Our Legacy
Every business has a founding date. Ours is 1988. But our story starts more than two decades earlier — in the High Country, with one man, and a job no one else wanted.
1966 — Forged in the High Country
Wayne Martyn’s working life began in the old growth alpine ash forests of Victoria’s High Country — vast, remote timber country where the trees stood tall and the danger stood taller. Felling crews worked mostly by hand, on terrain that punished the smallest mistake. There was no manual for this kind of work. There was only skill, nerve, and an unshakeable respect for the mountain.
It was here, swinging an axe and a saw in some of the most punishing conditions the industry could offer, that the standards were set. Standards that would carry the Martyn name through the next 50 years.
1972 — From Timber to Terrain
Hard work builds a reputation. Reputation opens doors. By 1972, the Martyn name had earned its way onto one of Victoria’s most significant infrastructure projects: the pre-strip and clearing works for the Dartmouth Dam. It was the moment the story shifted — from felling the High Country’s forests to reshaping its very ground. Earthmoving on a scale few in the region had attempted, and the beginning of a career built on moving mountains, quite literally.
1983 — Where the Mountain Fought Back
Nothing tested the family’s resolve quite like 1983.
Awarded the earthmoving, drilling, and blasting works for the development of the Mt Hotham ski field, the team faced a challenge unlike anything before it: close-proximity trench blasting through hard, dense granite, on slopes so steep the drill rigs had to be anchored and winched by hand just to reach the rock face. One wrong move, and there was nowhere to go but down.
Yet trench by trench, blast by blast, the team drilled and excavated a path across the entire mountain — delivering the power and gas infrastructure that would bring every lodge, building, and ski run to life. It wasn’t just earthmoving. It was engineering resolve carved into granite.
Word travelled fast. Soon, three more of Australia’s world-class alpine resorts — Falls Creek, Mt Buller, and Mt Baw Baw — called on the same expertise. By the mid-1980s, when the mountain needed moving, there was one name the industry trusted to do it.
1988 — A Legacy Becomes a Business
By 1988, the reputation built across timber, dams, and mountains had become something greater than a career — it had become a business. Martyn Mining Services was founded: 100% Australian-owned, family-built, and grounded in a drilling and blasting legacy that no competitor could replicate, because no competitor had lived it.
It wasn’t a new beginning. It was simply the next chapter of a story already decades in the making.
Today — The Legacy Continues
Luke Martyn now leads that legacy as Managing Director of Martyn Mining Services — raised in the same High Country that shaped his father’s career, and forged by his own years across logging, earthmoving, and mining in remote Australia.
The equipment has changed. The methods have advanced. But the values that built this family’s name have not moved an inch: integrity, safety, reliability, and technical excellence, on every project, without compromise. Today, we bring that legacy to bear delivering precision drill and blast solutions to the mining, quarrying, and civil industries across Australia.
Our history isn’t a story we simply tell. It’s the standard we build to, every day.