McMahon Services into national engineering/ construction after a family haulage start in South Australia in 1957

Glen McMahon (top right) and sons David and Andrew (top left) built the family haulage company into a versatile civil engineering and construction company national wide, including taking its equipment to remote inland projects.
Images courtesy McMahon Services

Starting in 1957 as a family-owned local haulage business operating between Port Vincent on South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula and Adelaide, McMahon Services Australia celebrated its 60th year of contracting in 2017 as a national civil engineering and construction company.

Norwood Football Club ruck/rover Glen McMahon and wife Barb formed the G.F. McMahon Transport in 1957, specialising in logistics and storage, and quickly grew to support much of the Yorke Peninsula. In 1970, they moved from Port Vincent to Adelaide where Glen started a waste collection company called McMahon Waste. This expanded with in 1974 with G.F. McMahon Demolition, that became one of South Australia’s larger companies in this field with asbestos removal.  

Glen’s sons David and Andrew McMahon founded McMahon Services at Dry Creek, in Adelaide’s north, in 1990. Starting with just 12 employees, McMahon Services grew to 630 employees with offices in South Australia, Queensland, Western Australia, Northern Territory, New South Wales and Victoria. Three generations of the McMahon family were employed across the businesses, with David’s and Andrew’s sons Tom and Hugh McMahon also working between study.

The company delivered projects in every state and territory in Australia, from remote outback regions to city centres and completed projects with a combined value running into billions. Major projects for McMahon Services in South Australia included constructing part of the Northern Connector freeway and demolishing the Northern Power Station. 

Its projects ranged new purpose-built buildings, refurbishing existing buildings and external works a sports centre at St Mark’s College in Port Pirie to rehabilitating and transforming the  former West End brewery site on Port Road at the Adelaide suburb of Thebarton.

McMahon Services’s asbestos-removal credential were called on for work at the Auckland’s Museum of Transport and Technology, New Zealand’s largest, spread across 16 hectares. It also did asbestos removal and remediation for Christmas Island Phosphates, in the Indian Ocean, 3,400 kilometres from the Australian mainland.

Another challenging project was designing and constructing a 3,000 tonne fully-bolted steel silo for Morgan Cement International, a subsidiary of the Adelaide Brighton Group (renamed AdBri), operating a cement clinker grinding plant in Port Kembla, New South Wales.