Meet the Team: Jack Loftus
As part of our 25th anniversary, Project Manager Jack Loftus looks back on ten years with Geovert, from Telfer Mine to FNQ via Koolan Island, the US and Canada.
Jack Loftus's Geovert story started with a phone call to New Zealand, back before Geovert had space to take him on. The timing wasn't right, so a few months later Jack tried Australia instead. A quick call with the works manager in Sydney and he was soon on site at Telfer mine, installing a large drape mesh with a crane over four benches. Originally from the UK and fresh off three years in Canada, the 50 degree readings on the ute dashboard were a shock, and so, for that matter, was working out what a "ute" actually was.
Ten years on, Jack is a Project Manager and Senior IRATA Level 3, and the list of projects in between reads like a tour of Geovert's growth as a business. East coast works, the Toowoomba bypass, works at Black Mountain with Queensland Rail - where an experienced works manager gave him his first real insight into project management - the Great Ocean Road project in Victoria and the Super Pit in WA. Three years as site manager at Boddington, which he counts as the moment his career properly took off, because suddenly there was no one above him on site and every problem was his to solve. That's the environment he says he thrives in.
Since then, Jack has onboarded Geovert's first major High Reach Drill upgrade with carousel at Boddington Gold Mine, run four custom drill rigs powered and winched by excavators on Koolan Island through the height of COVID, flown to the United States to install three catch fences in a two week window, and managed remote projects such as Tropicana while also looking after the Perth yard. He led the first Geovert project in Australia to use a Spider excavator at McArthur River Mine, worked across three sites for Sydney Connect, and took on rock bolting and shotcrete on Putty Road, large boulder removal in the Blue Mountains, and helicopter supported scaling work for Rio Tinto. In 2024 he set up Geovert's first ground support works at Detour Lake mine in Canada, and more recently he has led the new ground support contract at Talison Lithium and taken over the Kuranda Range Recovery project. This year he kicked off works at Mt Spec with CMC and TMR.
Ask Jack for his most memorable moment and he doesn't hesitate: a 20 metre abseil scaling job at Gatton Road where he was stung by a bee on the lip, found a redback spider, and then uncovered a snake behind a loose rock, the third snake the crew had come across on that job. He also remembers seeing his first moose in the US and Canada, despite having lived in Canada for three years before joining Geovert.
What's changed since he started, in his view, is the plant and equipment. Geovert now has the range to put the right rig on the right job, rather than trying to make one machine work for everything. What hasn't changed is the branding.
"Everyone knows straight away who the tribe is when they are wearing the Geovert overalls."
For Jack, the appeal of this kind of work has always been the challenge.
"If it was easy, then everyone would do it, and it would be boring to me."
His advice to anyone starting out is that hard work pays off, but consistency is the real trick and always expect the unexpected!
"Strap in. You never know what's about to come around the corner."
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