an afternoon with their son Luke sitting by the tracks watching the action unfold in front of us. As my mate Rob says, “this was a defining moment for me as a young child” and cemented several ideas in my head for what I dreamed of my ‘Queensland Mining Company’ (QMC) would be. I would spend time drawing with pencil and paper locomotives and rolling stock for the QMC until we started learning of the state's geography at school.

1996 the ‘Great Dividing Range Mining Company’ (GDRMCo) came to be, a rebranding of sorts of the QMC idea. At the time I had yet to begin reading magazines on railways, but I scooped up every nugget of information I could. That mainly came from Life-Like catalogues and what books I could find in the library, many of these being North American focused led