Hodge Drilling

About Us

Hodge Drilling was started by Tony Hodgkisson and Deborah Schuster in December 2005.

Tony Hodgkisson is a highly experienced Driller who came into the industry in 1992 as an offsider for Capricorn Drilling and then in 1994 became a driller for Weston Drilling. As time moved on this company later became Capricorn Weston Drilling when it merged and in 2004 Tony became a full time supervisor.

During this period he worked at several mine sites over the Bowen Basin and developed an excellent rapport with the various mine managers and geologists, to the point where they quite often insisted on having him as their preferred driller.

The other partner in Hodge Drilling is Deborah Schuster who is a qualified FCPA accountant with 24 years’ experience in the accounting industry. Debbie started her own accounting practice in 2004 and now has a thriving practice in the Yeppoon area which supports the administration side of operations at Hodge Drilling.

All of our drillers have a number of years’ experience and all have a minimum of their Certificate 3 in Drilling, Queensland Coal Mining Legislation & Workshop Certificate, G2, S1, 2 and 3 and Current Senior First Aid. Tony hand picks all potential new drillers from our offsiders and they go through a two year training program until they are ready to run their own rig. Any driller that joins our team again spends time on the rig as an offsider until Tony feels that they are ready to run the rig in a safe and professional manner.

We are constantly doing regular training for all staff and when we built the Workshop in 2018 we made sure that we had a fully equipped training room! This enables us to have regular training for required courses as well as guest speakers to assist our staff with development and growth. We feel we have an unbeatable team! We are very proud of our staff and have no problems in putter their achievements forward for your consideration.

During our 16 years in business we have endeavoured to develop our safety and administration side of the business to a very high standard. We have recently contracted a safety advisor who is working closely with management to improve our Safety Management Plan, Environmental Plan, Risk Assessments, Standard Working Procedures, Fatigue Management Plan, Induction Program and Prestarts etc.