Bulldozing the Dream Property

In 2001 Mark Goopy, a panelbeater by trade, bought 150 acres of rough, rugged, variable soil property to build his dream house in the lush rural land 30km behind the Gold Coast in Queensland.

Since then he has been devoting all his spare time to improving the land - a paltry one-and-a-half days each week. He wants to keep as much of the forest as he can but to make way for the driveway and house slab some clearing and levelling needed to happen. To do that job he at first opted for a small manual dozer but after a while decided to go with an automatic East Wind YCT and he couldn't be happier with its performance in the tough country.

"I thought I would have to have a stilt home up here but a soils expert told me I could have a slab house. That changed things a bit so now I am making the drive so the cement trucks can get in without losing their loads."

"This unit is good for uphill work and inclines don't really worry it. The steel track is also good; up here it is what you want for all the dirt and stone.

It is a pretty undulated place. It's heavily vegetated flat-lands either side of a steep ridge with a creek on either side. It goes from rainforest to open woodland. I had a manual clutch machine before but that was too hard on hills. This one was $35,000 new and that's a good price and now has 159 engine hours up."

The three-cylinder diesel engine has especially impressed Mark with its ability to get through eight hours solid work on the three-tonne machine one 20 litre tank of fuel. "It just chugs along at 1,000 rpm," he says.

Mark hopes to have everything built up here before 2010, and by that time the surrounding country will look a bit different. "It is all being subdivided up to my boundary into blocks one to five acres in size. I was pretty lucky to get this while I did.

While still needing a bit of muscle to operate the auto unit - which also features a three point linkage and PTO that Mark uses to run a slasher.

Mark intends to run a few horses on the place when it is sorted out. The as-yet-unnamed place has a bit of farming history behind it: up until the 1950s it was a banana farm run by two brothers who used a flying-fox to overcome the terrain. At other times has been beef country. Cattle might again roam the hills as Mark has plans to use them as lawnmowers to chew through the overgrowth. And what overgrowth! Some parts of the formerly neglected land were so thick and high with grass and shrubbery that Mark was driving blind in the YCT some of the time yet the unit wasn't concerned by the tough going. In fact when he can't see for the scrub Mark's only worry with the machine is whether it's going to hit a hidden gully or boulder too fast - so he says he goes slow and if he encounters such an obstacle he uses the manoeuvrability of the dozer to avoid trouble.