Cyril Golding, described both as a living icon and “Mr Gladstone”, was today awarded the Queensland Resources Council Medal by Premier Anna Bligh at the QRC’s annual resources sector lunch.

 

The medal is awarded annually to recognise significant contributions to the state’s minerals and energy sectors.

 

In 1942, at just 22 years of age, Golding founded Cyril Golding Earthmoving, later to become Golding Contractors.

 

The mining services and civil infrastructure company now employs more than 1000 people and operates one of the largest privately owned mining and earthmoving fleets in the southern hemisphere.

 

Golding is a great innovator, inventing tipping truck bodies in the 1940s to allow easy unloading and in the 1980s taking up new computer technology by teaching himself programming language to write his own applications.

 

In the 1960s he forged an enduring partnership with Queensland Alumina in Gladstone and in the 1970s took his business into contract mining and civil works at Mary Kathleen and in the Bowen Basin.

 

Since then Golding Contractors has undertaken major projects in the resources industry, including the Boyne Island Smelter, the RG Tanna Coal Terminal, the Townsville Zinc Refinery, Phosphate Hill mine and numerous coal mine contracts.

 

When Golding stepped down from the company in late 2007 after 65 years at the helm, Golding Contractors had five regional offices and an annual turnover of $450 million.

 

QRC chief executive Michael Roche said Golding was the epitome of a quiet achiever and great philanthropist with his work for the Gladstone community.

 

“Cyril represents the best of the best in our industry and it’s the initiative, passion and inventiveness of people such as Cyril that have made this industry the great creator of prosperity for Queensland that it has become.”

 

Previous winners of the medal include Professor Don McKee and Ian McAuley.